Among the stage towns on the 2027 Tour de France route, two appeared on the map of the inaugural 1903 edition: Paris… and Toulouse. To reach the “pink city”, the peloton had to cover 423 kilometres from Marseille. Hippolyte Aucouturier proved the quickest, completing the stage in just under 18 hours. The Tour’s pioneers then set off from Toulouse on another historic day: at the finish in Bordeaux, Swiss rider Charles Laeser became the first foreigner to win a stage. His compatriot Mauro Schmid came close to emulating that feat in 2025, but Norway’s Jonas Abrahamsen beat the Swiss champion and Mathieu van der Poel at the end of a furiously contested stage that started and finished in Toulouse. Two decades earlier, Juan Antonio Flecha, who was also an accomplished attacker, claimed a memorable victory in the city. The hometown of sprinter Frédéric Moncassin has also been kind to fast finishers, notably Mark Cavendish and Caleb Ewan in recent years. It also produced a great time trial specialist in Jean-Christophe Péraud, who was French champion in the discipline in 2009 and finished as runner-up to Vincenzo Nibali in the 2014 Tour.
- Stage town for the 30th time
- Prefecture of Haute-Garonne (31)
- Population: 515,000
- metropole.toulouse.fr
