The Tour de Suisse starts in Italy today and there are only five stages. What was once the fourth biggest stage race on the World Tour calendar has now become the joint-shortest.
If Pogačar wins on Sunday he’ll add the Tour de Suisse to his palmarès where he’s got little else to win beyond the Vuelta and Olympics. If Primož Roglič wins he’ll add the only missing stage race, alongside the Tour of course. Missing because the Tour de Suisse has been held up as a week-long race to go alongside the Dauphiné, the Tour of the Basque Country, Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico and other pillars of the calendar. Now at five days nobody will put an asterisk next to the Tour de Suisse but it is not what it was.
The Tour de Suisse started in 1933. Despite the French name, it was organised by the Schweizerischer Radfahrer Bund, one of two cycling federations in Switzerland at the time and as the name hints, the one from the German-speaking cantons. Rather than being called the Schweizer Rundfahrt, French was for long the international language of cycling and the Tour de Suisse label was used to appeal outside of the country.
The race has shrunk over time. It used to have a mid-week start and finish. In 1986 it started on a Tuesday and after 12 days of racing finished on a Friday. In 2004 it settled on the weekend-to-weekend format, nine days from Saturday to Sunday. In 2021 it went to eight days, Sunday to Sunday.
Now in 2026 it’s been cut to five days. It makes the race is shorter than the Tour Down Under and the Tour de Romandie, and only matched by the Renewi Tour, five days too. Anything less probably wouldn’t be allowed as a World Tour stage race.
Why the shrinkage? There’s some spin around this. The women’s Tour de Suisse is growing from three days to five so the men’s reduction has been presented as equalisation. It’s great that the women get five days. But what is also happening is the women’s race happens in the morning, the men in the afternoon and on the same course which allows for savings as the organisers have the same finish arch in place, the same staff on the ground. Putting the women’s race in the morning gives them low audiences compared to the men’s race in the late afternoon.
In an interview with newspaper HLN (paywall), Thomas Spiegel of race shareholder Flanders Classics (it bought in 2023) call it a facelift and say the race has been “condensed” to better accommodate riders wishing to dip and in out of pre-Tour altitude training camps.
Read the Swiss press and the message is blunt: the race has been shortened because it has had financial and logistical difficulties. News website Watson.ch says the Tour de Suisse budget last year was eight million Swiss francs (€8.7m), of which the women’s race was one million and it lost several hundred thousand francs. Now the budget is cut to six million, and putting on both races together saves money. But a shrinking race is less valuable, five days of content rather than eight.
Similarly the concept of having the start and finish in the same place each day has its merits, the idea is to create an event for the day rather than seeing the buses park, riders assemble then then ride away, host towns now get a lot more. But again this is not always by choice, another report suggest the race was struggling to find routes with locals and “growing opposition” to road closures.
What happens in here though can happen elsewhere. The Tour of California came and went because it was financially unviable. The Volta Catalunya has needed emergency loans. The Tour de Romandie has financial troubles today. If wealthy Switzerland has problems running bike races, look at its neighbouring countries with high debts that are looking for budget cuts and sports funding by regional government is a soft slice. Meanwhile countries like the UK and Germany have disproportionately small races outside of the World Tour.
None of this criticism is meant to be against the race. There’s the famous joke told by Woody Allen at the start of his film Annie Hall where he cites two women at a resort and one says “Boy the food at this place is really terrible” and the other says “Yeah, I know, and such small portions.” Today the only complaint is that the serving has shrunk but the dish remains mouthwatering. Give me more racing, give me the Sustenpass, the Furka, the Grosse Scheidegg, the Albula, the Gotthard and its Tremola cobbles, glacial lakes and landscapes that evoke the Sound of Music and Heidi, the Shangri-La for Alpine cycling, and all in the sublime June sunshine.
Conclusion
A diminished Tour de Suisse goes from eight to five days. Once heralded as the fourth stage race of the season, now its ranks alongside the Renewi Tour, although with far better scenery. Contrary to some reports, the shrinkage is because of financial losses.
The dual format of men and women will be interesting to watch, as will the circuits format but less from a sports viewpoint and more the insider perspective of logistics and event management. There’s plenty to enjoy, the wish is there was more.
Pogacar has brought a serious team of support riders si this really does look like a dress rehersal for UAE.
It’s a missing leaf in Pogacar’s laurel wreath
Miss the week long race but nothing lasts for ever.
PS why does it start in Italy ?
It’s a willing and generous host. The race has a deal with the Valtellina, the valley in Lombardia on the Swiss border, designed to attract Swiss tourists to Italy. The agreement was signed a couple of years ago and so persists this year and the race will visit next year too.
You could even say “once heralded as the 3rd most important stage race”, in absolute terms, right after the Tour and the Giro (around the same years when it rather was “the Giro and the Tour”, so quite a while back 😉 ).
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Last year watching the women and men races on the same course in Küssnacht only provided a double dosis of excellent racing, but it’s true that besides hardcore fans it’s a killer timetable for women audience. The sort of kafkian writing and application of rules thanks to which we got the Giro Donne very harshly sanctioned some years ago for providing a recorded show, broadcast just after the men TDF stage on the same day, which granted very good viewing figures on free national channels – but of course it’s all fine if you provide “a live feed” which few will broadcast and close to nobody will watch, with finish scheduled at noon.
Of course the problem isn’t forcing the existence of a live TV feed, which is necessary to say the least, but the proportion between that sanction and a sort of ahem “solution” like this one.
Really interesting to see how this dual format works out. It makes sense from a logistics and format perspective but there’s definitely an impact on course design with the same start and finish locations. Stage 3 for the women is a blast around the Rhine valley with Netherlands-esque levels of elevation. For the men it’s an equally odd route that would make for great racing if it was reversed but which front loads some decent climbs through the Alpstein only to drop into a flat last 60km.
What I liked last year was that the stage was the very same route, although it developed differently of course.
This year they did a good job having routes which will work in similar ways across the two races (with exceptions), but I’d have liked also a truly identical stage besides the ITT.
For what I’m being told by locals, I think that in Switzerland it’s not an issue about money as such (obviously), rather some cultural resistance about what you’re spending public money in.
The Swiss cycling federation (despite CH being an historical key country for the sport and the sport itself being, on turn, an asset for the country) goes chronically through periods of underfunding; I can’t remember the details now but they happened to leave athletes out from international competitions (especially women – it’s not the best country in terms of equality, relative to their privileged condition of wealth and cultural capital, many achievements are shockingly recent, so many issues are still rooted across society and mentality). I think they even had to shut the MTB marathon team or so.
As a wholly different example, the excellent public tv recently faced the risk of severe cuts in their incomes as a few years ago it was proposed to cancel the specific tax which partly funds it, then again to reduce it by some… 40% (!). The proposals were finally voted against but the political general attitude is “no more spending by the Federation or public institutions”.
It’s a bit like the USA. Cycling usually struggles in societies where the idea of “public spending” is weak and individualism is rampant.