2026 Tour de France Betting Preview
Updated July 9, 2026
Tour de France 2026 · Barcelona to Paris · July 4-26
The four jerseys, and where I'm putting money
Yellow · General Classification
Tadej Pogačar -350
My play: I'm passing on Pogačar to win and backing Vingegaard +450 as a saver, plus his stage props.
Green · Points
Jasper Philipsen +200
My play: Philipsen. The new points rules were written for a sprinter with his lead-out.
Polka Dot · King of the Mountains
Lenny Martinez +800
My play: Martinez, with one eye on Pogačar swiping it if he wants the double-points summits.
White · Best Young Rider
Isaac del Toro +200
My play: Del Toro over the shorter-priced Seixas. White goes to the best-placed young rider, not the one with the most air time dedicated to him.
Opening prices, late June. Lines move. 21+. Please bet responsibly.
Tadej Pogačar is -350 to win a fifth Tour de France, which would tie him with Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain. That's the whole story, and also not the story at all. The 2026 route was built to break him. Eight mountain stages. Five summit finishes. Back-to-back days on Alpe d'Huez to close it out. ASO even rewrote the green jersey math to keep him off the points podium. None of it has shortened his price, because Pogi has shown all season that savage terrain is exactly where he thrives.
So the betting interest isn't really "who wins." It's where the value hides once you accept the obvious. Barring disaster, Tadej Pogačar will win a fifth Tour and firmly establish himself on the list of the sport's greatest ever riders.
Here's how I'm reading all four jerseys, and then a stage-by-stage breakdown for anyone who wants the GC-decisive days mapped out.
He's lost one race all year. That was the ever-elusive Paris-Roubaix title still missing from the Slovenian's palmarès, and tells us nothing about the shape he is in for the Tour. In June he went to the Tour de Suisse and rode away from everyone, in a race far more indicative of his climbing prowess and the quality of his preparation.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG skipped the Giro and the Vuelta with him so the entire season points at July. At -350 there's no edge in backing him outright. You're risking 350 to win 100 on a rider who could still suffer a mechanical or get caught up in a crash on stage 9 and hand it all back. No thanks.
Jonas Vingegaard at +450 is the only man in the peloton who's beaten Pogačar over three weeks, and he did it twice. The version that turned up at the Giro d'Italia in the spring looked like the 2023 Vingegaard, the one who actually won this race. He took a Pantani record on Piancavallo and never looked like he was emptying the tank. His pitch all year has been that he's tuning up for the Tour de France, and the Giro-Tour double is exactly the formula Pogačar used in 2024. I don't think it's enough to beat him. I do think +450 is a fair number on a man who's never finished worse than second here in five attempts.
Then there's Paul Seixas at +550. The 19-year-old Frenchman is making his Tour debut, and is tipped as the first home winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985. It's a wonderful story and if you love a narrative, it is hard not to get caught up in the hype. However, modern cycling is rarely romantic.
He crashed on the final weekend of the Dauphiné a few weeks back, and asking a teenager to carry the hopes of a nation through his first three-week race against the sport's best riders is a sure-fire way to lose a bet. I'll be watching him, but I won't bet on him at that number.
My yellow play: I'm not touching Pogačar at -350. I'll take a small Vingegaard +450 as a saver and put the real money on his stage props, summit finishes and the late time trial, where the books price him closer to Pogačar than the outright suggests. If Visma turns the Alps into a war and Pogačar has one flat day, +450 looks very different in week three.
Last July, Pogačar finished 78 points off Jonathan Milan in the points classification. He was hoovering up green points on the lumpy days because the old scoring let him. ASO noticed, so for 2026 a flat-stage win now pays 70 points instead of 50, second pays 50, third pays 40, and every flat stage carries two intermediate sprints. In other words, they're handing the jersey back to the pure fast men and shutting the door on a GC rider stealing it.
This is excellent news for Jasper Philipsen. He won green in 2023, finished second in 2022 and 2024, and he's got Mathieu van der Poel leading him out, which is the best lead-out in the race by a street. Philipsen's edge isn't only top speed. He banks points when he doesn't win, which is the whole game over three weeks.
Tim Merlier might be faster on a clean, flat line, but he skips intermediate sprints to save his legs for finishes, and this new format punishes exactly that. Mads Pedersen is the every-single-day grinder who'll poach points on the hilly stages the sprinters get dropped on, and with Milan currently left out of the confirmed Lidl-Trek squad, Pedersen's the one to watch if the race gets selective.
My green play: Philipsen. The rule change reads like it was drafted with his exact profile in mind, and his lead-out train is a level above the rest. Pedersen's the hedge if you want one, because he keeps scoring on the days the bunch splinters.
Thirty categorised climbs across the route, and summit finishes score double. The mistake casual bettors make is backing a yellow-jersey contender for polka dot. It rarely works, because GC riders are busy marking each other instead of mopping up climb points from a breakaway. The classic winner is a climber with a free role and a team happy to send him up the road. Lenny Martinez is that rider. His Bahrain team will give him the leash, and his whole style is built for snatching points over the top of a categorised climb.
The wrinkle: Pogačar won this jersey in 2025 too. If he decides he wants the double-points summit finishes, including two cracks at Alpe d'Huez, he can simply take them, and there's no breakaway hunter who can out-climb him on a mountaintop finish. So Martinez is the play only if Pogačar leaves the scraps alone. He usually has bigger things to mind.
My polka dot play: Martinez at a number, with Lorenzo Fortunato, Giulio Ciccone and Warren Barguil as the names in the next tier if you want a longer shot. Just know Pogačar's the ceiling on the whole market.
This is a two-horse race between Paul Seixas and Isaac del Toro, and the market loves Seixas because he's the French sensation everyone's writing about. Here's the thing about the white jersey. It goes to the best-placed young rider in the overall standings, not the most talented one. That changes the calculation.
Del Toro is nominally Pogačar's domestique this summer, but he's also the rider who won the UAE Tour, Tirreno-Adriatico and the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes this spring. A top UAE climber riding near the front of every mountain stage for three weeks tends to bank a top-five overall almost by accident.
João Almeida did exactly that in 2024, coming in fourth place while working for Pogačar. Seixas, meanwhile, is a teenage debutant who just crashed at the Dauphiné and whose team has to balance his GC hopes against Olav Kooij's sprint stages. If Seixas loses two minutes in the first week, and first weeks at the Tour eat debutants alive, Del Toro's consistency wins this comfortably.
My white play: Del Toro at the longer price over Seixas at the short one. I'd rather back the rider whose floor is a top-five than the one whose ceiling is a podium and whose floor is a bad week.
Twenty-one stages, 3,333 km, 54,450 m of climbing. You don't need all of them. These are the GC-decisive days, grouped by week. Tap any block to open it.
Week 1 · Barcelona, then straight into the Pyrenees
Stage 1 (Sat Jul 4): Barcelona team time trial, 19.7 km. The first TTT to open the Tour since 1971, and it uses the new rule where each rider gets their own time rather than the team's fourth man. Mostly flat until the Montjuïc ramp at the end. The best-drilled squads put time into everyone else on day one, so Pogačar, Vingegaard and Evenepoel can all gain or lose before a single mountain.
Stage 2 (Sun Jul 5): Barcelona, hilly, 2,500 m climbing. Three trips up the Montjuïc castle climb, 1.6 km at 9.3%. A day for the puncheurs, maybe a reduced sprint, and the GC men can't switch off.
Stage 3 (Mon Jul 6): into France, 195.9 km, 3,850 m. Crosses from Spain over the Pyrenees with a Cat. 1 on the way and an uphill finish at Les Angles. Not a brutal gradient, but the first real selection.
Stage 6 (Thu Jul 9): Col du Tourmalet to Gavarnie-Gèdre. The first summit-finish reckoning, over the Tourmalet to a mountaintop line. This is where we find out if anyone can live with Pogačar in the high mountains, or if it's a two-man race by the first rest day.
Rest day after stage 9, Monday July 13.
Week 2 · Transition days, then a brand-new wall
The sprinter window. The middle of the race rolls through the Massif Central, Jura and Vosges with flatter days that hand Philipsen, Merlier and the fast men their chances. This is where the green jersey takes shape, and where two intermediate sprints per flat stage start to matter.
Stage 15 (Sun Jul 19): Plateau de Solaison. A new summit finish, and a nasty one, roughly 9% average. The last hard day before the second rest, and a place to gain real time before the Alps close the race.
Orcières-Merlette. One of the five summit finishes sits in this stretch too, another chance for a breakaway climber to chase polka dots while the GC group watches each other.
Rest day after stage 15, Monday July 20.
Week 3 · The time trial, then Alpe d'Huez twice
Stage 16: the individual time trial. There's only about 26 km of ITT in the whole race, and this is most of it. Evenepoel's clearest path to time. Vingegaard's TT prices here are often better value than his outright, especially against the clock where raw power beats explosive jumps.
Stages 19 and 20: Alpe d'Huez, back to back. The headline of the entire route. Two finishes on the most famous climb in cycling on consecutive days, with the Col du Galibier (2,642 m, the race's highest point) on the menu before the second one. If the GC is still close on the morning of stage 19, this is where it's settled. Summit finishes score double mountain points, so the polka dot jersey can flip here too.
Stage 21 (Sun Jul 26): Paris, with Montmartre. The Champs-Élysées finale keeps the cobbled Montmartre climb, the same one where van Aert dropped Pogačar on the final day in 2025. Usually a procession plus a sprint. Last year it wasn't, so don't sleep on a late move.
Yellow saver | Vingegaard +450 + his stage props |
Green | Philipsen +200 |
Polka dot | Martinez +800 (Pogačar is the ceiling) |
White | Del Toro +200 over Seixas |
When does the 2026 Tour de France start?
It runs from Saturday, July 4 to Sunday, July 26, opening with a team time trial in Barcelona and finishing on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Who's the favorite to win?
Tadej Pogačar, at roughly -350. He's chasing a record-equalling fifth title, and the entire UAE season was built around this race.
Can anyone actually beat Pogačar?
Jonas Vingegaard at +450 is the only rider who's done it since Pogi has been in long pants, and he arrives off a dominant Giro. The double Alpe d'Huez finish and the late time trial give Visma somewhere to try and topple UAE.
What changed with the green jersey for 2026?
ASO raised a flat-stage win to 70 points and added a second intermediate sprint on flat days, tilting the points classification back toward pure sprinters after Pogačar nearly stole it in 2025.
Odds cited are opening prices from late June 2026 and will move before the Grand Départ. 21+. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER.
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