Tour de France Time Cut: The Limit and the Grupetto

La Rosière, 18 July 2018. Geraint Thomas had won the stage and pulled on the yellow jersey more than an hour before Mark Cavendish reached the ski station, riding alone. Cavendish, the British sprinter with thirty Tour stage wins to his name at that point, was out of the race. So were Marcel Kittel and Mark Renshaw. None of them had crashed out or climbed off. They had taken too long.

That is the time cut. Every stage of the Tour de France has a time limit, calculated as a percentage of the stage winner's time, and any rider who finishes outside it is eliminated unless the commissaires choose to reinstate him. The percentage is not fixed. The organisers, Amaury Sport Organisation, grade each stage by difficulty, and the allowance then rises with the winner's average speed, from a few per cent on a slow flat day to something approaching a fifth of the winner's time in the high mountains. The grupetto is the riders' answer to the rule: a big group of sprinters and spent domestiques who ride the mountain stages together at the slowest pace that still gets them home in time.

Thomas's part in that day belongs to our guide to British winners of the Tour de France. This page is about the other end of the race.

How the Tour de France time limit is calculated

The rule sits in the race regulations that ASO publishes for each edition, under an article on permitted finishing times, the délais d'arrivée. It works in two steps, and the second is the one most explanations leave out.

First, every stage is given a coefficient before the race starts. Recent rulebooks have used six of them, running from stages judged to present no particular difficulty through hillier days and the long mountain stages to short mountain stages and, in a class of their own, time trials. The coefficient is the organisers' judgement of how hard the day is, made months ahead and printed with the route. It broadly follows the split described in our guide to the Tour's flat, hilly and mountain stages, though the two gradings are not the same thing: one decides the points on offer at the finish, the other decides how far behind a rider is allowed to be.

Second, each coefficient has its own ladder of percentages, and the rung that applies depends on the winner's average speed. On the easiest coefficient the ladder has started at around three per cent for a stage ridden at touring pace and gone up a rung for every couple of kilometres an hour, reaching double figures only when the winner's average is close to 50 km/h. The mountain coefficients start higher and top out in the high teens, and the short-mountain coefficient goes further still. Time trials have carried a flat figure, a quarter of the winner's time in most recent rulebooks, with no sliding at all.

The limit is the winner's time plus that percentage, worked out to the second. A rider who crosses the line one second inside it is classified. One second outside, and the results sheet shows the letters OTL, outside time limit, or HD in French, hors délais.

The exact rungs are reprinted each year and occasionally adjusted, so one edition's table should not be assumed to be the next one's. The structure has been stable for decades. The numbers inside it have never been sacred.

1. 1Coefficient assignedMonths before the race, the organisers grade the stage by difficulty, from flat days to short mountain stages and time trials.
2. 2Winner's time recordedThe clock stops on the first rider across the line. Time bonuses play no part in the calculation.
3. 3Average speed worked outStage distance divided by the winner's time gives the speed that selects a rung on that coefficient's ladder.
4. 4Percentage appliedThe faster the stage, the higher the percentage added to the winner's time.
5. 5Limit announcedThe commissaires confirm the cut-off to the second. Riders outside it are listed as outside the time limit.
6. 6Jury reviewThe commissaires' panel decides whether any exceptional circumstance justifies extending the limit or reinstating a rider.

The sequence laid out in the Tour's race regulations. The percentages themselves are reissued with each edition and are not reproduced here.

Why the percentage rises with speed

It looks backwards at first. The logic is mechanical rather than generous. When the peloton is travelling at 50 km/h across flat country, the shelter of the bunch is worth an enormous amount, and a rider who loses contact after a puncture or a crash is suddenly doing alone what 150 riders were doing together. He loses time quickly, through no lack of effort. On a day when the bunch dawdles at 36 km/h, almost any professional can hold that speed on his own, and a rider who still finishes a long way back has not really been racing.

The sliding scale also protects the back of the field from the front's tactics. If the leaders decide to race flat out from kilometre zero, the percentage climbs with them.

There is a wrinkle here that the teams know well. Because the scale moves in steps, a small change in the winner's speed near a threshold adds or removes a whole percentage point. On a five-hour stage a point is three minutes. Riders at the back have been known to hope, sincerely, that the men at the front go faster.

Five hours in the Alps: a worked example

Take a mountain stage that the winner finishes in exactly five hours. Nothing about the calculation is hidden, so anyone with the route book and a phone can do it.

Five hours is 300 minutes. If the stage's coefficient and the winner's speed put the allowance at 10 per cent, the limit falls 30 minutes after the winner. At 14 per cent it is 42 minutes. At 18 per cent, 54. These percentages are illustrations rather than a quotation from any one year's table, but they sit in the range the mountain coefficients have covered, and they show how much rides on which rung applies.

Winner's time	Limit at 8%	Limit at 12%	Limit at 16%	Limit at 20%
3 hours	14 min 24 sec	21 min 36 sec	28 min 48 sec	36 min
4 hours	19 min 12 sec	28 min 48 sec	38 min 24 sec	48 min
5 hours	24 min	36 min	48 min	60 min
6 hours	28 min 48 sec	43 min 12 sec	57 min 36 sec	72 min

Read across the five-hour row and then up to the three-hour one. The same 16 per cent that buys 48 minutes on a long day buys under half an hour on a short one. That single fact explains most of the eliminations later on this page.

At 8 per cent24minutes

At 12 per cent36minutes

At 16 per cent48minutes

At 20 per cent60minutes

Plain arithmetic on a 300-minute winning time at four sample percentages. An illustration of the mechanism, not the official table for any edition.

Show the numbers

Minutes allowed behind a five-hour stage winner

Item	Value
At 8 per cent	24minutes
At 12 per cent	36minutes
At 16 per cent	48minutes
At 20 per cent	60minutes

Now put the grupetto into it. A stage like this might cross three big passes. On each one the front of the race climbs at a speed the sprinters cannot hold, and the gap grows by minutes per climb: a pass that takes the leaders fifty minutes can take the back group an hour or more. Some of that comes back on the descents and along the valley floors. The final climb returns nothing, because there is no road after it. So the group has to reach the foot of the last ascent with enough of the allowance unspent to cover what it will lose going up.

Why the sprinters know the figure before the start

Nobody at the back waits for the commissaires to announce the limit. By then it is too late to do anything about it.

Each team's sports directors estimate the winning time the night before, from the stage distance and a likely average speed, then work out the cut for a spread of cases: a fast day, a normal one, a slow one. Riders start with those figures in their heads or taped to the handlebar stem beside the list of climbs. During the stage the estimate is revised from the team car as the gap to the front and the speed of the leaders become clearer, and the new number goes up the road by radio.

The estimate can be wrong in both directions. A breakaway that is allowed to go and then reeled in gently produces a slower stage than predicted, a lower rung on the ladder and a tighter limit. A day of attacks from the gun does the opposite. The grupetto rides to the pessimistic figure, which is why it usually arrives with several minutes in hand, and why the days it arrives with none are remembered.

Who rides in the grupetto, and what else it is called

The word is Italian, gruppetto, a little group, and English-language cycling has mostly spelled it with one p missing. The French call the same thing the autobus. English-speaking riders of an earlier generation called it the laughing group, a name with more irony in it than humour, since nobody in it is having a good day.

It is rarely little. On a hard Alpine stage it can hold fifty or sixty riders, a third of the race.

Its membership is predictable. Sprinters are the core: men built to produce huge power for fifteen seconds, carrying far more muscle than the climbers they share a start line with. Their lead-out riders sit beside them, bigger still. Then come the domestiques who have already done their day's work, the ones who rode on the front for 100 kilometres through the valley or paced a leader up the first half of the opening climb and then swung off. And there are always a few riders who are in the group for no tactical reason at all, nursing a damaged knee, a stomach bug or the grazes from a crash two days earlier.

How it forms and the etiquette inside it

There is no moment when the grupetto is declared. On the first serious climb the pace at the front rises, riders slide off the back in ones and twos, somebody shouts the word, and the stragglers gather into one bunch rather than each fighting the mountain alone. Riders who could climb a little faster generally choose to wait for it. Sixty riders share the wind in a valley. Three do not.

A truce applies. Sprinters who were elbowing one another at 70 km/h the previous afternoon pass bottles across and take turns on the front. Nobody attacks, nobody sprints for the line, and a rider who pushes the pace on a climb is told bluntly to stop, because the group can only travel as fast as the weakest man it has decided to save.

There is a second reason to stay together, and it has nothing to do with aerodynamics. A jury that would eliminate four stragglers without a second thought hesitates before removing fifty.

The bus driver and the arithmetic of pacing

Every grupetto has somebody doing the sums. Riders call him the bus driver: usually a veteran domestique who has ridden a dozen Grand Tours, knows the climbs, and has the authority to tell a famous sprinter to slow down or a frightened neo-professional to keep going. The Austrian Bernhard Eisel, for years Cavendish's road captain at HTC and then Team Sky, was the best-known driver of his generation.

The method has four parts, and each one runs against instinct.

On the climbs the group rides a single steady tempo from bottom to top. Surges are what destroy heavy riders, so the driver sets a pace on the first ramp that the weakest sprinter worth saving can hold, and keeps it there. It feels too slow at the bottom and barely survivable at the summit.

On the descents the bus goes flat out. Sprinters are among the best bike handlers in the peloton, the road is closed, and a long line of heavy riders drops off a pass faster than a nervous group of climbers. Minutes come back here that could never be recovered going uphill.

In the valleys the group rides like a team time trial, a rotating line with everybody who is able taking a turn. And all day, on every kind of road, there is the arithmetic. The team cars behind know the gap to the stage leaders and can project the winner's time; the driver knows roughly what each remaining climb will cost. The conversation is a running subtraction: this much allowance, this much already lost, this much still to lose.

1. 1Start to first climbThe whole race rides together. Sprinters' teams may already be saving riders who will be needed later.
2. 2First climbThe pace rises at the front, the non-climbers lose contact and collect into one group behind the peloton.
3. 3Tempo setThe bus driver fixes a steady climbing pace that the weakest rider being protected can hold to the summit.
4. 4DescentThe group descends as fast as it safely can, recovering time lost on the way up.
5. 5Valley roadsRiders rotate on the front in a long line while the team cars relay the gap and the projected limit.
6. 6Final climbThe remaining allowance is spent on the last ascent, with the driver calling the time left at intervals.

The usual pattern on a multi-pass stage, as riders and team staff describe it. Not every day follows it and no timings are implied.

When the sums are tight

At Tignes in 2021, on a wet Alpine stage, Cavendish reached the line with about a minute and a half to spare, shepherded by Deceuninck-Quick-Step team-mates who had dropped back for the purpose. Arnaud Démare and Bryan Coquard, finishing behind him, were eliminated. Cavendish finished that Tour with four stage wins and the green jersey. Half of it depended on ninety seconds on a mountain he had no interest in racing up.

The back of the race is watched. Commissaires on motorbikes follow the grupetto, and the usual temptations are all offences: holding on to a team car, taking a "sticky bottle" that is passed from the car window and not let go of for several seconds, sheltering behind a vehicle. The penalties run from fines and time penalties to expulsion from the race. What riders may legitimately take from their cars and from the roadside is set out in our guide to feed zones, musettes and neutral service.

Why short mountain stages and time trials are the dangerous days

The longest mountain stages are not the ones the sprinters fear. A 200-kilometre day through the Alps usually begins with an hour or two of valley road, the percentage is applied to a winning time of five or six hours, and the allowance in minutes is large. The table above gives the reason the short ones are worse. Fifteen per cent of five and a half hours is nearly 50 minutes. Fifteen per cent of three and a half hours is about 31.

Organisers fell for the short mountain stage in the 2010s because it makes better television. With barely 100 kilometres to cover, the favourites attack from the first climb and the stage is raced at full intensity throughout. For the back of the field that removes every part of the day on which time is normally saved. There is no gentle opening, the grupetto forms within minutes of the start, and there is less flat road between the climbs on which sixty riders can use their numbers.

The stage to La Rosière in 2018 was 108.5 kilometres long with four climbs in it. The stage to Alpe d'Huez in 2011, when 82 riders finished outside the limit, was 109.5. ASO's recognition of the problem is the existence of a separate coefficient for short, very difficult stages, with a more generous ladder than the one for long mountain days. More generous in percentage terms, that is. In minutes it has still caught riders with dozens of stage wins between them.

Time trials, where nobody can hide

Against the clock the rule changes character. The limit has been a flat share of the winner's time, and the winner of a time trial is a specialist riding at the edge of what a human can do for half an hour or an hour. A quarter of a 30-minute winning time is seven and a half minutes. That is plenty for a fit rider taking the day steadily and very little for one with an injury, because there is no bunch to sit in and no bus to catch.

The harshest example is the American rider Ted King in 2013. Hurt in a crash on the opening stage, he was dropped by his own Cannondale squad almost immediately in the team time trial at Nice on stage four and rode the course alone. He missed the limit by seven seconds, and the jury did not reinstate him.

What the commissaires can forgive

A rule this blunt needs a safety valve, and the regulations provide one. The commissaires' panel, the jury of UCI officials that governs the race, may extend the limit or reinstate individual riders in exceptional circumstances, after consulting the race direction. The article names the kinds of things that count: a serious crash, extreme weather, a road blocked by an incident that was none of the riders' doing.

It also tells the jury what to weigh. The considerations have included the average speed of the stage, the point in the stage at which the incident happened, the effort the delayed riders visibly made afterwards, and whether the road was obstructed. A rider who crashed in the last 30 kilometres and chased to the line bleeding has a case. One who sat up on the first climb does not.

Then there is the provision that matters most in practice. If the riders outside the limit amount to more than 20 per cent of the stage's starters, the commissaires may raise the limit to bring them back in. It is a discretion, not an entitlement, but in the best-known cases a jury faced with removing a third of the race in an afternoon has used it.

Reinstatement has a price. Riders brought back in this way are docked points in the points classification, a penalty tied to what the stage winner earned on the day. For most of the bus that costs nothing, since they have no points worth protecting. For a sprinter in the green jersey it is the whole of a stage win's reward taken away for finishing a mountain stage slowly.

Situation at the finish	What the regulations provide	Result for the rider
Inside the limit, however narrowly	Nothing further	Classified and starts the next stage
Outside the limit, small group, no incident	Elimination	Out of the race, listed as OTL
Outside the limit after a crash, weather or blocked road	Jury may reinstate, case by case	Continues if the jury accepts the circumstances
Outside the limit with more than a fifth of the starters	Jury may extend the limit	Continues, docked points in the points classification
Stops during the stage	Not a time-cut matter	Recorded as an abandonment

The table makes the rule look tidier than it is. The discretion is real, juries differ, and the same finishing deficit has ended one rider's race and not another's.

Pontarlier 2001 and the Alps in 2011: days the rule bent

The eighth stage of the 2001 Tour ran from Colmar to Pontarlier in cold, steady rain. A break of fourteen riders went clear and the peloton, with no team willing to chase in those conditions, let it go. And kept letting it go. Erik Dekker won the stage, Stuart O'Grady took back the yellow jersey, and the main field came in 35 minutes and 54 seconds later.

On a flat-to-rolling stage that was far outside the limit. Applied literally, the regulations would have sent home everybody except the fourteen men in the break and left the Tour de France with a field smaller than a club road race. The jury used the provision for a large share of the field and reinstated the lot.

The sporting consequences lasted a fortnight. Two riders from the break, François Simon and Andrei Kivilev, had been handed more than half an hour on every favourite. Simon wore the yellow jersey in the mountains and Kivilev finished fourth overall in Paris, a placing built almost entirely on one wet afternoon in the Jura.

Ten years later the rule bent twice in two days. Stage 18 of the 2011 Tour finished on the Col du Galibier at 2,645 metres, then the highest stage finish the race had used, after Andy Schleck attacked alone from 60 kilometres out. Eighty-eight riders finished outside the limit. All were reinstated, and each was docked 20 points. The next afternoon, on the short stage to Alpe d'Huez, 82 riders missed it and the same thing happened.

• 14Riders in the Pontarlier break, 2001
• 35Minutes the field lost at Pontarlier
• 88Riders reinstated on the Galibier, 2011
• 82Riders reinstated at Alpe d'Huez, 2011

Figures from the 2001 stage to Pontarlier and stages 18 and 19 of the 2011 Tour. The 2001 gap was 35 minutes 54 seconds, shown here in whole minutes.

Cavendish was in both groups. He lost 40 points across the two days, saw his lead in the competition shrink when a rival made a limit he had missed, and still reached Paris in green, the first British rider to win that jersey.

Those two days drew a criticism that has never gone away. If a jury will not eliminate eighty riders, then eighty riders who stay together cannot be eliminated, and a grupetto that knows this has little reason to hurt itself chasing the clock. The provision was written as a safety valve. It became a bargaining position.

Sprinters who missed the time cut

The 2018 Tour shows what the rule does when the bus is too small to be protected.

Cavendish, Kittel and Renshaw were not part of a group of sixty at La Rosière. They were dropped early on a short, violent stage and came in far behind a grupetto that had made the limit. No jury was going to raise the cut for three riders with no crash to point to. The following day, on the road to Alpe d'Huez, Dylan Groenewegen, Fernando Gaviria and André Greipel all abandoned. Inside 48 hours the race had lost most of the riders who had been contesting its flat finishes, including the winners of four of the first eight stages.

Arnaud Démare has been through it twice. In 2017 he had won at Vittel on stage four, the day Cavendish crashed out in the finishing straight, and five days later he was eliminated on the stage to Chambéry along with three FDJ team-mates who had dropped back to pace him. Four riders from one team gone in an afternoon, three of them perfectly healthy. Then Tignes in 2021.

Year	Stage finish	Outside the limit	Outcome
2001	Pontarlier	Almost the entire field	Reinstated
2011	Col du Galibier	88 riders, Cavendish among them	Reinstated, 20 points docked
2011	Alpe d'Huez	82 riders	Reinstated, 20 points docked
2013	Nice, team time trial	Ted King	Eliminated by seven seconds
2017	Chambéry	Arnaud Démare and three team-mates	Eliminated
2018	La Rosière	Cavendish, Kittel, Renshaw	Eliminated
2021	Tignes	Démare, Coquard and others	Eliminated

What the green jersey really requires

The points classification is decided on the flat, but it is awarded on the final day, and only to a rider who gets there. A sprinter with five stage wins and a 100-point lead who misses the cut in the Pyrenees in the third week finishes the Tour with nothing. His points are void and the jersey passes to the next man.

So the competition is partly a climbing test. Not a test of climbing well, but of climbing just well enough, eight or nine times in three weeks, on legs that are built for something else. Teams chasing green pick their rosters accordingly, with one or two riders whose job on mountain days is to sit beside the sprinter and hand over their wheel, their bottle or their slipstream.

Why the Tour bothers with a time cut at all

Remove the limit and consider what a sprinter's team would do. On every mountain stage it would send its fast man up the passes at walking pace, an hour or two behind the race, and deliver him to the next flat stage fresher than anybody who had been made to compete. The climbers would be racing a three-week event and the sprinters a series of one-day ones, with rest days of their own choosing in between.

The rule exists to stop that. A stage race is supposed to be one contest in which each day's effort is carried into the next, and a win on stage 19 means more because the winner has also survived stages 11 to 18. The same principle sits behind the cumulative clock itself, which our guide to the Tour's distance, stages and days describes.

There are practical reasons as well, and they are less noble. The roads over a mountain pass are closed to traffic for the race and cannot stay closed all evening. The finish area has to be dismantled and driven to the next town. Police, medical cover and the broom wagon all work to the back of the race, wherever that is.

Against all this stands one uncomfortable fact. The rule falls hardest on the injured and the ill, who are trying harder than anybody, and it sometimes removes the very riders the organisers and broadcasters most want in the following week's sprints. ASO has a commercial interest in a star sprinter reaching the final stage and a sporting interest in a rule that might stop him. The discretion given to the jury is where that conflict gets managed, case by case, and not always consistently.

The lanterne rouge is last, not eliminated

The two are often confused, and they are opposites. A rider outside the time limit has failed to finish the Tour. The lanterne rouge has finished every stage of it.

The name is the red lantern that hung on the back of the last carriage of a train, and it belongs to whoever sits at the bottom of the general classification, the rider with the greatest total time among those still in the race. On the final day he is the last classified finisher, placed behind well over a hundred others and ahead of every rider who abandoned or missed a cut along the way. There is no jersey for it and no prize from the organisers.

It became a minor honour for a commercial reason. After the Tour, town-centre criteriums across France, Belgium and the Netherlands paid appearance money to riders the public had heard of, and the man who finished last was a name people knew. Second-to-last was nobody. So riders near the bottom began competing in reverse, losing time on purpose where they safely could.

In 1979 this reached the point of farce. Gerhard Schönbacher and Philippe Tesnière were separated by very little at the foot of the classification going into a late time trial, and Tesnière rode it so slowly in pursuit of last place that he missed the time cut and was thrown out. Schönbacher took the lantern. The organisers, who disliked the whole business, responded the following year by eliminating the last-placed rider on general classification after certain stages. Schönbacher finished last again anyway.

A few names recur. Wim Vansevenant of Belgium was last in three consecutive Tours from 2006 to 2008, a hard-working domestique who never rode slowly on purpose and simply spent everything he had in the service of others. Tony Hoar finished last in 1955, the year he and Brian Robinson became the first British riders to complete the race. And in 2018 the American Lawson Craddock fractured his shoulder blade on the opening stage, held last place from that day to Paris, and survived every time cut for three weeks. That is the lanterne rouge at its best: the hardest finish in the race, not the easiest.

From early elimination rules to the coefficient table

The first Tour, in 1903, had a rule that now looks startling. A rider who failed to finish a stage was removed from the general classification but could start later stages and race for their prizes. Hippolyte Aucouturier abandoned the opening stage and then won the next two. It was the opposite of the modern principle: the early race cared about each stage as a contest, and the idea that a competitor must complete everything came later.

Henri Desgrange, the race's founder, came to hold that idea fiercely. His ideal Tour, by his own much-quoted account, was one that only a single rider managed to finish, and the regulations of the early decades were written in that spirit. Stages of 400 kilometres on unsurfaced roads did most of the eliminating without help from a clock.

Twice the organisers tried something harsher than a time limit. In 1939, and again in 1948, the last-placed rider on general classification was removed after each stage for part of the race, whatever his finishing time. It was elimination by rank. A rider could do nothing wrong on the day and still be out, and the experiment was not kept. The 1980 measure aimed at the lanterne rouge was a brief revival of the same idea.

What survived was the gentler and more defensible principle: finish within reach of the winner, and the reach depends on the day. Somewhere in the post-war decades that settled into its present form, a percentage of the winner's time graded by the type of stage. The regulations do not record their own history, and we have not found a reliable date for the first sliding scale, so we do not offer one. What can be said is that the table has grown more detailed in step with the route. The separate coefficient for short mountain stages follows the fashion for those stages. The provision for a fifth of the field was already there to be invoked when Pontarlier needed it in 2001.

How the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España handle the same problem

The Tour did not invent a private rule. The UCI's road-race regulations require every stage race to set finishing time limits in its own regulations, according to the character of each stage, and they give the commissaires the same power to extend a limit in exceptional circumstances after consulting the organiser. Each race then writes its own table.

The Giro d'Italia, run by RCS Sport, groups its stages into difficulty categories with a percentage scale for each, and the Vuelta a España, run by Unipublic, does the same. The bands and percentages differ from the Tour's and from each other's, and they change, so a figure remembered from July is no guide to May or September. The Giro has one extra complication: it crosses the high Alps and Dolomites in spring, when snow can force a stage to be shortened or rerouted on the morning it is run, and the limit has to be recalculated for whatever is actually raced.

The Vuelta supplied the most argued-over reinstatement of recent years. On stage 15 of the 2016 race, a short mountain stage to Formigal, Alberto Contador and Nairo Quintana attacked almost from the start. Chris Froome was caught behind and lost more than two and a half minutes, and far behind him 93 riders finished outside the limit. The jury reinstated all of them. Rival teams pointed out that the 93 included most of Froome's Team Sky support riders, who had in effect been given an easy afternoon in the middle of a Grand Tour, and that the riders who had raced hard to make the cut got nothing for it. Both points were fair. Quintana won the race.

The same rule reaches Britain. The Tour of Britain, organised since 2024 by British Cycling Events, is a UCI stage race and carries a time-limit article of its own, as does the women's race. It seldom makes news, because a week of racing over the Pennines or the Welsh hills has no hour-long passes on which a sprinter can lose 40 minutes; our guide to how the Tour of Britain is run covers its format. The Tour de France Femmes applies the article too, and with stages over the Alps and Pyrenees its grupetto does the same sums. How results in all these races convert into ranking points for teams is a separate subject, covered in our explainer on the UCI points system.

More on the sport is collected on our cycling pages, and the rest of the series sits on the England guides hub.