If you have spent the last couple of summers wondering how to watch the Tour de France without paying for it, there is some welcome news ahead of this July. Cycling’s most famous race is coming back to Freeview and the other free-to-air TV platforms in the UK.
5 has signed a multi-year deal with TNT Sports to show highlights of the sport’s three Grand Tours, beginning with the Tour de France in just a few weeks’ time.
There is an important catch, and we will get to exactly what is and is not included. But for the many fans who felt priced out of the sport over the past two years, this is a real step forward.
How The Tour Vanished From Free TV
For about four decades, catching the Tour de France for free was simply part of a British summer. Channel 4 began airing evening highlights in the 1980s, ITV picked up the baton in 2001, and ITV4 went on to run a nightly hour-long highlights show at 7pm, alongside live coverage of each stage.
No subscription, no login – you just turned on the telly.
That ended in 2025. Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT Sports, bought the exclusive UK rights to the Tour from 2026 onwards as part of a deal that runs through to 2030. ITV’s coverage last summer was its farewell.
The knock-on effect was stark. With ITV out of the picture, 2026 was set to be the first year in roughly forty years with no free Tour de France at all.
To watch any of it live, you would need a TNT Sports subscription – which now lives inside the HBO Max app and costs £30.99 a month (or £25.99 a month if you commit to a year).
This sat on top of an already sore point for cycling fans. When Eurosport closed in February 2025 and its racing moved to TNT Sports, plenty of viewers who had happily watched the odd stage as part of their basic TV package suddenly faced a bill of around £30 a month – much of it for football, rugby and cricket they had no interest in.
The frustration was real enough that a petition to make the Tour a protected “listed event,” which would force free-to-air coverage, was debated in Parliament before being dismissed.
So a free highlights deal is exactly what a lot of people have been asking for.
What 5 Has Actually Signed
From this summer, 5 becomes the free-to-air home of highlights for all three Grand Tours – the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España.
Those are cycling’s three biggest multi-week races, held across France, Italy and Spain, respectively, and the Tour is comfortably the most prestigious of the lot.
The coverage rolls out like this:
- Tour de France highlights: 2026 to 2028
- Vuelta a España highlights: 2026 to 2028
- Giro d’Italia highlights: 2027 to 2029
It all kicks off with the Tour de France’s Grand Départ – the opening stage – from Barcelona on July 4.
From there, 5 will show a daily highlights programme at 7pm every evening through July, fronted by sports presenter and journalist Rebecca Charlton.
The 2026 Tour runs from July 4 to 26, with the Vuelta following from August 22 to September 13. The Giro joins the line-up from 2027.
The agreement, which followed a competitive tender, gives 5 the exclusive English-language free-to-air highlights for all three races.
The Big One: Live Coverage Returns In 2027
In 2027, the Tour de France’s Grand Départ comes to the UK – and for those opening days, 5 goes beyond highlights to show actual live coverage.
The race will start on home roads with three stages across Scotland, England and Wales:
- July 2, 2027: Stage 1 – Edinburgh to Carlisle
- July 3, 2027: Stage 2 – Keswick to Liverpool
- July 4, 2027: Stage 3 – Welshpool to Cardiff
Both the men’s race and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift (the women’s Tour) will have their UK Grand Départ shown live on 5 and TNT Sports, and 5 will also carry daily highlights of the 2027 women’s race.
For a sport trying to win back a mainstream audience, a home start broadcast free to the nation is about as good a shop window as it gets.
Highlights Are Not Live – What You Still Won’t Get
It’s worth being clear-eyed about what this deal does and does not do.
Outside of those 2027 UK stages, what 5 is offering is highlights – a packaged recap of each day’s racing, not the live drama as it unfolds over four or five hours.
If you want to watch every stage live, in full, you still need TNT Sports through the HBO Max app (or via Amazon’s Prime Video Channels), at the same £30.99 a month.
The 5 deal sits alongside that paid coverage rather than replacing it. Even with these highlights, 2026 remains the first summer in decades without free live coverage of the Tour.
For a lot of viewers, a tidy hour at 7pm will be plenty – it is, after all, exactly what most people watched on ITV4 for years. For die-hards who want every breakaway and every mountain finish as it happens, the paywall has not moved.
There is also an intriguing corporate wrinkle here. 5 is owned by Paramount, while TNT Sports belongs to Warner Bros. Discovery – so on paper this is a deal between two rival media giants.
Except Paramount is currently in the process of buying Warner Bros. Discovery outright. WBD shareholders approved the takeover in April, and the deal is now working through regulatory approval in the US and Europe, with both companies expecting it to close later this year.
If it goes through, 5 and TNT Sports would end up under the same corporate roof – meaning this cross-company rights deal could quietly become an in-house arrangement by the time the 2027 home Tour rolls around.
For now, that approval is not guaranteed, so it remains a deal between two separate companies.
A Growing Sports Habit For 5
This is not a one-off for the broadcaster. Since rebranding from Channel 5 to simply “5” last year, the channel has been steadily building a sports portfolio – it has aired the NFL Super Bowl, the FIFA Club World Cup, England T20 cricket internationals and snooker’s British Open, and it was recently confirmed as the free-to-air home of this summer’s Commonwealth Games.
Adding the Grand Tours fits that pattern: high-profile events that pull in big audiences and, conveniently for a commercial broadcaster, premium advertisers alongside them.
For the cycling fan who quietly mourned the loss of those ITV4 evenings, the practical takeaway is simple. From July 4, you can once again follow the Tour de France for nothing – the stories, the standings and the best of each day’s racing, every night at 7pm.
It is not the all-day, every-stage feast that lives behind the TNT Sports paywall. But after two years of cycling drifting out of reach for anyone unwilling to pay, having the world’s biggest bike race back on free TV is a homecoming worth marking.
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