Eight Down, 176 to Go: Every Rider Who Has Left the Tour de France 2026 Before Bastille Day
Of the 184 riders who rolled out of Barcelona for the opening team time trial, eight have already climbed off before the race reached its first rest day in Cantal. It is a lighter toll than the carnage that thinned the Giro d'Italia earlier this year, but between crashes, a stomach infection and a heatwave severe enough to trigger cut-off rules, the Tour de France has already reshaped several teams' ambitions for the final twelve stages.
The first to go was Clément Berthet of Groupama-FDJ United, who crashed into teammate Guillaume Martin midway through the opening-day time trial in Barcelona and finished the stage too battered to start stage two. It was a cruel opening blow for a team that had built its Tour around a climbing double act.
Arnaud De Lie lasted two stages longer. The Belgian sprinter, already a marked man on the flat stages for Lotto-Intermarché, visibly wilted through stage three as a stomach infection took hold in the Pyrenean heat, and he abandoned within 10km of the finish rather than risk his health further. It was a familiar and frustrating pattern for a rider who has now walked away from the Tour early more than once — and it makes his reported move to Tudor Pro Cycling for 2027 look, in hindsight, like a fresh start he may well need.
Stage four's soaring temperatures then claimed Kelland O'Brien of Jayco AlUla, who rolled in a few minutes outside the time cut and was eliminated under the race's heat-adjusted rules — the same red-alert conditions that would later force organisers to shorten stage nine into Ussel. A day later in Pau, Alex Molenaar of Caja Rural-Seguros RGA was caught in the pile-up that split the bunch ahead of the finish, clearing the UCI's concussion protocol despite having no memory of the crash itself, only for an X-ray to reveal a fractured metacarpal that ended his Tour debut before stage six.
Stage six to Gavarnie-Gèdre — the day Tadej Pogačar obliterated the Tourmalet record — proved the single most damaging stage of the race so far. Arvid de Kleijn of Tudor Pro Cycling, Bert Van Lerberghe of Soudal-Quick-Step and Cian Uijtdebroeks of Movistar all failed to finish, while race leader Torstein Træen finished the stage with fractured ribs before withdrawing the following morning — a heartbreaking end to a maiden yellow jersey already chronicled in full here.
Eight abandons in nine stages leaves several squads thin on domestiques heading into the second week, with Tudor, Movistar and Soudal-Quick-Step each down a rider before the race has even reached the Alps. None of it has touched the GC picture directly — Pogačar still carries his 2:42 cushion over Jonas Vingegaard into stage ten — but with seven categorised climbs and a Bastille Day crowd waiting on the Puy Mary, nobody in the bunch will be short of reminders that the broomwagon is never far away.
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