Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 2026 Stage 8 Preview | Poor Tuckwell faces fired-up Seixas and Del Toro

They are not making life easy for the riders in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. For the second day in a row, the race serves up a short but extremely tough mountain stage. IDL ProCycling previews the final stage of this Tour de France preparation race!

The eighth stage of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes starts in Beaufort, from where the riders immediately begin the Col du Pré. This is anything but a gentle prelude, because the numbers of this climb are intimidating right away: 6.9 kilometers of climbing at an average gradient of 10.1 percent.

The riders then return to Beaufort via a 17-kilometer descent. It will not be long before the road rises again, however, because the Montée de Bisanne is next on the menu: 11.4 kilometers at 7.7 percent.

After that, the race heads into Haute-Savoie via the Col des Araxis, which at 7 kilometers and 6.8 percent is relatively easier than the climbs before it. From the top, thirty kilometers follow on roads that trend gently downhill.

The finish, however, comes on Plateau de Solaison, a climb the Tour de France riders will also face in July. Stage 15 of the Tour finishes on that same climb, which is 11.3 kilometers long and has an average gradient of 9.3 percent. The steepest kilometers come right at the start.

Times
Start: 1:20 PM CET
Finish: around 4:57 PM CET

Conditions in the Alps look decent on Sunday, with temperatures around 15 degrees Celsius and little chance of rain. The sunshine is expected to give way to cloud toward the end of the afternoon.

With Luke Tuckwell still in the yellow leader’s jersey for Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, the final day promises to be a spectacle. Plenty of teams will sense an opportunity to win the overall, while others will hope that a stage victory can still rescue something from their week. The 21-year-old Tuckwell looks set for a very hard day, with several riders breathing down his neck.

After stage seven, Isaac del Toro looks like the main contender for both the stage win and the overall victory. The Mexican from UAE Emirates-XRG rode everyone off his wheel on the Grand Colombier, and if he can do that again, a double prize is there for the taking. Matteo Jorgenson of Visma | Lease a Bike, second overall, already looked slightly below Del Toro’s level and seems more likely to be defending.

Juan Ayuso is certainly also a candidate for the stage win. The Spaniard will be fired up after, by his own admission, wasting a good pair of legs by attacking too early on stage seven. Can the Lidl-Trek leader play it better this time? And what role could teammate Mattias Skjelmose possibly play? The Dane did look a little less convincing on Saturday.

Another rider who will surely be fired up is Paul Seixas. The Frenchman from Decathlon CMA CGM produced a fine performance by taking seventh place on stage seven, but of course he was going for the stage victory. How much will Saturday’s crash affect him on Sunday? Can he push through the pain barrier and turn all those feelings of revenge into a fightback? Overall victory seems a step too far, but the stage certainly does not.

Tobias Halland Johannessen and Cian Uijtdebroeks also have a chance of winning the stage, based on the balance of power in the mountain stages so far. The leaders of Uno-X Mobility and Movistar will need the others to look at each other, though, and with so much time still to be made up on Tuckwell, that scenario does not seem very likely.

Of course, there is also the possibility of a stage win from the breakaway, but with bonus seconds available at the finish and the general classification still so tight, the chances of that appear fairly slim. Riders such as Carlos Rodríguez of Netcompany INEOS and the XDS-Astana duo Cristian Rodríguez and Harold Tejada climb well enough to hope for something.

Top favorites: Isaac del Toro (UAE Emirates-XRG) and Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM)
Outsiders: Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek), Matteo Jorgenson (Visma | Lease a Bike), and Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility)
Long shots: Cian Uijtdebroeks (Movistar), Cristian Rodriguez and Harald Tejada (XDS-Astana), Carlos Rodriguez (Netcompany INEOS)

Author: David Bavin-Hobbs - [email protected]