Monday was the first rest day of the 2026 Tour de France — an occasion that the peloton had been looking forward to since rolling off the time trial ramp in Barcelona nine days earlier.
There is a usual pattern to these days: a slow morning, a team ride, and a group coffee, before a handful of media obligations in the afternoon and an early night. Some teams organised fun activities — Visma Lease-a-Bike, for example, held a quiz for riders and staff, with the most popular question asking which soigneur had previously beaten Tadej Pogacar up a climb in their junior racing careers.
But really, ahead of a hard stage ten in the Massif Central, these rest days are about recovery — which several teams complained they were unable to get.
UNO-X’s twins, Anders and Tobias Halland Johannessen, posted a video on Instagram of them having taken their beds outside onto the balcony, sleeping outside with eyemasks, due to the condition of the room, containing dirt and dozens of spiderwebs.
Their teammate, Danish champion Magnus Cort, provided more detail in a lengthy review on Instagram — the popular 33-year-old generally posts about every Tour hotel he stays in under the hashtags #RoomsAndRatings and #ItIsHardToBeACyclist.
“It has an amazing view and looks pretty good on the outside,” he said of the hotel, situated near the summit of Le Lioran, the finish of Tuesday’s stage, and a lodging where he had stayed before.
“But in reality, it is amongst the worst places I have stayed. It wasn’t completely soaked this time and only a small smell of rot. We also had the luxury of dry toilet paper. I had a sink in the closet that was nice to have so I didn’t have to walk two sets of stairs during the night. It is hard to say much more positive things about this place.
“It was dirty, no air-conditioning and no WiFi. It was very (well-)used with many broken things like the holder for toilet paper and shower head. Even though it was better than last time it will still only get 1 out of 7 stars.”
Two other squads — Picnic-PostNL and Mathieu van der Poel’s Alpecin-Premier Tech — were staying at the same hotel.
Alpecin’s Silvan Dillier was another rider to sleep outside — with the hotel lacking air-conditioning, and the Swiss cyclist finding the team’s own portable air-conditioning too noisy to sleep. All three teams were also disturbed by noise the night before the race, with hundreds of spectators having descended on the town ahead of the summit finish on Monday.
Tadej Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates also revealed that they stayed at an old hotel lacking air-conditioning, though the Emirati squad possess their own AI mattress technology which cools the body based on its biomarkers.
British riders Tom Pidcock and Fred Wright, both riding for Pinarello-Q36.5, also complained about their accommodation, with Wright calling it “the worst hotel we’ve had”, and Pidcock, with characteristic bluntness, calling it “crap”.
Both UNO-X and Alpecin complained to the Tour’s organiser, the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), who declined to comment when spoken to by The Athletic.
The ASO has total control over which hotels that teams stay in. They book up the rooms themselves before the race route is revealed — incidentally, a source of leaks as to where the Tour will take place that year — with each hotel’s star rating carefully noted down.
Teams are banned from organising their own accommodation and must stay in the ASO’s selection, which the organization says is for reasons of fairness. Effectively, the ASO organizes the distribution of hotels between the teams in order to provide them with the same total number of five star and two star hotels across the race. In theory, if you add up the stars held across all hotels for each team across the race, they should come to similar totals.
However, it is luck of the draw as to which get the swanky rest day hotels — last year, Visma stayed at an Occitanie vineyard, while others were in a two-star glorified service station on the outskirts of Montpellier — which can lead to the complaints. On other nights, it is often arrive, eat, massage, and sleep.
This year, according to several sources from across the peloton, the hotel problem was made more difficult by the rest day’s location in the Massif Central. As the least-populated area of France, it means that the selection of nearby hotels — itself already restricted by the number of rooms and facilities required — is much more limited than it might be in a large city, or a flat part of France with easy access to motorways.
UNO-X directeur sportif Stig Kristiansen spoke to The Athletic about whether there was a need for reform.
“Not to make it an excuse, but in a race like this, over three weeks, when you have just two rest days, you want it to be decent,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be five stars, and we’ve had nice hotels on the other nights, so not to complain, but this hotel was a one-off.
“It’s mostly that it wasn’t clean, it was warm without air-conditioning. We do so many measurements to make our hotels as good as possible, to help with cleanliness, but at least the riders had the possibility to ride the last 60km of the day’s stage, so that’s the positive.”
While several officials from larger teams privately voiced their desire to The Athletic for squads to be able to book their own hotels, others from smaller squads, whose budgets are already dwarfed, say the system has to remain in place so they do not always end up with the cheapest options.
“We’d be screwed,” one says. “So we’ll put up without air-conditioning.”
