Anti-Pogačar? Not quite, but this radical Tour de France route does highlight ASO's love-hate relationship with the world's best rider

You might have seen the 2027 Tour de France route described as an 'anti-Pogačar' exercise, and, with a return to time trialling doses of old and a relatively meagre helping of high mountains, you can certainly see why.

In truth, there is no such thing as an 'anti-Pogačar' route. It simply does not exist within the realms of plausible conception. It would have to be 21 flat stages, half of them against the clock, and even then he’d still probably find a way to win.

And yet, the route that was unveiled in Paris on Thursday did signal a growing discomfort, on the part of the Tour de France organisers, with Tadej Pogačar’s dominance. Jonas Vingegaard’s epic takedowns of the Slovenian are three years in the past now, and Pogačar has since rattled off a trio of yellow jerseys, each more convincing than the last, to take his tally to a record-equalling five.

He has done so with the sort of panache the race directors can only dream of, but he has also done it with a level of ease that is becoming a bit of a nightmare. So utterly superior, Pogačar spent the second half of this year’s Tour essentially riding as a domestique for his third-placed teammate, Isaac del Toro. In some ways, the yellow jersey selflessly repaying favours is a nice image for the race. In others ways, it’s really not such a great look – not one you’d want to make a habit of, anyway.

The irony was that the 2026 Tour de France had been billed as a 'Tour of Suspense'. The route had been constructed in such a way, we were told, that the battle for yellow would only be decided in the final days on Alpe d’Huez. As it turned out, Pogačar had the jersey all but sewn up by stage 6.

I wrote a piece on this at the time – about how the attempt to tone down the early Col du Tourmalet only toned it up – so I won’t rehash it all here, but it was a bit of an own goal, I felt. Granted, Pogačar’s dominance would have told anyway, but in any case, it was revealing in the broader context of ASO’s intentions.

Put simply, they badly want a yellow jersey contest that remains open until the last few days, and it didn’t work last time.

Not a good year to be a polka-dot fan

And so here we are, not going above 1,750 metres of altitude until stage 18 of 21 next July.

The route for that stage is a Pyrenean beast – going over the Soulor, Tourmlaet, and Hourquette d’Ancizan before the final climb to the Col du Portet – but it makes everything else look pretty tame in comparison. In fact, it’s only the second of two true mountain-top finishes in the entire race.

The Alps have had it pretty good in recent years but what did they do to deserve this? Even if the World Champs-inspired stage 10 looks like a thriller and the stage 11 combo of the Col du Pré and Montée de Bisanne looks tough enough, the lack of big-name high-altitude Alpine passes is really quite shocking.

And the Pyrenees may have the upper hand this time but they too only have two stages. Elsewhere, it’s over to the Jura to provide the first summit finish on the Grand Colombier on stage 9, and the Massif Central on a stage 14 that is harder than it looks but still very much sloggy medium mountain stuff. All in all, then, not a good year to be a die-hard polka-dot fan.

And then there’s the time trialling, with 71km against the clock constituting the most ITT-heavy Tour de France since the former world TT champion Bradley Wiggins won the race in 2012. This itself is remarkable, a complete laying down of arms in the battle ASO has waged on time trialling over the past decade. This was, of course, inspired by the dominance of Team Sky – first through Wiggins and then through Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas – but the trend has remained even in the Pogačar and Vingegaard era.

Until now. It’s no coincidence that the runner-up this year is also the best time triallist in the world, by a country mile. Remco Evenepoel may well wear the yellow jersey in next year’s Tour, and he may well take a minute or two on Pogačar, though it’s worth remembering he was beaten by more than six this summer (with Pogačar taking his foot off the gas at times).

So you can’t Pogačar-proof a Tour de France route, but in completely upending the balance between mountains and time trials, the organisers have certainly taken a new, much bolder, step in attempting to prevent him completely running away with it.

Pro-Pogačar, anti-Vingegaard?

At this point, it’s worth circling back to ASO’s relationship with Pogačar, which we might describe as 'love-hate'. They hate the suspense he takes away from the race as a whole, but they absolutely love just about everything else about him.

Race director Christian Prudhomme and co barely made any attempt to hide their distaste of the so-called Skybots, and what an antidote they’ve since struck upon with Pogačar, an all-action figure who will light up the race given even the slightest invitation, or even the slightest hint of boredom. For two years in a row now he has been in the thick of the action on the remodelled final stage over the Montmartre climb in Paris, carrying the Classics torch that has seen him win Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, and twice podium Paris-Roubaix.

In that respect, this is actually quite a pro-Pogačar route. The entire first week is peppered with punchy climbs and Classics-flavoured stages that aren’t critical GC flashpoints but may well tempt Pogačar out to play. The first of the two Alpine stages, based on the route for World Championships past and future, looks like the sort of circuit-based, short-but-hard-climb affair Pogačar would draw up in his dreams.

The marquee high-mountain stages have been toned down only because the terrain dictates that this is where his superiority stretches into big time differences. But for all Pogačar is the best climber in the world, he’s not a pure climber, and he has famously come unstuck on some of the Tour’s most brutal mountain stages. Vingegaard was the man to crack him in both 2022 and 2023, and while the Dane hasn’t come close in recent years, he has mitigating circumstances, not least the fact that he didn’t get to finish this year’s race.

For many years now, Vingegaard has banged out the same old refrain – that he can only try and live with Pogačar on the punchier climbing days, and that he needs the bigger, heavier, multi-col mountain days to truly take the fight to him.

In that light, the 2027 Tour de France route only reduces the room for manouevre for the greatest rival of Pogačar’s career. Of course, with Paul Seixas coming through, that title could change hands at some point, and it’s worth noting that the French prodigy – already a winner at Il Lombardia and runner-up at Liège and Strade Bianche – is cut from very much the same cloth as Pogačar.

But no, if this route is anti-anyone, it’s anti-Vingegaard. And if you were the Dane, seeing your favored terrain neglected as Evenepoel’s is pandered to – by people who want a closer challenge to Pogačar – you might just take that personally.

As for main man himself, we return to the point we made at the start of this piece; you could devise 100 different Tour de France routes, and the Tadej Pogačar of the past three years would win every single time, provided he stays upright.

And here again Prudhomme made a revealing comment. "There are certainly questions lingering after his crash," the race director said of Pogačar’s season-ending Vuelta fall, even going as far as to reference Eddy Merckx’s famous (and much more severe) 1969 crash, after which he was supposedly never the same rider (but still won four more Tours). Prudhomme seems excited by that prospect of a slightly-less-than-perfect Pogačar, or at least relishing the doubt, the intrigue, the… suspense.

Whether we actually get any of the stuff next July remains to be seen. The Tour de France organisers love Tadej Pogačar, but they hate him too, and it seems even clearer now that they want the best of best worlds – to encourage his firework-lighting instincts while at the same time trying to rein him in to some degree.

In that respect, the 2027 Tour de France route is one of the most radical we’ve seen in years – it simply might not make a blind bit of difference.

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