It’s early November, which means the Halloween candy is on sale, the piles of leaves in my yard are getting harder to ignore, and the routes for the 2027 men’s and women’s Tour de France have finally been unveiled. After weeks of refreshing Tour rumor sites, here’s what stood out to me about the men’s route.

First, let’s address the Slovenian elephant in the room: There’s little anyone can do to defeat a healthy, in-form Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates XRG), who will head into the 2027 Tour as the overwhelming favorite to take a record-breaking sixth overall victory. Certainly, the organizers seem to feel the same way.

Rather than create a race designed to defeat him, which currently doesn’t seem possible, they’ve laid out a course that could at least prevent the five-time champion from running away with it in the first week. The 2027 Tour packs more than 53,000 meters of elevation gain and 28 second-, first-, or hors catégorie climbs into its 21 stages. But there are only three summit finishes, and the first doesn’t arrive until the end of Stage 9, atop the Grand Colombier.

That means fewer chances for Pogačar and his team to jump out to a huge early lead on the Tour’s general classification and then ride defensively, slowly wearing down the opposition until the final week. That’s when the Slovenian usually delivers the coup de grâce, adding a few more stage wins to his ever-growing tally.

Yes, there are a couple of punchy uphill finishes in the opening week, at the end of Stages 4 and 5, and Pogačar will do well on them. But the time gaps shouldn’t be huge, so I expect a tighter bunch of riders at the top of the GC heading into the first individual time trial on Stage 7.

Speaking of time trials, the 2027 Tour features 71 kilometers of them across Stages 7 and 16, the most we’ve seen since 2012. It’s hard not to see that as a nod to Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe), the four-time world time trial champion who finished second in the Tour this past July.

If he can improve his preparation for this year’s Tour, and he’s only 26, Evenepoel could use those time trials to his advantage. The first might even give him a chance to give Pogačar a scare before the mountains arrive at the end of the opening week.

But waiting until Stage 9 for the first mountain stage doesn’t mean the opening week will be easy. A slew of long, tricky stages will be tough for one or two teams to control. And at least until the Stage 7 time trial, plenty of riders should be in contention to spend a day or two in yellow and willing to take a few risks and big swings to make it happen. That’s the downside of designing a route that attempts to delay the GC fireworks until the second week. More riders feel they have a chance to wear yellow, which can lead to more risk-taking and, unfortunately, the possibility of more crashes.

Throw in tight roads, punchy climbs and descents, some rain during the three opening stages in the United Kingdom, and perhaps a few days of crosswinds, and you’ve got the exact right mix to create unpredictable and downright chaotic racing.

If Pogačar is going to run away with another Tour, I expect we’ll know by the end of Stage 11, the final day in the Alps and the second of the race’s three summit finishes. If his rivals, including Evenepoel, Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard (Visma–Lease a Bike), and France’s Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM Team), can somehow limit the damage on Stages 9, 10, and 11, we could have a much more compelling Tour than what we’re used to.

A run of sprint and transitional stages follows before the final week, when the second time trial and two days in the Pyrenees await. With any luck, we’ll still have a GC battle worth watching by then.

That’s what the organizers appear to be hoping for with this route. But given what we’ve seen from Pogačar and his UAE squad in recent Tours, I’m not sure it will happen. While the time trial kilometers seem to acknowledge Evenepoel as one of Pogačar’s greatest threats, I also see the route as a not-so-subtle gesture to Seixas, the young Frenchman many consider the rider most likely to be Pogačar's successor.

Seixas, now 20, raced his first Tour this past summer and finished fourth overall. The 2027 course should give him a chance to continue growing as a Tour contender without throwing him in at the deep end the way this year’s route did. The French would be thrilled to see him finish on the final podium, and with the Tour’s most intense stages broken into two- or three-day chunks, with time to recover and regroup in between, that kind of result looks well within his reach.

I’m also eager to see how two-time Tour champion Vingegaard tackles the race. Recent routes have forced Vingegaard and his Visma–Lease a Bike team to burn a lot of matches early, leaving them powerless when Pogačar and his UAE teammates throw down in the second and third weeks. The 2027 course should allow Vingegaard to ride a bit more under the radar, hopefully keeping him fresh for the Stage 7 time trial and the first summit finish on Stage 9. If all goes to plan, the Dane could enter the third week ready to challenge Pogačar in a way we haven’t seen since Vingegaard won his second Tour in 2023.

As for specific stages, I’ve already marked a few as days I won’t want to miss.

The Tour begins in the United Kingdom with three stages that should generate some intense battles among sprinters and Classics riders. Of the three, Stage 3 looks like the hardest. Its 223 km route includes a slew of punchy climbs, making it a perfect day for riders like Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin–Premier Tech), Wout van Aert (Visma–Lease a Bike), and Tom Pidcock (Pinarello–Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team).

Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin–Premier Tech), Wout van Aert (Visma–Lease a Bike), and Tom Pidcock (Pinarello–Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team) have embodied what it means to be a classics rider over the last five years. Shout out if you know which cyclocross podium this photo is from.

Then there’s Stage 10, a 171 km ride from Annecy to Sallanches that features six categorized climbs and previews the course used in August’s world championship road race. Coming right after the Tour’s second rest day and sandwiched between summit finishes on Stages 9 and 11, this should be an exciting and hard-to-predict day for the GC contenders.

Stage 14 takes the riders 199 km from Montpellier into the Cévennes, covering many of the roads immortalized in Tim Krabbé’s The Rider, one of the best cycling novels ever written. Seriously, if you’ve never read it, find a copy and enjoy! The stage ends on an airstrip just past the summit of the Côte de la Croix Neuve, a famous climb that always generates an exciting finish.

After taking a back seat in recent Tours, the Pyrenees close out the mountain racing in 2027, highlighted by Stage 18. The Tour’s “queen stage” runs 174 km from Pau to Saint-Lary-Soulan, with 5,400 meters of elevation gain and perhaps the two toughest climbs in the entire race: the Col du Tourmalet and a summit finish on the Col du Portet. If the race hasn’t been decided heading into Stage 18, it should be by the end, even with one relatively milder day in the Pyrenees still to come.

And what about Stage 21? Maybe you heard the pre-announcement rumors that the organizers would skip the cobbled Côte de la Butte Montmartre. Thank goodness they proved false. Adding a few trips over the climb to the final stage in 2025 has proven to be one of the greatest innovations in Tour history, and I’m thrilled they kept it in for another year.

Overall, the 2027 men’s Tour stacks up like this: 3,479 kilometers (2,162 miles) spread over 21 stages, with seven flat stages, six hilly stages, six mountain stages, two individual time trials, and three rest days.

With about eight months to go before the riders hit the road in Edinburgh, a lot can still happen. Most of the top contenders haven’t even confirmed their 2027 programs, which means there’s a chance, however unlikely, that at least one of them might not participate.

But as long as Pogačar is racing, the result, for better or worse, might be a foregone conclusion. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, resetting the record books of the sport the way Eddy Merckx once did.

But as the saying goes: it’s the journey—not the destination—that matters here. Yes, we should enjoy speculating about who will and who won’t win the Tour de France—and how and when they manage to do it. But we can’t forget that the Tour de France offers at least 21 chances for something exciting and unexpected to unfold. Next year’s route might not prevent the inevitable, but it will certainly produce lots of great racing along the way. And I can’t wait.