How To Watch The Tour de France Online

If you’re asking yourself how you can watch the Tour de France online from abroad or from a censored country, this is the guide for you.

Where And How To Watch The Tour de France Online

The Tour de France. Le Tour. By many accounts the single greatest sporting event on the planet. The world's toughest endurance athletes spend three weeks in July in the saddle, pushing themselves to the limit over a course of around 3,500 kilometers - and all for the sake of glory. The Tour is the world's most famous bike race, and it demands riders who can perform at peak output for hours at a time, day after day, and still have something left to sprint for a finish line.

The course is brutal. France in July, especially along the southern routes, regularly produces temperatures hot enough to soften the tarmac. Flat stages can stretch past 200 kilometers in a single day. Mountain stages climb the most famous passes of the Alps and Pyrenees, with gradients that touch 20% in places. To finish, a rider must survive both; to win, he must be near the front on every kind of terrain.

Who broadcasts the Tour?

The Tour's host broadcaster is France Télévisions, the French national network, which carries every stage live and free for viewers in France on its france.tv streaming platform. The live feed is piped to partner broadcasters around the world - in many countries that means Eurosport or a national network, and in the UK free-to-air highlights and live coverage have long been available. The catch is the same everywhere: each broadcaster's stream is geo-restricted to its own country.

If the coverage you want isn't available where you are - or costs extra there while being free at home - a personal VPN lets you connect through a server in the right country and watch as if you were there. Connect to Le VPN's France server for France Télévisions, or any UK server for the British free-to-air coverage.

Understanding the race

The Tour is a stage race - one of the three Grand Tours of Europe alongside the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España - made up of 21 stages over three weeks, with two rest days. Most stages are group starts; a few each year are time trials, either individual or team-based. Some editions open with a short prologue time trial to set the initial rankings. The route alternates direction from year to year, and the opening stages sometimes start abroad - Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Germany, Denmark, Italy and Spain have all hosted Grand Départs.

The first week is usually a series of flat stages as the riders head toward the mountains. Here the contenders focus on staying safe: a crash in an early stage can end a favorite's chances, or condemn him to weeks of riding at race pace with road rash and bruises.

Then come the mountains. The passes of the Alps and Pyrenees climb thousands of meters through tight switchbacks on narrow, weather-beaten roads. This is where the general classification is decided. Riders without the heart, lungs and legs to power over the summits get dropped - and anyone who misses the daily time cut is eliminated from the race entirely.

Between the mountain ranges lies the South of France: blistering heat and flat stages plagued by crosswinds that stretch the field into long diagonal echelons. The final stage is always the same ceremonial ride into Paris, finishing with laps of the cobbled Champs-Élysées and one last chance for sprint glory.

The jerseys: six races in one

Within the Tour there are several competitions running at once:

• Yellow Jersey (maillot jaune) - the general classification, worn by the rider with the lowest total elapsed time. This is "winning the Tour." Margins can be astonishing: the closest final gap ever recorded was just 8 seconds.
• Green Jersey - the points classification, effectively the sprinters' contest, decided by points at stage finishes and intermediate sprint lines on flat stages.
• Polka Dot Jersey - King of the Mountains, won by accumulating points at the tops of categorized climbs.
• White Jersey - best young rider on time. White Jersey contenders are often the Yellow Jersey winners of future Tours.
• Most Combative Rider - a daily and overall award for aggressive, attacking riding tempered by good sportsmanship.
• Team Classification - like the GC but counted on the combined times of each team's best finishers.

Useful vocabulary for your first Tour: the peloton is the main bunch of riders; a breakaway is a group that escapes off the front; an attack is a sudden acceleration to drop rivals; and off the back is where no rider wants to be.

The team behind every winner

No one wins the Tour alone. Each team of eight riders is built around specialists: the GC leader the team protects; the sprinter who unleashes 65+ km/h bursts in bunch finishes; his lead-out man who paces him into the final meters; the climbers who set the pace in the mountains; and the domestiques who carry water, shield teammates from the wind, and sacrifice their own chances - sometimes even their bikes - for the leader. A rider will burn well over 5,000 calories on a hard stage, which is why designated feed zones and a constant supply of gels, bars and bottles are part of the spectacle.

How Can I Watch The Tour de France From Abroad?

As complex as the race is, watching it online is simple - as long as your IP address is in the right country. Broadcasters check where your connection comes from and block viewers from outside their territory. A VPN solves this:

1. Subscribe to Le VPN and install the app on your computer, phone, tablet, or TV device.
2. Connect to a server in the broadcaster's country - France for France Télévisions, or any UK server for British coverage. Le VPN has servers in 100+ locations worldwide.
3. Open the broadcaster's site or app and enjoy every pedal stroke live. You can verify your virtual location on the test your IP page.

A VPN does more than unlock geo-restricted coverage. It encrypts your entire connection, which protects you on hotel and public Wi-Fi, and it prevents your local ISP from identifying and throttling your video stream during those long afternoon broadcasts. Le VPN supports fast modern protocols - WireGuard, OpenVPN and IPSec/IKEv2, plus Stealth WireGuard for countries that actively block VPN connections - and one account covers up to 10 devices simultaneously. With a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first purchase, you can set it up before the Grand Départ risk-free and watch all the way to the Champs-Élysées.