Tour de France iCal

Here’s a downloadable calendar of the Tour de France for your electronic diary or phone with brief details of each stage. There’s also a look at the TV coverage ahead.

The format proves ever popular, perhaps there’s a big demand to schedule work and social life around the crucial days? With this in mind each stage has a star rating, a subjective take on the stage’s importance to the race, whether drama or likely importance for the overall classification.

If you’re familiar with ical files, here’s the URL for the ics file:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/hla990g5m68avipbcqagst0g44%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Save the ics / iCal / iCalendar file and you can import it into your electronic diary. One or two clicks and it’s on your iPhone / Outlook etc. The default settings have alerts switched off but check your device to avoid nocturnal alarms.

Alternatively if you use Google then see calendar below and the Calendar link on the bottom-right. Note this method can work with Android phones when the iCal file might not.

If you want more help on how to make use of this, see the inrng.com/calendar page which has the calendar for all the main men’s and women’s pro races in 2020 and a fuller explanation of how to put a calendar into Outlook, an iPhone, your diary etc.

TV coverage
Just like recent years the Tour de France – and La Course on Saturday – will be broadcast live from start to finish. The timings vary, check the daily preview on here. It pays to be selective with the viewing. Some stages will be fascinating to watch in full, sometimes the liveliest part of the day can be the fight to get in the day’s breakaway. Yes, some days are dull, just as a 90 minute football match has its lulls, a three week stage race is bound to have some sleepy moments. Newspaper Le Monde usually publishes a siesta guide and the calendar above has those star ratings. Now though it’s easier to check in than ever, you can get the Tour in your phone, at your desk and so on.

France Télévisions will be filming, it’s their images you’ll see whether you’re watching Eurosport, RAI, NBC, J-Sports etc. They also have two motorbikes with reporters, one in front of the peloton to go with the breakaway and one behind to note what’s happening at the back, like dropped riders and mechanicals and this provides good info if you can handle the French audio, you’ll quickly learn the words for attack, crash, dropped etc. Both France TV and Eurosport Player have websites where you can choose your own TV images, if you want to watch Moto 1 then you can click on it. It’s nice to have but you quickly appreciate the skills of slick production that cuts to the action… especially when, say, Moto 3 stops for a pee or to chomp a baguette lunch.

•  radio is a good format for a grand tour and the likes of France Info, Europe 1 and RTL have the final kilometres live, often from a motorbike. But RMC Sport probably has the fullest coverage.