There's always so much speculation about the route of each year's Tour de France. The rumors and the hype all build towards the big reveal, on an October morning in Paris at the Palais des Congres, within a stone's throw of the Arc de Triomphe.
For all his own talk of burn-out, there's been a suggestion going around that Tour organizers ASO have now grown a little weary of Pogačar's domination. After all, he was the marquee name in most of their biggest races in 2025.
From Liege-Bastogne-Liege to the Criterium du Dauphine, from Fleche Wallonne to the Tour de France -- via second place in his debut Paris-Roubaix -- the Slovenian was (almost) all-conquering.
Tour boss Christian Prudhomme said that he wants "tension that keeps on growing," but with Pogačar now so dominant on all terrains, is that realistic? And if that's the brief, who'd be a race designer?
That task sits with ex-pro Thierry Gouvenou, ASO's route guru, who will have seen that the 2025 Tour route's combination of an explosive first week, lengthy road transfers and climb-heavy stages sometimes worked against providing tension and suspense.
Another learning from this year, with the Slovenian now seeking a record-equaling fifth Tour, was that trying to make the race as hard as possible serves Pogačar well and only exhausts his rivals even further. If they're trying to go up against Pogačar, they need all the recovery time they can get.
Even so, with the Pyrenees early in week one, stages in the Massif Central, Jura and Vosges, two summit finishes on Alpe d'Huez, and an eye-watering 54,000 meters of vertical gain, next year's Tour route is hardly a cakewalk.
If Pogačar does win another Tour next summer (and right now, who'd bet against it), he will become a member of an elite club. The 2026 Tour route, which builds to a brutal climax on Alpe d'Huez, will ensure he earns it.
For the third time in its history, the Tour will start in Spain, with, unusually, an opening team time trial, finishing in Barcelona's Montjuic Olympic park. In a move away from the usual team time trial format, the time will be taken from the first two riders to cross the line, although not everybody is a fan of that innovation.
"The team time trial is a collective effort," Richard Plugge, general manager of Jonas Vingegaard's Visma Lease-a-Bike team said. "You have to stick together if the time's taken on the fourth or fifth rider. This version takes all that away."
"It's not really a team time trial -- it's more a long sprint for the leader. What's the thinking behind it? I've no clue...maybe just to have something different."
After a second finish in Barcelona, the peloton crosses the Pyrenees and on day three, enters France. Two new mountain finishes, at Les Angles and Gavarnie-Gedre, presage a series of flat and rolling stages into the Massif Central, with a Bastille Day finish at Le Lioran, where Vingegaard won from Pogačar in 2024.
A trio of breakaway and sprint stages lead to Le Markstein, first of a pair of mountain stages that may prove to be 'sleepers,' with the following day's stage 15 finish, to the Plateau de Solaison, an 11.3 kilometer climb of steep gradients, described as "abominable."
After the second rest day, the only individual time trial comes on stage 16, a rolling 26-kilometer test between the spa towns of Evian-les-Bains and Thonon-les-Bains that, on paper, looks pretty well-suited to new Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe recruit, Remco Evenepoel.
After that, it's all about the double-header on the Alpe.
The first stage finish to Alpe d'Huez, via the Col du Noyer and the innocuous Col d'Ornon, is tame compared to the final Saturday's monstrous 5,600 meter altitude gain trawl over the legendary climbs of Croix de Fer, Galibier and then the 'back road' to the Alpe, the wild and remote Col de Sarenne.
There is not another stage in the Tour that holds a candle to this 171 kilometer epic, which has barely a kilometer of flat road along the whole route. At least Plugge was happy to see Alpe d'Huez back on the Tour route.
"Alpe d'Huez is always fantastic and the Col de Sarenne is very beautiful, and maybe even a bit tougher I think. I like it a lot, it will be brutal," he said of the Tour's penultimate stage.
"In comparison, the start of the Tour is relatively easy, so they obviously want the battle to last right to the end." Plugge is right. After all, if the Tour wants to see Pogačar pushed and tension to the end, his rivals have to have something left to give when the chips are down.
The final stage in Paris reprises this year's Montmartre circuit, albeit with some tweaks that make a catch, on the way down from the cobbled climb to the Champs Élysées, slightly more likely. Even so, it's unlikely to be a return to the bunch sprints of old.
"He can win five Tours, three world championships, the Vuelta, beat Cavendish's record for Tour stage wins and beat the record number of Monument wins," he said of his star rider.