Tour de France 2026: The End

I’m sitting writing this in the Swiss Alps, where I’m staying with my family ahead of the start of the Tour de France Femmes this weekend. I thought my Tour de France this year would incur less fatigue than commentary, or racing, but unfortunately I was wrong. I’m man down.

I’ve ridden up a 10km mountain pass into the Portes du Soleil on each of the past two mornings and have been absolutely creeping. So badly that I can’t get my heart rate above 130 while crawling up the climb, which is slightly shocking considering that normally I would struggle to keep it below that. I’m not too pleased about this, because my hope at the beginning of the Tour was to come out of it in better shape than I went in. I’m guessing, and hoping, that it is simply mental fatigue. I’m blaming it on watching and thinking too much about bike racing.

It was perhaps telling that my final two diaries were written the following day, because by those final evenings on Tour my brain had stopped working. I could still watch the race and talk about it, but once that was done there was nothing left with which to make sense of it.

Although I’m thinking again now. Free-thinking, that is, rather than my work thinking, which is always on and task-orientated. Which is where this Substack comes in handy, because it gives all that free-thinking somewhere to go and consolidate.

With a few days to slow down and digest the past three weeks, I’ve been reminded of the Peak-End Rule. The theory is that we don’t remember an experience as an average of everything that happened; instead, we give disproportionate weight to its most intense moment and to how it ended.

A holiday is an obvious example. You can have ten perfectly enjoyable days, but if something goes badly wrong and the journey home ends with cancelled flights and hours of delays, you can return feeling the whole thing was a bit meh. The uneventful contented majority disappears, while the peak and the ending remain.

There is a book I read a few years ago that I highly recommend, called The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath. It isn’t specifically about the Peak-End Rule, but it is effectively about how we can curate our own lives, or the experiences of others, to include peak moments that not only fill us with joy but become sticky memories. The best people in hospitality are masters of this. They know that what stays with us isn’t necessarily the seamless middle of an experience, but the moments that surprise us or make us feel something.

I talked about this in the Traka 560 film we made last year. One of my reasons for doing that crazy ultra was to create an experience that would jolt me out of my comfort zone and force peak experiences that I knew I would remember. I’ve thought about it a lot since reading The Power of Moments, and try to apply it where I can, because I don’t think it’s by chance that, as we grow older, the days begin to fly by and the months and years blur into one another.

The majority of people hold their most vivid memories from adolescence and early adulthood, when we are experiencing so many things for the first time. New experiences demand our attention and create an emotional response, and that emotion creates a pathway to the memory bank. Time almost slows down as we turn our attention up high and absorb as much information as possible, logging it and learning from it.

The irony is that the more familiar something becomes, the less attention we give it, which means we can never quite recreate the same intensity of joy or curiosity we felt the first time. Familiarity makes life easier, but it also allows more of it to pass unnoticed.

I’ve been thinking about this because the Tour de France is a perfect example of the Peak-End Rule in action. Over three weeks, stages begin to blur together. Ned and I often throw random quizzes at each other during the race, and without fail, on the first rest day, one of us will ask the other to name every stage winner so far. Without fail, we struggle. Embarrassingly so.