Tour of Britain Cycling Race: Format, Route and History

Haytor, on the eastern edge of Dartmoor, on a September afternoon. The road rises out of Bovey Tracey through hedgerows and then breaks onto open moorland, with the granite tor standing over the last kilometres and a crowd several deep at the top. Nobody has paid to be there. The riders arrive in ones and twos, separated by seconds that will decide the race.

The Tour of Britain is Britain's national professional road stage race. The men's race is held over several days each September on public roads in England, Scotland and Wales, and sits in the UCI ProSeries, the tier below the WorldTour. A separate women's race, first run in 2014 as the Women's Tour, belongs to the Women's WorldTour. British Cycling has organised both since 2024. The overall winner is the rider with the lowest accumulated time across all stages, and because Britain has no high mountains, that time is usually separated by seconds won on short, steep climbs and in time bonuses rather than minutes on Alpine passes.

What the Tour of Britain cycling race is, and where it sits

There are two races under the name now, and it helps to separate them at once.

The men's race runs in September, typically over six to eight stages, and is classified by the UCI as a 2.Pro event: a stage race ("2") at ProSeries level ("Pro"). The ProSeries was created in 2020 as a layer between the WorldTour, which holds the Grand Tours and the Monuments, and the Continental calendars beneath. In its last years before that change it carried the old 2.HC status, which served a similar purpose.

The women's race has a separate history. It began as the Women's Tour in 2014, joined the Women's WorldTour in 2016, and from 2024 has run as the Tour of Britain Women under British Cycling. It has usually been held in May or June rather than in September, though its dates have moved more than once.

Neither race is a Grand Tour, and neither tries to be. A week of racing over rolling British roads produces a different kind of contest from three weeks in France, and the riders who win it are often those who can climb a steep kilometre at full power and still sprint at the top. The guide to British Tour de France winners covers the three-week races in which British riders have made their name; this page is about the one at home.

The race has visited all three nations of Great Britain over its history, though not every edition reaches all three, and the balance between England, Scotland and Wales shifts with where the host funding comes from.

• 1945First Brighton to Glasgow race
• 1958First Milk Race
• 2004Modern race relaunched
• 2014First Women's Tour

Dates of the key changes in the race's history. The 2004 relaunch began the current professional series.

How the Tour of Britain is won: time, bonuses and steep finishes

The general classification works the way it does at any road stage race. Each rider's finishing times across every stage are added together, and the rider with the lowest total leads. The leader wears the leader's jersey on the next day's stage, and the rider leading after the final stage wins.

Two things complicate the arithmetic.

Time bonuses

The first is bonus seconds. Under the UCI's road regulations, a stage race may deduct bonus seconds from the times of the first finishers on a stage and of the first riders across intermediate sprints. The usual pattern at this level is ten, six and four seconds for the first three across the line, and three, two and one at an intermediate sprint, with the exact allocation set in each year's technical guide. Organisers have experimented with additional bonus sections from time to time, which reward riders who attack in the final hour.

In a race with no long climbs, those seconds are often decisive. A sprinter who wins two stages can lead the race for several days on bonuses alone. A climber who wins a summit finish and takes ten seconds might gain more from the bonus than from the gap itself.

The group finish rule

The second is how times are given when riders finish together. Under UCI rules, riders who cross the line in the same group are given the same time as the first rider in that group, so a bunch of a hundred riders sprinting for a stage all receive the winner's time. Gaps only open when the bunch splits, which usually happens on a climb, in crosswinds, or in a crash in the final kilometres (the three-kilometre rule protects riders caught up in a crash at the very end of a flat stage).

Why seconds, not minutes

This is the essential thing about the race. With climbs of a few kilometres rather than a few hundred metres of altitude gained over an hour, the strongest riders rarely lose much time to each other on any single day. Overall margins in the modern race have often been measured in seconds rather than minutes. A punchy finish such as the Tumble or Haytor might open a gap of fifteen or twenty seconds among the best riders. A team time trial or an individual time trial, when one is included, can be worth more than any mountain.

What a decisive day looks like

Take an imagined but entirely typical hilly stage in the West Country. The breakaway goes early, usually four to eight riders, several of them from British Continental teams who want the television time and the sprints points. The peloton lets them go, and the leader's team rides at a steady pace on the front to keep the gap to a few minutes. Nothing much changes for three hours.

Then the final 40 kilometres. Teams with a contender move to the front before the narrow lanes, because position on a single-track road with high hedges is everything: a rider fifty places back when the road narrows can lose half a minute without ever being dropped, simply because the riders in front of him slow on a corner. The pace rises. The breakaway is caught. The finishing climb arrives and the race is over in five or six minutes of full effort.

That is the whole tactical shape of most Tour of Britain stages. Long periods of control, then a short, violent finale on a road that rewards the riders who were already at the front. A rider who loses the overall race usually loses it in one of those finales, often to a gap he could have closed on a wider road.

The race favours a particular type of rider: one who can win a sprint from a reduced group, survive a short climb with the best climbers, and ride a strong time trial. Those riders also tend to do well in the one-day Classics, which is why so many Classics specialists appear on the winners' list.

The jerseys and other classifications

The leader of the general classification wears a distinctive jersey. Its colour has changed over the years with the race's sponsors, which is unlike the Tour de France, where yellow has been fixed since 1919.

Alongside it, the race has run several further competitions.

Classification	How it is decided	Equivalent at the Tour de France
General classification	Lowest total time across all stages, after bonuses	Yellow jersey
Points	Points for places at stage finishes and intermediate sprints	Green jersey
Mountains	Points for the first riders over classified climbs	Polka-dot jersey
Sprints	Points at intermediate sprints only	No separate jersey at the Tour
Combativity	Awarded by a jury to the most aggressive rider of the day	Red race number

The sprints classification, separate from the points competition, is a British habit. It rewards riders from small teams who go into the day's breakaway and contest the intermediate sprints, and it gives a jersey on the podium to a rider who would otherwise not be there. The Tour de France folded its intermediate sprints into the green jersey long ago.

The mountains classification is scored at categorised climbs, with more points for steeper and longer climbs. In Britain that can mean a climb of barely two kilometres carries the top category, because there is nothing longer on the route. The race has also awarded classifications for the best young rider and for the best British rider in some years, and teams compete for a team classification calculated on the combined times of their best three riders each day. The exact list varies with the year's regulations and sponsors.

Who rides the Tour of Britain

A typical field mixes three or four kinds of team, and the mix is part of the race's character.

At the top are WorldTeams, the 18 or so teams that hold the top licence. Most do not send their Tour de France leaders. They send riders preparing for the world championships, which usually fall in late September, riders who need racing after an injury, and young riders being given a chance to lead. A September week in Britain, with short climbs and racing every day, has been popular preparation for a hilly world championship course.

Below them come ProTeams, the second tier, which rely on invitations to the biggest races and use the ProSeries as a source of results and ranking points.

Then the British Continental teams. These are the domestic sport's professional and semi-professional squads, registered with British Cycling, and for them the Tour of Britain is the biggest race of the year. A rider on a Continental team who makes the day's breakaway is televised for hours. One who finishes in the top ten overall, or wins the sprints jersey, may earn a contract with a bigger team on the strength of it.

In some editions a Great Britain national team has started as well, selected by British Cycling from riders on the development pathway or on non-British teams, giving them a race in national colours on home roads.

The shop window

That last point is the one British riders talk about. The domestic calendar, explained in our guide to British Cycling race categories, produces riders who can win national series races. The Tour of Britain is the only race in the country where those riders race against the WorldTour, on the same roads, in front of scouts and directeurs sportifs. Its importance to the domestic scene is out of all proportion to its place in the international calendar, and several riders who later raced Grand Tours first came to notice there.

Teams in stage races of this level start with smaller squads than in a Grand Tour, which means each rider's workload is heavy and a crash or illness for one rider affects the whole team's plan. Squads of six or seven riders, against eight at a Grand Tour, are the rule at this level.

How the route is put together

The route is not designed in the way a Grand Tour route is. It is assembled from the places that want it.

Councils, regional development agencies and combined authorities bid to host a stage start or finish, and the organiser builds a route from the winning bids. A host pays a fee and commits to the logistics: road closures through the local highway authority, a finish area, parking for the team buses, signage and staff. In return it gets television coverage of its roads and countryside and visitors on the day.

That mechanism explains the route's shape. A stage that finishes in a city centre does so because the city paid for it. A sequence of stages that zigzags across the country, with long transfers between finish and start, is often the result of where the money came from rather than a designer's preference. Few years have followed a neat clockwise loop.

The climbs the race returns to

Certain finishes recur because they produce racing. Haytor on Dartmoor, a long, steady climb onto open moor. The Tumble, above Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, about five kilometres at a gradient that hurts all the way. The Great Orme at Llandudno, a short and very steep climb up the headland out of the town. Burton Dassett in Warwickshire, a short, exposed climb in a country park whose hilltop has served as a finish.

The northern stages have used fells and passes in the Lake District and the Pennines, Whinlatter among them, and the Scottish stages the hills of the Borders and around the central belt.

The final day

The final stage has finished in several places. London hosted a series of circuit finishes through the 2010s, often in central streets, on a course built for sprinters. Welsh and Scottish towns have also hosted the final day, Caerphilly among them. A final-day time trial was used in some years to keep the overall result open until the end.

1. 1Invitation to bidThe organiser invites councils and regional bodies to bid to host stage starts and finishes
2. 2Bid and feeA host commits funding and support for road closures, a finish area and team parking
3. 3Route assemblyThe organiser links the successful host locations into a sequence of stages with transfers between them
4. 4Course designEach stage is planned in detail with highway authorities, police and the race's own route team
5. 5ApprovalThe route is checked against the UCI's technical rules and the race's safety plan
6. 6AnnouncementHosts and stage outlines are published, then the detailed timings ahead of the race

The general sequence; the details and timing vary from year to year and are set by the organiser.

Watching the race at the roadside

There is no ticket, and no charge. The race runs on public roads that are closed only while it passes.

The closures are rolling, not all-day. Police and motorcycle outriders close the road a short time ahead of the race, the convoy passes, and the road reopens behind the last vehicle. On a typical road away from the finish, the whole process takes perhaps half an hour from closure to reopening. Spectators can get into position well before the closure and leave as soon as the road reopens.

Arriving

The usual advice is to arrive early, an hour or more before the race is due at your point. The organiser publishes a timing schedule, giving expected times at each point on the route at different average speeds. Plan on the faster speed. Roads can close earlier than expected.

Where the race is slowest

A rider on a flat road passes at more than 40 kilometres an hour and is gone in seconds. A rider on a steep climb passes at a walking pace or a little faster. Climbs are the best places to watch, and the reason crowds gather at Haytor or the Tumble. Town-centre finishes are the other option, especially with a circuit, which lets you see the race several times. Large screens are often put up near finish lines.

What passes before the riders

First come the police and the motorcycle marshals. Then a series of official race vehicles, including the race director's car and the vehicles carrying the commissaires. The publicity caravan at the Tour of Britain is small compared with the Tour de France, but sponsors' vehicles pass ahead of the race. Then come the riders, often split into a breakaway and the peloton, separated by a few minutes. Behind them, team cars, neutral service vehicles, medical cars and finally the broom wagon and the vehicle marking the end of the race. Riders dropped behind that vehicle are often off the road. The rules on what riders can take from their teams during a stage are covered in our guide to cycling feed zone rules.

1. 1Road closurePolice and motorcycle outriders close the road ahead of the race
2. 2Advance vehiclesOfficial cars and sponsors' vehicles pass, some time before the riders
3. 3BreakawayThe day's leading group passes, followed by its team cars and a commissaire
4. 4PelotonThe main group follows, often minutes behind, with its convoy of team and service cars
5. 5StragglersDropped riders pass, followed by the broom wagon
6. 6End of raceThe final vehicle passes and the road reopens to traffic behind it

The general order; the number of vehicles and the gaps between them vary with the stage and the state of the race.

The Tour of Britain Women, from the Women's Tour in 2014

The women's race began in May 2014 under the name the Women's Tour, run by the same organiser who had relaunched the men's race a decade earlier. Its first edition was a five-day stage race through the East Midlands and East Anglia, and its winner, the Dutch rider Marianne Vos, was then the most decorated rider in the women's sport. The race made an immediate impression, both for the crowds and for its organisation, which was much more substantial than many women's races of the time.

It also set a standard on prize money. The race went on to match the prize fund of the men's Tour of Britain, a significant step in a sport in which women's prize funds were often a small fraction of men's. Other organisers were measured against it.

The race joined the Women's WorldTour, the top tier of the women's calendar, in 2016, the first year of that series. It then ran most years in June, which placed it before the women's Giro and, from 2022, the Tour de France Femmes.

Year	Winner	Nationality
2014	Marianne Vos	Netherlands
2015	Lisa Brennauer	Germany
2016	Lizzie Armitstead	Great Britain
2017	Katarzyna Niewiadoma	Poland
2018	Coryn Rivera	United States
2019	Lizzie Deignan	Great Britain
2021	Demi Vollering	Netherlands
2022	Elisa Longo Borghini	Italy
2024	Lotte Kopecky	Belgium
2025	Ally Wollaston	New Zealand

The 2016 and 2019 winners are the same rider, who raced under the name Armitstead until 2016, and the Yorkshire rider is the only British winner on the list. The race was not held in 2020, because of the pandemic, or in 2023, when the organiser's financial difficulties forced its cancellation.

How the women's race differs

The women's race is shorter, both in stages and in daily distance. The UCI sets lower maximum stage lengths for elite women's racing than for men's, so the women's stages tend to be raced at a higher intensity from the start, with less of the long early period of control. Teams are smaller too, and a single strong team can find it harder to hold a race together over five or six days.

The women's route has also been built on the host-bidding model, which has given it a different geography from the men's. Its early editions leaned towards the east of England and the Midlands, with later years going further afield, including a summit finish on the Black Mountain in Wales. Finishes on short climbs in towns have been as decisive as in the men's race, and the same rider types, strong on short climbs and quick at the finish, have prospered.

Its return in 2024 under British Cycling, with a new name, kept it in the Women's WorldTour. The race's place in the women's calendar has been more precarious than the men's, partly because the women's calendar has grown so much since 2014 that a short British stage race now competes with many other events for the best riders.

Who runs the race now

The current series began in 2004, when a private company, SweetSpot, relaunched a professional Tour of Britain after a gap of several years with no national stage race. The race grew under that management, from a field drawn largely from smaller teams to one with many WorldTeams present, and to roadside crowds that host councils came to count as a reason for bidding.

The same company started the Women's Tour in 2014. Over the following decade its business depended heavily on host-venue fees and on a title sponsor, and when its finances deteriorated in 2023, the women's race was cancelled that year and the men's race ran under some strain.

British Cycling takes over

From 2024 British Cycling took on the delivery of both races, which it now organises as the Tour of Britain Men and the Tour of Britain Women. The governing body had been involved in the races as the national federation before, but organising them is a different role: it means taking on the commercial risk, the host agreements and the operational work of closing hundreds of miles of road.

The arrangement has an obvious appeal. The national federation has a direct interest in keeping both races on the calendar, because they are the top of the pathway for British riders. It also has an obvious risk: a governing body that loses money on an event has less to spend on everything else. How that balance plays out will depend on hosts and sponsors over the coming years, and this page does not attempt to predict it.

One practical result of the change was a shorter men's race in 2024, six stages rather than the eight of most recent years.

The earlier Tours of Britain: from the 1945 Victory Marathon to the PruTour

The modern race is the latest of several.

The first came in 1945, organised by the British League of Racing Cyclists, a breakaway body formed to bring continental-style mass-start road racing to British roads at a time when the official governing body would not permit it. The Victory Marathon, run from Brighton to Glasgow, was a statement of intent as much as a race. Massed starts on open roads were still controversial, and the league's riders were banned by the official body for taking part.

Races under the Tour of Britain name followed in the early 1950s, sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper. They gave the name to the race, and the newspaper's backing gave a still-contested form of racing a national platform.

The Milk Race

In 1958 the Milk Marketing Board began a sponsorship that ran until 1993 and gave the race its best-known name. The Milk Race was for most of its life an amateur race, which mattered more than it might seem. Amateur cycling in the Cold War era included the national teams of the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, whose riders were state-supported and effectively full-time. Their teams travelled to Britain for the Milk Race and were frequently its strongest riders.

The race ran for around two weeks in many years, longer than the modern race, and covered much of Britain. In its later years it was opened to professionals as amateur and professional racing began to merge.

The Kellogg's Tour and the PruTour

A separate professional race, the Kellogg's Tour of Britain, ran alongside the Milk Race from 1987 to 1994. It was shorter than the Milk Race, and it brought the best British professionals and some continental teams to British roads. When Kellogg's withdrew, Britain had no professional national stage race for several years. The PruTour, sponsored by Prudential, ran in 1998 and 1999 before its funding ended. Then there was a gap until 2004.

Race	Years	Status
Victory Marathon	1945	Breakaway league's mass-start race, Brighton to Glasgow
Daily Express Tour of Britain	Early 1950s	Newspaper-sponsored stage race
Milk Race	1958-1993	Amateur, later open
Kellogg's Tour of Britain	1987-1994	Professional
PruTour	1998-1999	Professional
Tour of Britain	2004 onwards	Professional; ProSeries from 2020

Tour of Britain winners worth knowing

The modern men's race has produced a winners' list that reads like a guide to the best Classics riders of the period. A short, hard race with no long climbs suits them.

Edvald Boasson Hagen of Norway won in 2009 and 2015, and won a large number of stages in between. Lars Boom of the Netherlands won in 2011 and 2017. Wout van Aert won in 2021 and 2023, the second of those finishing in Caerphilly.

Bradley Wiggins won in 2013, the year after his Tour de France win, building his lead in a time trial at Knowsley. Julian Alaphilippe won in 2018 and Mathieu van der Poel in 2019, both in seasons when they were among the strongest one-day riders in the world.

Year	Men's winner	Nationality
2013	Bradley Wiggins	Great Britain
2015	Edvald Boasson Hagen	Norway
2016	Steve Cummings	Great Britain
2018	Julian Alaphilippe	France
2019	Mathieu van der Poel	Netherlands
2021	Wout van Aert	Belgium
2023	Wout van Aert	Belgium
2024	Stephen Williams	Great Britain

The British winners

The race's British winners are few. Wiggins in 2013. Steve Cummings in 2016, a Wirral rider whose career was built on long-range breakaways and who won this race without a stage win, taking the lead at the Haytor summit finish and holding it over the final two days. And Stephen Williams, the Welsh rider, in 2024, the first British winner since Cummings.

The 2012 race was won on the road by the Devon rider Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, but the title was later taken from him after an anti-doping case based on irregularities in his biological passport.

The 2022 race had an unusual ending. After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the final stages were cancelled, and the Spanish rider Gonzalo Serrano was declared the winner on the standings at that point. The race was not held in 2020.

How it compares with the week-long races on the continent

A week-long stage race in Britain looks, on paper, like Paris–Nice, the Critérium du Dauphiné or the Tour de Suisse. In practice it is a different event.

Those three are WorldTour races, and the riders there are mostly building towards the Tour de France. They include long mountain stages and long time trials, and the best riders in the world attend. The Tour of Britain is a ProSeries race, held in September after the Tour and around the Vuelta, and its fields reflect that: strong teams, but rarely their Grand Tour leaders.

What ProSeries status means

ProSeries status has two practical consequences. The first is ranking points: a ProSeries race awards fewer than a WorldTour race, which affects how much a team values a good result there. The mechanics of that are explained in our guide to the UCI points system.

The second is entry. A WorldTour race must invite every WorldTeam, which leaves few places for anyone else. A ProSeries race is not obliged to invite every WorldTeam, and the UCI's rules limit how much of the field they can take, which leaves room for ProTeams, Continental teams and national teams. For the Tour of Britain that means places for British Continental teams. A promotion to the WorldTour would take those places away, which is one reason the domestic sport does not necessarily want one.

The British case

The race's character comes from the roads. British country lanes are narrow, often twisting, and lined with hedges or stone walls. Short climbs come in quick succession. The weather in September can change several times in a stage, and wet roads, crosswinds and fog have all affected results. Riders who come from the continent frequently find it harder than the profile suggests.

That combination, short stages that race flat out from the start, steep finishes and unpredictable weather, makes it one of the more aggressive races of the season. For readers who ride, the domestic events that use similar roads are covered in our guide to the British hill climb season, and the rest of our road racing coverage sits under cycling and the England section.