TakeTour4 weeks ago
Eneco Tour 2026 will alternate men and women on the start ramp of its opening prologue, male-female-male, all the way down the sequence. That's not a scheduling quirk — it's the organizers testing what equal footing actually looks like on the road, rather than just on paper.
To make room for this, Eneco Tour Women 2026 dropped from UCI Women's WorldTour to UCI 2.1 — a deliberate step down to dodge calendar overlap with WorldTour races in China, not a sign of weaker ambition. Race director Roxane Knetemann was explicit about the stakes: «It will be a cycling week with two fully fledged races.» Both pelotons will even start the final stage together in Arnhem before splitting onto separate routes. Compare that to Tour de Suisse 2026's shared locations but separate windows, or Tour Down Under 2027's same course at different start times — Eneco Tour's model is the most entangled of the three.
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