"Like Riding Into A Hair Dryer" - Extreme Heat This Summer Rapidly Redefining The Tour De France
The Tour de France and the heat of the midday sun are old bedfellows, going back long before an era when the biggest catastrophe of the Tour’s opening week was a major fault in the Visma team bus’s air conditioning. Flip back 50 years to my favourite Tour read, the late Geoffrey Nicholson’s The Great Bike Race, and we find the doyen of cycling writers discussing a Tour that began in baking conditions in the Vendée, and continued through the canicule in central France and Normandy.“The heatwave,” wrote Nicholson, “is becoming a serious worry.” He describes the late Raymond “Pou-Pou” Poulidor as “an old sweat” – pun alert – “in legionnaire matters”, who was “careful to limit himself to two litres of water on a stage … it is part of the collective wisdom of the peloton that too much water leads to depression and fatigue.”
Tell that to the Tour men of 2026 as they glug down one bidon after another. Nicholson harks back to heatwaves now long forgotten; “the summer of 1951 when suffering from the Languedoc sun, Fausto Coppi lost 33 minutes on the stage to Montpellier. More recently, and nearer home, there was the dog- day Tour of 1957 when the baking roads of Normandy forced 66 of the 120 [starters] to retire.”
The twist is that Nicholson was describing the notorious drought year, 1976, but even so, the temperatures he describes bear little resemblance to the Tour de Furnace of 2026: 25C in the Vendée in late June, 29C on the road to Caen. These days, as they stuff stockings filled with ice down their necks and supply urine samples to be tested for dehydration, the riders are probably longing for such conditions. “Like riding into a hair dryer,” said one of the 40-degree temperatures this week.
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There is only so far this can go, however, as there is only so far the human body can be made to adapt. Global heating is bound to force the race organisers into some profound rethinking at some point, ironically enough for a sport where so many teams are backed by oil companies and petro-dollar regimes. This might seem unlikely, but rethinks happen fast: it is only a few years ago that there was relative insouciance about the race’s carbon profile; now, at least spectators are encouraged to attend on their bikes and the use of electric vehicles in the diesel-heavy cavalcade is rising.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jul/11/salted-codfish-cabbage-climate-crisis-tour-de-france-future