Grand Départ

One city, one roar, and the whole world's peloton vanishing into the horizon.

The Grand Départ is the opening stage of the Tour de France, the moment the peloton surges out of a city's streets for the first time in a three-week epic. More than a sporting start line, it is a civic spectacle: a free, open-air festival where hundreds of thousands of spectators line the cobbles, the boulevards, and the riverbanks to watch the world's best road cyclists thunder past. For the host city, it is a week of transformation—barricades become stages, cafés become viewing decks, and the whole population becomes part of the show. The tradition stretches back to the very first Tour in 1903, which set off under the banner of L'Auto. Each edition carries the weight of that lineage: the roar of the crowd, the smell of exhaust and hot tarmac, the white jerseys and rainbow champions threading through a sea of flags.

Background

In the early days, the Grand Départ was almost an afterthought. The 1903 race launched with a modest crowd, the riders in woolly jerseys, the journalists of L'Auto scribbling notes in the heat. Henri Desgrange wanted a race that was brutal, honest, and unglamorous, and the start was simply the point where the suffering began. There was no ceremony, no fireworks, no three-day media circus.

Just a line of men on bicycles and a flag dropping. That changed slowly. As the Tour grew into a national institution in the 1920s and 1930s, the opening stage acquired a theatrical quality. Cities competed to host.

The start area became a stage in its own right—bands playing, local dignitaries waving, the peloton corralled in a tight knot while the crowd pressed against the barriers. By the 1950s and 1960s, the Grand Départ was a full civic event, with the host town dressing its streets, closing traffic for days, and treating the riders almost like visiting royalty. The Tour has now started outside France 26 times, 13 of them in the Low Countries and four in Germany, and since the 1970s foreign starts have been a deliberate way of widening the race's audience.

Since then, the Grand Départ has become a rotating ambassadorship: a city borrows the Tour's mythology for a week, drapes itself in yellow and white, and lets the peloton's thunder shake its foundations before the race scatters eastward into the mountains. The tradition is less about the kilometres ridden on day one and more about the collective breath held before the first sprint.

Did You Know?

The Grand Départ has occurred outside France 26 times: 13 times in the Low Countries, 4 times in Germany, and 9 times elsewhere.
In 2024, the first Grand Départ outside France for the Tour de France Femmes took place in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Cities outside France have paid organisers Amaury Sport Organisation around €6 million to host the Grand Départ; French cities pay less, with Brest paying €3.6 million in 2021 and Lille paying €4.2 million in 2025.
Since the 1950s, the Grand Départ has typically taken place in a different town each year, and since the 1970s it has been common to award it to cities outside France to increase international interest.
The right to host the Grand Départ is now highly sought after, with cities bidding to host, and has been shown to increase economic activity as well as interest in cycling in the host area.