After two years experimenting with a punchy detour over Montmartre, the final stage of the Tour de France is set to return to a traditional flat-track sprint finish on the Champs Elysées, according to reports in the French press.
The route for the 2027 Tour de France will be unveiled in Paris next Thursday, and the newspaper Le Progrès reports that the Montmartre climb is set to be excluded.
In the past two years, the Côte de la Butte Montmartre has shaken up the traditional format of the Tour's finale, measuring 1.1 km at an average gradient of 5.9%, mostly on cobblestones, and followed by a tricky little descent.
It has created drama on both occasions, with Wout van Aert dropping Tadej Pogačar and soloing to victory in 2025, before Mathieu van der Poel hung on from a small-group attack – also involving Pogačar – to hold off the chasing pack in a nail-biting finale this year.
The organisers had already tweaked the format, extending the distance from the top of the climb to the finish line from six kilometres to just over 10km, which resulted in the closer contest between the attackers and the sprinters.
This appeared to strike a better balance between tradition and the modern desire for action and entertainment. However, if Le Progrès is to be believed, the organisers have reverted to the old format, for next year at least.
One factor could be the fact that the general classification timings have been neutralised on both occasions the race has gone over Montmartre in the past two years, with the GC 'frozen' and therefore finalised upon entry to the final circuit.
In 2025, the wet weather made the cobblestones treacherous, and the neutralisation was enforced to allow the likes of Pogačar to race openly without fear of losing their overall placing in the event of an accident. This year, the weather was dry, but the riders pushed for a similar GC neutralisation and the organisers eventually agreed.
The organisers would have preferred to leave the GC open, and this has perhaps played into this reported decision. The final stage of the Tour has for many years been processional, with riders drinking champagne and posing for photographs in the early kilometres before racing in central Paris, but any situation where proper GC racing could see positions – or even the yellow jersey – change hands, would throw that celebratory atmosphere up in the air.
The last bunch sprint on the Champs Elysées came in 2023, with the 2024 edition moved from Paris entirely due to the Olympics taking place in the French capital that summer, and the Tour ending with a time trial in Nice.
It remains to be seen what the organisers do with stage 21 in the long-run – and it might be that they alternate between the Montmartre circuit and the traditional laps of the Champs – but more will become clear when we see what is officially confirmed for the final day of the 2027 Tour next week.
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