No climb of the Tour de France generates the same anticipation and excitement Alpe dHuez does. Yet it wasnt love at first sight far from it.Local businesspeople first brought the race to the Alpe in 1952 (using their own money, because the town hall had none), but despite the stage finish at the summit being won by the legendary Fausto Coppi, slim crowds and an underwhelming day of racing meant it was 1976 before another stage finished there.After this, youd struggle to separate the Tour de France and the mountain, because it has returned with unfailing regularity over the years. A big reason for this delayed love affair was the introduction of live television coverage in the intervening years between 1952 and 1976, which helped to amplify the unique traits of the climb.Why is Alpe dHuez popular? Tom Pidcock won the stage the last time the Tour de France visited the Alpe. Tim de Waele / Getty Images To explain its popularity, you certainly wouldnt begin with its aesthetics or difficulty. Its not a classically attractive climb.Strip away the vast crowds and drama of a Tour stage and its tough to take a good photo of it. Although it's a stiff incline 13.8km at 8.1% its far from the toughest of the Tour, and its 1,850m altitude means its not as breathless as the highest summits Col du Galibier tops out at 2,642m, for instance.What it does have in its favour, however, is the closest thing professional road cycling has to a stadium. Its 21 switchbacks which in 1999, on the Tours 21st visit, were adorned with the 21 winners here are packed tightly on top of each other.The mountain frequently attracts the biggest crowds of the season, especially on the seventh switchback AKA Dutch Corner, a nickname that was popularised between 1976 and 1989, when Dutch riders won eight times.The Tour de France Femmes and its 32nd appearance Demi Vollering won the stage on Alpe d'Huez in 2024, but Katarzyna Niewiadoma (pictured) edged a thrilling overall victory. Alex Broadway / Getty Images Its debut appearance in the Tour de France Femmes in 2024 saw Kasia Niewiadoma edge a thrilling overall victory over Demi Vollering, and it surely wont be long until we see a sequel.This year is the 32nd time Alpe dHuez has featured in the mens race, and for the second time therell be a double helping on stages 19 and 20 although riders will only once head up the fabled 21 switchbacks. More Tour de France questions answered Why is Eddy Merckx cycling's GOAT? And why is he the rider that Tadej Pogaar is always compared to? How much money does Pogaar earn, and how does that compare to other sports top stars? What does a Tour de France rider do if they need to poo? How dangerous is the Tour de France? Why is the Tour de France not on ITV? 3,302km in 76 hours: how fast is the Tour de France? What is the Tour de France caravan, and why does everyone love it so much? Tour de France jargon buster: all the cycling terms you need to know to understand the race

Not everyone can have a Tour de France debut like Isaac Del Toro and Paul Seixas who are locked in a tight battle for the probable third and final spot on the podium.Most of the other 50 debutants have had a far more typical first experience of the race: some good days, some bad days. Some, like Alex Molenaar, have crashed and abandoned. All are knackered, counting down the days until home. But three days, and two ascents of Alpe dHuez, still have to be tackled.I thought Id be in a body bag by now, and I am in a way, but not as much as I thought I would be, laughed EF Education-EasyPosts Max Walker ahead of stage 18. Ive been recovering and sleeping well, and feel surprisingly better than I expected I would.Speaking before the race, Walkers approach to his first ever Tour and first ever race longer than eight days was not to think too much about it. No point stressing over the unknowns; embrace the experience. Ive got to think back to when I was a kid and dreaming about doing this race, and then realise that now Im actually here," he said. "Its going to be really hard, but its a privilege to do it, and Im lucky to do it.Im probably a bit naive to it all and Ive not spoken to many people about it. Im just trying to block it all out and itll be nice when it happens. Ill try not to get overwhelmed by it all. Im quite a relaxed person so I think Ill be able to zone everything out and just take it as it comes."Three weeks on, Walker has definitely done that. His relaxed demeanour remains the same, as does his cheeky smile laugh. He also enjoyed his 25th birthday, turning a year older on stage nine. Were almost there [at the finish] and its getting tougher the further we get into it, but the feeling is pretty good and Ive actually really enjoyed it, he saidI didnt think the crowds would be as big as they have been thats been a bit of a shock but its been really nice.(Image credit: Getty Images)His main takeaway from his debut Tour is the intensity of the race. Its been raced a bit harder than I thought it would be, adds Walker, who is the latest rider from the tiny island of the Isle of Man to race the Tour. Im doing nearly my peak numbers in the third week and still getting my head kicked in. Its what youd expect, really.Im hoping that every other race feels a bit easier than this. Ive been told it will, so Im hoping that I take a step up in level and the rest of the races dont feel as hard.Walker has been one of EFs small army of domestiques for his teams leaders, stage 18 winner Richard Carapaz and Ben Healy. He has also, like the rest of his teammates, been attempting to infiltrate many a breakaway.Ive been trying to get in the break a few days but Ive not been able to, he said. Ive also been covering moves when other riders havent, and thats been helping my teammates get in the break. If I dont make it into the break then I turn my attention to keeping the boys fed and hydrated so they can either the stage easy to rest for the next day, or to keep their energy levels topped up for the end of the stage.The end is now in sight for the other debutants who remain in the race. Del Toro has a 20 seconds advantage over Seixas in the fight for third, and Alpe dHuez, both on Friday and Saturday, will determine which of the two will come out on top.For Walker, hes just focused on making the Alpe memorable for a very different reason. I think its going to be another level up even crazier, he said of the hundreds of thousands of fans lining the 21 hairpins.We were saying among ourselves that we should try to do a challenge of who can ride non-handed the longest without being pushed off. I dont think wed last very long. It depends on what corner youre on. If youre on Dutch corner, I think itd be impossible.Now thats how to bring the curtain down on a debut Tour.

Tom Pidcock says his position in the Tour de France general classification has made him too dangerous to be allowed into a breakaway, with rivals immediately shutting down his attempts on stage 18. The Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team leader had hoped to race aggressively on the road to Orcieres-Mer...

While bikepacking across the Balkans en route from England to India, Joshua Kian and Sarah Morgan had an unforgettable encounter and savored some of their journeys most fulfilling riding in Albanias Accursed Mountains. The People in Empty Places is a 20-minute video that unpacks the experience of feeling something shift inside. Watch it and find an accompanying feature story hereThe post The People in Empty Places: An Albanian Adventure (Video) appeared first on BIKEPACKING.com.

Although it's hard to imagine now, the Tour de Frances first visit to Alpe d'Huez was met with such a muted response that it would be almost a quarter of a century before the experiment was repeated.In 1952, hoteliers at the nascent ski resort paid out the equivalent of 400,000 to host the Tours first summit finish, but despite a prestigious winner in the shape of Fausto Coppi, the day was not deemed a success.A local artisan by the name of Jean Barbaglia had floated the idea of bringing the Tour to the Alpe, reckoning the climbs 21 hairpin bends made for a natural amphitheatre. Rather than seeing riders simply flash past, spectators on the roadsides could watch their heroes grind their way slowly up the mountain towards them. Fausto Coppi was the first winner on Alpe d'Huez on July 4, 1952 on the 10th stage of the 1952 Tour, which started in Lausanne. Staff-/AFP via Getty Images Yet crowds on the day were sparser than anticipated, while the newspapers grumbled that finishing at altitude had only served to stultify the racing until the lower slopes of the Alpe, where Coppi took flight to overtake home favourite Jean Robic.If anything, though, Alpe d'Huez had been ahead of its time. For the first half-century of its existence, the Tour had been an event more imagined than watched.Cinema newsreels apart, it was left to newspapers and radio to narrate the story of the race, and exercise poetic licence where they saw fit, but from the early 1960s onwards, live television began to make its presence felt. Not by coincidence, summit finishes steadily began to become a fixture.By 1976, and now in glorious technicolor, Alpe d'Huez was ready for its close-up, and it quickly captured the popular imagination. The Alpe d'Huez climb is made for television. Alex Broadway/Getty Images At 1,860m, its dwarfed by the nearby Col du Galibier. Its average gradient of 7.9 per cent is stiff, but by no means impassable. A shade under 14km, its barely two-thirds the length of Mont Ventoux. Under no metric can it claim to be the Tours toughest climb, but it proved to be something more important the most visually compelling.The panorama provided by its vicious switchbacks forms part of the appeal. Hanging over the town of Bourg dOisans, the road is slung like spaghetti across the mountainside, and from the valley below it reads like a warning sign.But the most striking aspect is its people. The hairpin bends rise up like steep terracing and the Tours return brought an atmosphere more akin to a football ground. The similarity would heighten with each passing year as fans returned in greater numbers, thanks in no small part to a spate of Dutch wins.Dutch Mountain Thanks to the spectators, Dutch Corner is probably the most testing part of the climb. Russell Ellis/russellis.co.uk/SWPix.com As the resort at Alpe d'Huez expanded in the 1960s, its first church had been built by a Dutch priest, Father Jaap Reuten, and when his fellow countryman Joop Zoetemelk won ahead of Lucien Van Impe in 1976, he marked the feat by ringing the bells in celebration.He would do so three more times before the decade was out, as Hennie Kuiper (1977 and 1978) and Zoetemelk again (1979) triumphed at the summit, and the trend would continue into the 1980s. Peter Winnen claimed a brace of wins, while PdMs terrible twins, Steven Rooks and Gert-Jan Theunisse, won in 1988 and 1989.In tandem with those victories, hordes of orange-clad fans began to trek south from the Netherlands each summer, camping out on the Alpe for days in a bid to secure the best vantage points. It was quickly nicknamed Dutch Mountain and, to this day, the tradition endures.Hairpin 7 the switchbacks count down from the base to the top is known as Dutch Corner, occupied by colourful, boisterous spectators who have spawned imitators from across Europe. Fans from Denmark, Norway and Ireland are among those who have since looked to claim part of the Alpe as their own.The second coming Laurent Fignon saw off Bernard Hinault on Alpe d'Huez at the 1984 Tour de France. Graham Watson/Getty Images The impact of the Alpes second coming at the Tour was remarkable, and seemingly unaffected by the fact that yellow jersey Michel Pollentier was excluded atop the climb in 1978 after he was caught trying to pass someone elses urine off as his own at doping control.By the following year, the cachet and purchasing power of the now booming resort of Alpe d'Huez was such that the organisers saw fit to include the climb as a summit finish on successive days, and it would go on to feature every year bar one in the 1980s.Its 1984 visit was a particularly dramatic one, as Bernard Hinault fired the final salvos in his forlorn bid to discommode defending champion Laurent Fignon.The veteran Hinault went on the offensive on the Col du Coq and again on the Cte du Laffrey, but his illusions evaporated on the punishing lower slopes of the Alpe. Resplendent in the colours of the French champion, the bespectacled Fignon bridged up to his rival and then inched mercilessly past as Hinault cracked.When I saw him attacking like that I could only laugh, Fignon shrugged after pulling on the yellow jersey at the summit, even if the day was not his alone.Although he saw off the challenge of Hinault to seal his second overall victory, Fignon was himself caught and passed on the Alpe by the waif-like Luis Herrera, who announced his arrival as the decades pre-eminent climbing talent. Just as importantly, the Colombian heralded the widening of the Tours horizons, as he danced clear to become the first amateur and the first rider from the Americas to win a stage.Domestique affairs Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault finished together atop Alpe d'Huez as LeMond went on to win the 1986 Tour. AFP via Getty Images Two years later, the Alpe was central to the narrative as Greg LeMond became the first man from outside of Europe to win the Tour itself, with Hinault again a protagonist.Hinault had promised beforehand to ride in support of his American teammate, but reneged on that pledge by moving into yellow in the Pyrenees. When the tables turned in LeMonds favour in the third week, and Hinault realised he could no longer win the Tour, he resolved to claim the public relations battle instead.Now playing the part of dutiful domestique, he acted as LeMonds sherpa on the Alpe, guiding him up the mountain and then hamming it up for the cameras by crossing the finish line hand in hand with his teammate and rival."They put on a spectacle worthy of the biggest names on television shows," as Lquipe put it. Marco Pantani's 1997 time is still the record fastest ascent of the Alpe. Mike Powell /Allsport via Getty Images In the 1990s, the Alpe, just like cycling at large, came to be dominated by Italian riders, with Marco Pantanis two wins, in particular, inspiring new levels of devotion on the mountainside.In 1997, the crowds were so large that Pantani could scarcely see the road before him after ridding himself of Jan Ullrich and Richard Virenque midway up the climb.At the last possible moment, the multitudes would part like the Red Sea, and at one point he even had to shake off the attentions of a man who tried to hug him on the bike, but it hardly slowed Pantanis progress as he clocked a time of 37:35 for the ascent, a record that seems unlikely to be broken any time soon given the gradual tightening of anti-doping measures in the intervening period.That timespan, of course, includes two wins on the climb by Lance Armstrong that were expunged from the record books in 2012, after he was found to have doped during each of his seven Tour victories.Ironically, after winning the novel time trial on the Alpe in 2004, Armstrong had protested about the number of fans shouting doping accusations as he rode past, prompting speculation that the organisers would place barriers all the way up the mountain for the Tours future visits.They didnt, of course if a fan knocking eventual stage winner Giuseppe Guerini off his bike in 1999 couldnt do it, then what possibly could?Final shootout The Col de Sarenne was descended in 2013; this year, the riders will climb it. James Startt / Getty Images The time trial idea has not been revisited since, although each fresh visit to the Alpe seems to bring further innovation. In 2013, there was speculation that the 100th edition of the Tour would be marked by finishing on top of Alpe d'Huez rather than in Paris.That particular pipedream was never likely to become a reality, but the Alpe was still an integral part of the celebrations as it was climbed twice in the same stage in the final week. It was the first time the Tour had ever dared to make a circuit race in the high mountains, linking the two ascents with the newly asphalted Col de Sarenne.This time around, Alpe d'Huez is visited later than ever before, on the penultimate day of racing, as the organisers place the Tours sporting dnouement on its slopes for the first time.Alpe d'Huez is the most telegenic climb in France, race director Christian Prudhomme said, and that is surely due to the spectators as much as to the scenery.The great mountains of the Tour de France belong to legend, but Alpe d'Huez stands alone. It belongs to the people, and therein lies its enduring appeal. 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Good morning and welcome to the liveblog of Stage 19 of the Tour de France. Today marks the long-awaited first day of the Alpine double-header, with the legendary finish atop Alpe d'Huez, and could prove to be the moment when the race's biggest questions begin to be answered. Over the next few hours...

Stages 19 and 20 of the 2026 Tour de France route feature two ascents of the legendary Alpe d'Huez across thrilling, back-to-back mountain stages.Climbing the 21 iconic hairpin bends of Alpe d'Huez remains a bucket list challenge for almost every cyclist. Since most of us aren't Tadej Pogaar, we can use all the help we can get.Garmin engineered the Edge 1040 specifically for epic efforts like this, making it one of the best bike computers on the market today. Right now at Sigma Sports, you can pick up the Garmin Edge 1040 for just 349 a massive 21% discount off the original 439.99 retail price.In Cycling Weekly's Garmin Edge 1040 review, our expert tester awarded it a stellar 4.5-star rating. The unit only missed out on a perfect score due to its high price, which makes this limited-time deal even more compelling.Save 23% The MET Trenta 3K Carbon MIPS helmet is engineered to be one of the most advanced road cycling helmets on the market, loaded with enhanced safety and performance features. It's available in four colours, but the Glossy Grey has the best discount of 26%. There are various sizes from S-L depending on the colour chosen.Read our MET Trenta 3K Carbon MIPS review.View DealOne of the key features that the 1040 and the majority of its Garmin siblings have is ClimbPro. This brilliant feature automatically detects the climb you're on and displays a dedicated screen. It shows the remaining distance, elevation, and average grade, which on the Alpe d'Huez is 8% for the entire 13.8km ascent.It also breaks the climb down into colour-coded gradient sections (green for easy, red/purple for the brutal 10%+ pitches), so you know exactly when to conserve energy and when you can push.Combined with the Edge 1040 monitoring your power output, heart rate, and historical fatigue, it effectively paces you up climbs, and will show your remaining Stamina % in real time. It tells you how long you can sustain your current pace before hitting the wall, helping you meter out your effort.Elsewhere, the 1040's battery life is claimed to be 35 hours, which is quite impressive for a non-solar Garmin, with the 1040 Solar extending its capacity to 45 hours.The 3.5-inch colour touchscreen displays an almost unfathomable number of features on a sharp, bright screen centred on fitness and performance technology. Highlights include a focus on strength and stamina training designed to improve the right areas. The built-in training programme will even prompt you if you miss a workout. These functions make it much easier to check and plan training schedules.Unfortunately, this specific deal applies only to UK shoppers; below you'll find the best Garmin Edge 1040 deals relevant to your location and currency.

Remco Evenepoel expects that the UAE Team Emirates XRG teams mounting problems will change the shape of stage 19 at the Tour de France, but the Belgian has ruled out gambling away second place in an all-or-nothing attack on Tadej Pogacar. Brandon McNultys abandonment has further reduced the supp...

Few European ski resorts attract summer crowds like Alpe dHuez, where cyclists are drawn like bees to a honeypot thanks to the climbs sweeping switchbacks and place in Tour de France legend.Despite first appearing at the Tour in the 1950s, it wasnt until 1976 that the peloton returned. Since then, it has become one of the most iconic climbs of the race.Here are the numbers behind Alpe dHuez and the Tour de France.2The 2026 Tour de France will visit Alpe dHuez twice. First, the peloton will ride up its 21 hairpins on stage 19, before ascending Alpe dHuez the next day from the other side for the first time in the Tour de Frances history.7The seventh bend is known as Dutch Corner, where orange-clad, beer-fuelled supporters cheer the peloton on. Fans from the Netherlands have populated the bend since Dutchmen won eight of the first 14 victories on Alpe dHuez, with Joop Zoetemelk first in 1976.20When the climb was last featured at the Tour in 2022, Britains Tom Pidcock won the stage.But it was Sepp Kuss who took the Strava KOM that day with an average speed of 20kph.21Part of Alpe dHuezs difficulty lies in its 21 hairpins. But this also adds to the climbs beauty, at least for viewers watching from home.29Although Kuss set a new Strava KOM in 2022, the record for the climb has stood for 29 years. In 1997, Marco Pantani set a time of 37 minutes and 35 seconds.There is some discrepancy between Pantanis record and modern attempts. Back then, the full climb was measured at 14.5km, whereas today it measures 13.8km. Still, that is a faster speed than Kuss ascent four years ago.13.8With an average gradient of 8.1% and the summit at 1,850m, the 13.8km-long climb is one of the toughest ascents to feature in the Tour.1952Alpe dHuez first appeared in the Tour de France in 1952 on stage 10, which was won by Fausto Coppi, who went on to claim the general classification. More from the Tour de France Why is there so much fuss about Alpe dHuez at the Tour de France? The 10-year-old bike still being used at the Tour de France An incredibly low heart rate and an unbelievable engine: the physiology of a Tour de France cyclist in numbers Tadej Pogaar's new lactate super fuel is a "breakthrough" in sports nutrition, but should you believe the hype?

From medical checks and bike changes to concussion protocols and time limits, this is how riders get back into the race, or why they are forced to stop