Organisers of the Los Angeles Olympics have unveiled the full schedule for all occasions on the 2028 Video games, and the calendar throws up a serious conflict with the standard dates of the Tour de France.
The 2028 Olympics run from July 12 to July 30, with the lads’s and girls’s street racing occasions falling proper in the course of the Video games.
Each time trials will probably be held on July 19, whereas the ladies’s and males’s street races will probably be held on July 22 and 23.
Whereas the dates determine to fit neatly into the ladies’s racing calendar, given the Tour de France Femmes transfer to early August (1-9) in 2026, the dates do appear to pose an issue for the lads’s race.
The boys’s Tour de France normally kicks off on the primary weekend of July. Nevertheless, the race typically shifts to the top of June in Olympic years, together with for the Paris Video games in 2024 (June 29) and the Tokyo Video games in 2021 (June 26). Final yr, the Tour was pressured to maneuver its ultimate stage away from Paris to accommodate the Video games.
In the meantime, the street racing occasions in Los Angeles are scheduled to start a full 5 days sooner than the identical occasions through the previous 5 Olympics, throwing up additional calendar challenges.
A Tour Grand Départ on July 1 would imply the race ends on July 23, overlapping with each Olympic occasions. An unprecedented begin date of every week earlier on June 24 would go away only a three-day hole earlier than the time trials and a nine-day hole earlier than the lads’s street race.
Transferring the race would have knock-on results on June’s racing calendar, together with Nationwide Championships all over the world and WorldTour races, together with the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (previously Critérium du Dauphiné) and the Tour de Suisse.
Nevertheless, with the Olympic dates now set, it appears to be like like a June 24 begin can be the Tour’s solely choice to keep away from a serious calendar conflict in 2028.
