The cycling road racing calendar is quite packed both in Europe and North America. There are loads of one-day races as well as multi-day stage races. But there are many different types of stage races for the road, ranging from Grand Tours that last three weeks to two-day, three stage races that take place over a weekend at your local office park.
Mountain bike stage races exist as well, with the Cape Epic taking place in South Africa probably being the most well known and prestigious. The BC Bike Race on Vancouver Island in Canada also draws many of the best off-road specialists in the world.
We’ll touch more on mountain bike racing and types of races in a future post. For today, we’ll stick to looking more closely at what are the different types of professional cycling road races.
Grand Tours
There are only three Grand Tours in the world, all of them in Europe. Professional cycling is a Euro-oriented sport, though UCI-sanctioned races happen on every continent aside from Antarctica. If you are interested in learning a little more about the three Grand Tours and which are the most important, check out our blog “Cycle grand tours - which races are the most important?” that goes into more detail.
The three Grand Tours are the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a Espana. They all are 21 stages long with two rest days, usually. On occasion, when one of the tours starts outside the home country, an extra rest day can be added for a travel day, if the distance between the country of the Grand Depart is quite away from the home country. For instance, in 2022 the Vuelta a Espana held the first three stages in the Netherlands. Then there was a day off to travel back to Spain before stage 4. The race then still had a rest day after stage 9 and another rest day after stage 15.
Having to race nearly every day for three weeks straight is what sets the Grand Tours apart from any other race on the cycling calendar. The accumulated fatigue for elite cyclists really starts to kick in near the end of the second week, which often makes the third week of racing a matter of survival. There recently has been talk from certain team managers who are floating the idea of reducing the Grand Tours to being just two weeks. The idea being that if the riders are less tired, then they will make the races more exciting. But that would be taking away what makes these races so special and so important. If it doesn’t go for three weeks, it can’t be a Grand Tour.
Major one-week stage races
Though in years past, when racers like Lance Armstrong and Chris Froome would focus 100% on the Tour de France, many other races on the calendar were seen as simply tune-up or training races. More recently, riders have been taking every race seriously, as an event to be won with almost total disregard for potential fatigue.
Many people point to the two covid seasons – 2020 and 2021 – as being the catalyst for this new attitude. Riders seldom knew whether the race would be the last race of the season since a covid positive could kick them out of the race, or indeed multiple positives could cancel the race altogether.
So one week races stopped being stress-free opportunities to hone form, but rather became as aggressively raced as if they were the first week of the Tour de France. Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico are the two early season stage races that are where the Grand Tour aspirants have the first opportunity to show their strength.
Then the mid-spring Tour of the Basque Country tries to live up to its reputation as the hardest one-week stage race on the calendar. The difficult parcours, sometimes awful weather conditions, and extremely high fitness level of all participants usually means the event has some of the best racing in the whole year. For 2024, it had the sad effect, though, of seeing three of the top four favorites for the Tour de France crash out. Time will only tell how much that will impact the rest of the racing season.
By the time June rolls around, the Dauphiné in France and the Tour de Suisse in Switzerland begin to take center stage. Any riders who didn’t do the Giro d’Italia in May and are still hunting for form ahead of the Tour de France in July will usually choose one of these two prestigious weeklong races. They are usually difficult enough to ensure a worthy winner without forcing the riders to dig too deep ahead of the French appointment in July.
Smaller non-European stage races
In the interest of growing the sport, the UCI has made an effort in recent decades to expand races around the world. Perhaps the most successful of these has been the Santos Tour Down Under which takes place in January in Australia. First raced in 1999, it missed a few editions because of travel restrictions during the covid epidemic. But otherwise, it has found a firm place on the calendar as a nice warm race to kick off the season for European-based riders.
The UAE Tour is another early season kick off race that takes place in a warmer climate than what Europeans and North Americans will usually find. The Middle East in fact hosts not only the UAE Tour, but the Tour of Oman and the Saudi Tour, which was rebranded as the AlUla Tour for 2024. And the Tour of Qatar, which was last held in 2016, used to be a favorite race for classics specialists to test their teams in crazy cross winds.
The races in the Middle East have a mixed reputation as sports-washing attempts by regimes with poor human rights records to get good publicity. The fact that the courses are frequently difficult to find inspiring with long straight roads that crisscross the desert and minimal fan turnout doesn’t help their case. But the pros have found them useful as early season warm weather events in low-stress race situations.
North American stage races
Though the United States has held important stage races over the years, from the Red Zinger/Coors Classic, to the Tour DuPont to the Tour de Georgia, Tour of Missouri, Tour of California and US Pro Challenge in Colorado, none of these excellent races has managed to have the staying power to last beyond a handful of editions.
It’s a shame too since the origin story of being a cycling fan for many Americans can be traced back to one of these events. We remember sitting at the side of the road in Denver, Colorado, circa 1986 with Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, Andy Hampsten, Davis Phinney and many more elite athletes from the European peloton racing past at incredible speeds. That certainly hooked us. And we’ve read similar comments from people like Jonathan Vaughters as a youth being similarly inspired at this race.
Homegrown races nurture both athletes and fans. It’s a shame to see the few stage races that still exist in the US, like Redlands, have so little connection to the outside world. Much of that can be attributed to their almost non-existent online coverage or streaming presence. We hope it doesn’t follow the same route that Joe Martin Stage Race has. As the longest running stage race in the US, Joe Martin was still forced to “postpone” the 2024 edition till 2025. Fingers crossed it really is only taking a year’s break, but if looking at how other US races have ended in the past, the first press release announces a postponement only for the next press release to announce total cancelation due to lack of funds.
Conclusion – there are no unimportant stage races
Every stage race serves a useful purpose on the calendar. We know that there are quite a few pundits shouting about how disjointed the racing calendar is and how it should be revamped and cleaned up. They argue that having Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico overlap, or the Dauphiné and the Tour de Suisse overlap makes it too hard for people to understand what is going on. Some of them argue that having the Tour de France as the most important event on the calendar, but happening in July when there are still months’ worth of racing ahead makes it hard for newcomers to understand the logic of the season.
We would argue the exact opposite. Every race has its own importance depending on what goals an athlete has for the season. Each race also has its own local fan base, and makes a contribution to that region’s ability to grow its own cycling culture. To say that the cycling calendar should be streamlined with a logical story would be to straitjacket the sport. That would more likely result in choking the life out of it by stifling the precise idiosyncrasies that make the sport of professional cycling so appealing.
Be sure to check our article on Giro d'Italia.
