L’Étape du Tour 2026 in Numbers: 12,907 Finishers, 4 Climbs, One Brutal Day

On July 19, 2026, more than fourteen thousand amateur riders lined up in Le Bourg d’Oisans to ride the queen stage of this year’s Tour de France: 170 km over the Col de la Croix de Fer, the Télégraphe, the Galibier and the Col de Sarenne, finishing in Alpe d’Huez. I was one of them — which is why I ended up pulling the complete timing data (every rider, every checkpoint) and doing what the official results page doesn’t: climb-by-climb leaderboards, descent rankings, and a proper look at how the day actually unfolded for the whole field.

Everything below is computed from the official chip times. All of it is searchable in the interactive results explorer — including your own race, if you were there.

The field, in one table

Put differently: one in six riders who clipped in that morning didn’t make it to Alpe d’Huez inside the time limits, and one in six who registered never even showed up at the start. The finishers included 687 women, riders from 54 countries (12,287 French, 1,589 British, 296 Belgian), and 8 riders who asked to remain anonymous — they stay anonymous in my data too.

The times

Luca Cavallo (IT) won in 5:20:20. Victoria Stansfield was the first woman in 6:19:12 — 122nd overall out of 12,907, ahead of 99% of the men.

But the number that best captures what this day was: the median finisher needed 9 hours 55 minutes. Half the field spent more than ten hours on the bike. The finish-time distribution isn’t a neat bell curve either — it’s a long plateau: every 15-minute window between 9h30 and 11h15 brought home roughly 650–690 riders, wave after wave, deep into the afternoon.

The climbers

Summing each rider’s chip time on the Croix de Fer, Télégraphe and Galibier (foot-to-summit timing mats) gives a pure climber’s leaderboard that the official results don’t publish. Why not all four climbs? Because of the day’s best data glitch — see below.

A few more climbing nuggets:

• The winner rode up the Croix de Fer in 1h05; the median rider took 1h55.
• The Galibier (18.3 km from the foot mat): fastest 50 minutes, median 1h55 — the single biggest gap between the front and the middle of the race.
• Counting all four climbs, the median finisher spent 6h24 of their 9h55 going uphill — roughly 65% of the day.

The day’s best data glitch: the Sarenne mat missed the front of the race

The timing mat at the top of the Col de Sarenne has no read for 96 of the top 100 finishers (and for a quarter of ranks 101–300), while it caught 99%+ of the rest of the field. It recorded the three eventual podium finishers, then apparently failed precisely while the front of the race was streaming past, and recovered for the mid-pack. That’s why the climber’s leaderboard above uses three climbs — a four-climb version would silently disqualify almost the entire front group. Timing chips are wonderful; timing mats are hardware on a mountain.

The descenders

Timing mats at the Col du Galibier and at the foot of the Sarenne make it possible to rank the field on the 24.6 km Galibier descent: the fastest rider averaged 42.6 km/h (34 minutes, including the short rise out of the valley), while the median rider took 57 minutes — 23 minutes of “free” time between a good and an average descender, no fitness required. The fastest descent of the day belongs to Thibaut Clément, the overall runner-up: he didn’t just out-climb almost everyone, he out-descended everyone.

Comebacks and blow-ups

Comparing each rider’s overall position at the top of the Croix de Fer (km 38.5) with their final result:

• Biggest comeback: Jonathan Tiller crossed the Croix de Fer in 14,003rd position and finished 3,128th — 10,875 places gained. Starting easy works.
• Biggest blow-up: a rider who summited the Croix de Fer in 785th place finished 12,472nd — 11,687 places lost over the last 130 km. The Étape always collects its debts.

Where the race broke people

1,767 riders abandoned. The timing data shows the last checkpoint each of them reached, which maps the attrition along the course:

• The Galibier was the executioner: 423 riders’ race ended between the Tunnel and the summit area, and another 301 made it to the foot of the climb but no further — that’s ~40% of all DNFs on one mountain.
• 322 riders got over the Croix de Fer but stopped in the Maurienne valley — often the time cut, not the legs.
• 261 riders crested the Galibier but never reached the foot of the Sarenne.
• The cruellest stat: 4 riders abandoned after the Col de Sarenne — within 9 km of the finish.

Find your own race

Every classified rider has a page in the explorer: your splits at all 12 checkpoints, your rank at every mat, your time on each climb vs. the field’s median, and where you gained or lost places.

Method. Data: official race timekeeping (Sport Innovation / TimeTo), fetched once after the race — 17,443 riders × 12 timing mats ≈ 164,000 splits. Segment times are differences between chip times at consecutive mats; climb/descent leaderboards are recomputed from those segment times. Times shown are chip times, the basis of the official ranking. A handful of riders have missing mats (timing misses); they are excluded from the affected segment leaderboards only.