We’ve officially entered Grand Départ week, with the Tour de France scheduled to kick off in just a few days on Saturday 4th July in Barcelona.
This year, Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel are set to lock horns once again on French roads, with youngsters Isaac del Toro and Pau Seixas sprinkled in for extra intrigue. On paper, it sounds like a classic in waiting, with Vingegaard and Seixas looking like worthy candidates to block Pogacar’s ambition of becoming the first rider to win five Tours this side of the Millennium.
It’s not easy to become a Tour de France classic either. It might seem like comparing apples with oranges, but we all know that no two Grand Tours are built the same. Some are more memorable, perhaps for GC narratives or stage highlights, and some have felt like a dirge, where the yellow jersey is a foregone conclusion and the racing falls flat.
So before we get too engrossed in the 2026 edition, let’s take a moment to look back on a decade’s worth of Tours. Which stack up well in the archives, and which won’t live long in our collective memories?
10. 2025
You don’t have to look too far back to experience a real stinker of a Tour de France.
You heard that right. The 2025 edition sits at the bottom of our list, having delivered a race with very few high points. Sure, we got the rise of Oscar Onley, the unpredictable Ben Healy campaign and a brief spell of Mathieu van der Poel in yellow, but the race dragged on for what felt like much longer than three weeks.
The parcours just didn’t deliver on its promise. The back-to-back-to-back mountain stages in the Pyrenees saw the final GC podium decided – and Remco Evenepoel defeated – while the race dragged into its final week. Then the last mountain stages felt like pulling out teeth. Pogačar had already created a gap large enough to cruise home, with Jonas Vingegaard so comfortable in second place. Neither seemed too bothered by it, and had accepted the inevitable fate from the end of their first mountain duel.
Last year’s Tour was so boring that even the eventual winner said he was bored of racing it. Imagine how we felt watching at home.
9. 2017
From the embers of the Team Sky era, Chris Froome’s last Tour win wasn’t the most watchable. However, after the apocalyptic first week, filled with crashes and broken bones, the GC looked tight. That was mainly down to a parcours marked by a distinct lack of mountaintop finishes. Seriously, there were only four.
Nevertheless, Froome’s lead never moved above a minute, and Fabio Aru even wore the yellow jersey briefly, giving many fans a sliver of hope that someone could topple Team Sky. In the end, Froome would win this race with little to no razzmatazz, leaving this as the only Grand Tour he won without claiming a stage along the way.
While this was the weakest Froome looked during his dynasty, none of his competitors were strong enough to really take advantage of this. That’s tough when your closest rivals are Rigoberto Urán and a pissed-off teammate in Mikel Landa.
That said, where Froome disappointed, others delivered in terms of drama. There was the whole Sagan-Cavendish crash gate, a win for Arnaud Démare and a green jersey battle that saw Michael Matthews handed the title after Marcel Kittel – winner of five stages – abandoned in the final week.
8. 2018
ASO decided to whack in a bunch of sprint stages during the first week in 2018, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Sure, it created some interesting finishes, including a cobbled stage that saw GC riders painted across the road in several shades of red, but it also introduced the rarity of mid-stage bonus sprints. That’s one of the few gimmicks the organisers rolled out in 2018 (don’t get me started on the grid start).
Regardless, Team Sky tamed the mountains with ease. Geraint Thomas took back-to-back stage victories, including that win atop Alpe d’Huez in yellow, before the race settled down into some form of order (and a familiar sense of Sky supremacy). In other words, it made it hard to argue against Thomas’s position as race leader.
The battle for the podium was interesting during the final week, helped by an emerging Jumbo-Visma team, a certain Primož Roglič, and an assumption that Thomas would falter at some point. Alas, he did not, and the race finished with Froome and Tom Dumoulin, the top two from the Giro a month before, alongside Thomas on the podium.
It’s a Tour with few memorable moments, even if the overall winner remains one of the most popular.
7. 2016
The earliest Tour to make our list, the 2016 edition felt like the tail end of prime Froome.
Prior to that though, Mark Cavendish and Peter Sagan would end career-long droughts and move into the yellow jersey before Froome, the era-definer, moved into the lead at the first opportunity in the Pyrenees. After a few more days in the mountains, Froome looked comfortable, but the top ten was still fairly compact behind him, with some star rides from Dan Martin, Bauke Mollema and Adam Yates.
Because of that tightness, the final week would decide it all. Romain Bardet’s podium siege on Stage 19, and Bauke Mollema’s catastrophic whoopsie, made for great viewing, while the top ten moved about like a volatile game of snakes and ladders, ultimately leading to Nairo Quintana’s most forgettable podium performance at a Grand Tour.
It had plenty of weird and wonderful moments, which certainly helped to make this race stand out in the archives. We won’t forget the inflatable arch incident or Froome running up Mont Ventoux – and the brief five-minute spell when we thought Adam Yates might be in the yellow jersey. Nor can we really forget Froome’s daring descent of the Peyresourde, when his cojones were pressed onto the down tube of his Pinarello, or the time he broke clear of the bunch with Peter Sagan on a sprint stage.
A bizarre Tour, so it was.
6. 2024
The 2024 Tour de France was probably the most anticipated Grand Tour I’ve experienced during my time within the sport. Most of that was because the acclaimed ‘Big Four’ – consisting of Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič – met at a Grand Tour for the first time, and the route looked exciting on paper, not least due to the Nice finish instead of the traditional Paris procession.
On the road, the GC hierarchy was decided quite early on. In fact, on Stage 4, when Tadej Pogačar darted away to take an unassailable lead in the GC. Yet, once the race progressed, the Big Four slotted into their roles and accepted their fates in due course, remarkably with few hiccups along the way (which is a triumph when you consider Evenepoel and Roglič’s record in Grand Tours). However, can a race where the champion wins with six stages and a six-minute advantage be considered a classic?
Well, that depends on how you measure a good Tour de France. Power-wise, this is considered to be the highest quality Tour de France in recent years. The stage to the Planche des Belles Filles recorded some of the fastest climbing times and watts-per-kilo calculations in the modern era, and the monumental gaps in GC go to show just how tough this Tour de France was. If you wanted to see the Tour at its most brutal, you certainly got that in 2024.
The GC battle rightfully occupied most of the airtime in 2024, but there were some other heart-warming narratives unfurling. Of course, this is when Mark Cavendish won his record-beating 35th stage win, Biniam Girmay became the first Black rider to win a Tour stage and Anthony Turgis claimed an emotional win on the gravel of Champagne.
However, I have a feeling that this might go down in history as Pogačar’s best Tour de France, which might help it live much longer in the minds of cycling historians, much like Arsenal’s invincible 2003-04 season.
5. 2021
I hear your shock at seeing this so high, but take a moment to remember just how blockbuster the first week of the 2021 Tour de France was.
Every single stage delivered a compelling narrative, from Julian Alaphilippe’s victory on day one to Mathieu van der Poel’s efforts on the Mur de Bretagne (and that emotional post-race interview) and Mark Cavendish’s shock return to the top of the Grand Tour podium. We got peak WVA vs MVDP in the hills, a brief taste of the Pog-Rog Slovenian rivalry, plus plenty of crashes. Remember Opi-Omi?
To be honest, you didn’t really need to watch the final two weeks. The Tour was decided on Stage 8, when Tadej Pogačar rinsed the field in the Alps to stretch out an overall lead of close to five minutes. Needless to say, no one really came close to chasing that down, and the Slovenian truly dominated the Tour for the first time.
While Pogi was clearly the best, the 2021 Tour saw the emergence of Jonas Vingegaard as a genuine GC leader. The Dane put Pogačar under pressure in the Pyrenees, and even dropped him up Mont Ventoux, a day remembered more for Wout van Aert’s heroics in the breakaway. I guess cycling historians will look back at this as the beginning of the Pogačar and Vingegaard era, even if we didn’t know it at the time as everyone was still comparing Pogačar to Roglič.
The 2021 Tour de France felt as though every great of that era had a moment to shine: Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel, Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Mark Cavendish. They made this Tour de France feel like a coronation for its stars. That said, while its high points were high, its low points were low. How many of you remember Patrick Konrad’s or Nils Politt’s stage victories? Precisely.
4. 2020
The 2020 Tour de France was strange from the get-go. The pandemic pushed it to September, the riders were coming off a botched block of racing, and no one quite knew whether the race was going to reach Paris or not. Just the jeopardy we needed for one of the Tour’s most iconic editions in recent times.
That sounds like it should immediately enter the top spot of this list, but I’ll have to remind you of the context.
Primož Roglič was expected to win this race. His performances in the mountains at the Tour, apart from that stage, demonstrated it, with a win at Orcières-Merlette and a significant gain made on the Col de la Loze. His time in yellow felt inevitable, and we expected a coronation. That made it feel like an almost impossible challenge for anyone to topple the world’s best rider on seemingly the world’s best team.
That’s part of what made the penultimate stage, the infamous Planche des Belles Filles time-trial, so shocking. Pogačar’s huge advantage on the TT seemed absolutely absurd, having toppled his seemingly invincible countryman, who crossed the line sickly in tone with a helmet slid back past his hairline. It was a real ‘where were you when’ kind of moment.
Sure, we can now look back on that as the beginning of this seismic shift, but at the time the result didn’t feel reflective of the full three weeks that were dominated by Roglič and his Jumbo-Visma squad.
Slovenians aside, this Tour de France offered a really intriguing podium fight, ultimately won by Richie Porte after Miguel Angel Lopez suffered a worse TT than even Roglič – who still finished fifth on the stage. Sam Bennett reignited hope in Irish cycling by winning the green jersey and Sunweb enjoyed a fruitful Tour, with Marc Hirschi kick-starting his wonder autumn of 2020.
3. 2022
I think the 2022 Tour de France, the first to be won by Jonas Vingegaard, sits as a classic in many people’s eyes.
Immediately you’ll come to think of this edition’s GC storyline, which was out of this world. I mean, the Col du Granon stage is still spoken about daily, probably more than any on this list. That day saw Jumbo-Visma deal out one of the toughest tactical blows imaginable to Tadej Pogačar, who looked set for a third consecutive Tour title by Stage 11. The Slovenian tried to bounce back later, which added an element of competition, but it soon became a race of Jumbo-Visma perfection.
Much of that has to be credited to Wout van Aert, who was the character of this Tour de France. He went into the yellow jersey early and immediately delivered one of the iconic images of that Tour by winning solo, with arms swinging like a bird on Stage 4. After losing the jersey to Pogačar, he remained the ‘it-girl’ of the Tour, having moved into the green jersey – a role that seemed insignificant once he got into the mountains and became the world’s top domestique.
It’s no wonder Netflix decided this was the time to make a documentary on the race.
2. 2023
After what felt like a bit of a dark patch on Pogačar’s palmarès, the 2023 Tour de France was framed as a much closer battle between the Slovenian and reigning champion Vingegaard.
The route was frontloaded in 2023, meaning we saw the two battle it out from day one. Pogačar’s broken wrist in the spring made it somewhat of a mystery how he’d fare, but they weren’t killing time before taking chunks out of each other.
As the race progressed, it felt as though the momentum was shifting each day. One day Vingegaard looked stronger, the other Pogačar looked better. That made for some of the most fascinating tactical battles in recent times, with equally matched rosters at Visma and UAE. Therefore, the finishes to the Puy de Dome, Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc and Morzine felt bitterly tense, with the pair fighting tooth and nail for any second.
To me, that was peak Pogačar-Vingegaard. The two placed hundreds of attacks on each other, yet the time gaps stood at ten seconds coming into the final week.
There’s a big ‘but’ coming up here, because Jonas Vingegaard ended up destroying the race in the space of two days in the Alps. Just look past the Col de la Loze stage, of ‘I’m gone, I’m dead’ infamy, and recognise that we enjoyed one of the closest GC battles in Tour de France history. Don’t let Vingegaard’s eventual seven-minute winning advantage fool you.
1. 2019
We have now entered a Pogačar-and-Vingegaard free zone. However, the 2019 Tour de France didn’t need either of those two, nor Roglič, to create the decade’s best Grande Boucle.
From start to finish, this Tour de France was refreshing. Every twist and turn delivered a popular or unexpected winner during the race’s opening phase. Despite this constant upheaval in expectation, it felt like a French passion had been injected into the race, with Julian Alaphilippe sending the host nation to the highest of highs during the second week. Having worn the yellow jersey for a good chunk of the race, we kept asking the same question: How far can he go?
Well, he managed to preserve his lead over the Tourmalet and Galibier, which seemed to pave the way to a potential podium. French viewers need not worry, because if he didn’t make it, Thibaut Pinot looked like France’s best chance at winning the race since the 1970s.
That made Stage 19 a real comedown for French expectations. Thibaut Pinot retired that morning, teary-eyed, after a thigh injury saw him tumble out of the peloton. Then, adverse weather conditions forced the race to be halted midway through the queen stage, with Alaphilippe set to lose the jersey. That meant the Tour ended with Egan Bernal crowned the champion, under a cloud of frustration that the newly-renamed Team Ineos had found the cheat code to preserving the team’s near-unbeaten run at the sport’s biggest race. Oh, how we were wrong.
Regardless, the 2019 Tour de France felt like cycling at its best. Perhaps not the quality, or the monstrous performances, but the roller coaster of emotions it delivered was unrivalled, particularly after a period of relatively dull Tours. That’s why we watch sport, right? It’s to be entertaining. On that metric alone, 2019 wins comfortably.