Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Every Tour de France, mapped: from a lap of France to a race that hops

Title card reading 'Every Tour de France, mapped' in black and red, with 'Tour de' on a yellow band, beside a map of France covered in thin coloured lines for every stage since 1903, with the 1926 route drawn in thick yellow as a loop round the edge of the country. Text: 2,427 stages, 1903 to 2026, start to finish; the 1926 loop in yellow, 5,745 km, the longest Tour.

The first Tour de France had six stages. Since then the race has been held 113 times, over 2,427 stages. I put every one of them on a map, from start town to finish town, and watched a lap of France turn into something else entirely.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

Every stage of every Tour is listed on the official race website, and Thomas Camminady has gathered those pages into LeTourDataSet, a free table of every stage and every rider since 1903. It names each stage’s start and finish town, but not where they are. So I matched all 863 town names against GeoNames, a free gazetteer, and located 95.8% of the 4,938 starts and finishes. Then I drew each stage as a straight line.

Map of France and its neighbours criss-crossed by thousands of thin coloured lines, one for each Tour de France stage from start town to finish town. Dark blue lines from the early decades trace a loop around the coasts and borders; later orange and red lines fill the interior and reach into Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. Paris, Bordeaux, Pau and Luchon are the largest circles
Every located stage of the men’s Tour, 1903 to 2026, coloured by decade.

A lap of France

The dark blue lines round the edge are the early Tours, and they really were a tour: a lap of the coasts and frontiers. In the 1920s, 92% of the French towns the race stopped in lay within 50 km of the sea or a border, although only 37% of France is that close to its edge. And the loop never broke. Through the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s every single stage started in the town where the last one finished.

Two maps of France side by side. On the left, the 1926 Tour drawn in yellow as a single closed loop around the edge of the country from Évian to Dunkirk, Brest, Bayonne, Perpignan, Nice and back. On the right, the 2026 Tour as scattered short yellow segments joined by dashed transfer lines, starting in Barcelona and ending in Paris
1926, the longest Tour, against 2026. Dashed lines are transfers between one finish and the next start.

Today’s Tour is a set of hops. In the 2020s, 88% of stages start somewhere other than the previous finish, and the gaps add up to about 1,152 km a race as the crow flies. The biggest single leap in the data is 681 km, from Espelette in the Basque Country to Houilles near Paris in 2018.

Bar and line chart by decade. Bars show the share of French stage towns within 50 km of the coast or a border, rising from 63% in the 1900s to 92% in the 1920s and falling to around half since the 1980s. A red line for stages starting away from the previous finish stays at zero from the 1910s to the 1930s, then climbs to 88% in the 2020s
The loop and the hops: stage towns near the edge of France, and stages that start somewhere new.

Shorter and faster

The longest Tour was in 1926: 5,745 km, won by Lucien Buysse after 239 hours in the saddle at 24.1 km/h. The 2026 race was 3,333 km, 42% shorter, and Tadej Pogačar won it at 45.1 km/h, the fastest winning average ever. The official record has no winner at all for 1999 to 2005: Lance Armstrong’s seven titles were stripped and never reawarded.

Bar chart of the total distance of every Tour from 1903 to 2026, coloured by decade, rising to a peak of 5,745 km in 1926 and falling to between about 3,300 and 3,700 km since 2000, with black dots for the winner's average speed climbing from about 25 km/h to 45.1 km/h in 2026
Total distance (bars) and the winner’s average speed (dots).

Paris, Bordeaux, Pau

The race has stopped in 701 places, but it keeps going back to the same few. Paris has 161 starts and finishes, and every Tour has ended there except 2024, which finished in Nice. Then come the gateways to the Pyrenees: Bordeaux (137), Pau (133) and Luchon (113). And it has been everywhere at least once: every one of the 96 départements of mainland France has hosted a start or a finish, though Corsica had to wait until 2013.

Horizontal bar chart of the fifteen most visited Tour de France stage towns, split into starts in navy and finishes in gold: Paris 161, Bordeaux 137, Pau 133, Luchon 113, then Nice, Metz, Grenoble, Caen and others
The most visited stage towns, with the number of Tours each appeared in.

Going abroad

The Tour first left France in 1913, with a stage from Grenoble to Geneva. It first started abroad in 1954, in Amsterdam, and has done so 27 times in all, from Dublin to Florence and Copenhagen. Since 2000 it has become normal: 14 of the last 27 Tours began outside France. Belgium is the race’s second home, with 118 stages.

Stacked bar chart of stages starting or finishing outside France in each Tour, coloured by country, with Belgium in red the most common. A few stages abroad appear before the Second World War and many more after it, and black triangles along the top mark the 27 Grand Départs abroad, increasingly frequent since 2000
Stages abroad by country, and the Grand Départs outside France.

Who won

French riders have won 36 Tours, but none since Bernard Hinault in 1985. Belgium has 18, Spain 12 and Italy 10. Five men have won five times: Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Indurain and, most recently, Pogačar.

A strip of coloured cells, one per year from 1903 to 2026, showing the nation of each Tour winner, with blank cells for the war years and hatched cells for 1999 to 2005, followed by bars of titles by nation: France 36, Belgium 18, Spain 12, Italy 10, United Kingdom 6, Luxembourg 5, Slovenia 5
The winner’s nation, year by year, and titles by nation.

How I did this

Stages come from LeTourDataSet; places from GeoNames cities1000. I matched names without accents or hyphens, and wrote a table of 150 special cases: French names for foreign towns (Londres, Gand), short names (Luchon), venues inside a town (Futuroscope) and ski stations named after their village (Alpe d’Huez). Summit finishes with no village in their name, such as the Puy de Dôme and Mont Ventoux, are left off rather than guessed, so the high mountains are under-drawn. The lines are straight, not roads. The data has no nationality for riders, so I added the winners’ nationalities by hand. The Tour de France Femmes, 42 stages since 2022, is a separate layer on the interactive map. The paper sets out every step and caveat.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Thomas Camminady, LeTourDataSet, MIT licence, compiled from the official letour.fr and letourfemmes.fr historical pages.
  • GeoNames cities1000, CC BY 4.0, as packaged by lutangar/cities.json.
  • Natural Earth outlines (public domain).
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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