S14 Ep74: The XL Tour de France 2026 Preview | Part Two | The Route | Barcelona > Paris
7/1/20261 hr 1 min
The 113th Tour de France starts in Barcelona on Saturday, and makes its way to Paris via the Pyrenees, Massif Central, Vosges, Jura and Alps.
In this episode, Lionel Birnie and Graham Willgoss take an in-depth look at the route, picking out some highlights along the way. There's also some French flavour from François Thomazeau, who has covered the Tour for the past four decades and writes the official tourist's guide for the race.
Join us for the journey when our daily episodes get underway after the opening team time trial on Saturday.
Part one of The XL Preview series is online now. Part three, covering all the other contenders to look out for, will be released soon.
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Our Tour de France preview series is sponsored by MyWhoosh.
MyWhoosh is a serious indoor training and racing platform, built for riders who love cycling, and it’s free. It’s built for anyone who wants to ride indoors with purpose, whether that’s staying fit, following a training plan, joining a community ride, racing hard, or exploring virtual roads and it’s free to ride, just like outdoors.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLionel Birnie· Host0:00
You're listening to The Cycling Podcast, brought to you by our friends at MyWhoosh. MyWhoosh is a virtual cycling platform that's built for anyone who wants to ride indoors with purpose. At one end of the spectrum, riders can just jump on and ride for free, and at the other end, MyWhoosh is now the most serious racing environment in virtual cycling because it's the platform behind the UCI Cycling Esports World Championships. And if you fancy having a go, there's the 2026 MyWhoosh Championships coming up very soon. It starts on the 7th of July and runs until the 14th. Seven days of racing and a rest day with a whopping one million prize pool up for grabs, split equally between men and women across a range of categories. This is proper hard racing, so if you want to experience what the Tour de France is like in the comfort, or perhaps that should be discomfort, of your own home, give the MyWhoosh Championships a go. There's still time to enter. Go to mywhoosh.com. The link is in the show notes. This promises to be the ultimate test of endurance, strategy, and resilience. Hundreds of kilometers to race, thousands of meters in elevation gain, a mix of flat, hilly, mountainous, and time trial stages. There'll be a GC, several other categories to aim for, and every finisher receives an exclusive MyWhoosh Championship kit worth over $500. So go to mywhoosh.com, click on Events to