Tour de Pologne

Tour de Pologne is a men's WorldTour cycling stage race held in late July or August, mostly across southern Poland. The route typically spans seven days and mixes rolling terrain, summit finishes, and time trials, making it a proving ground for stage racers looking to sharpen form late in the season.

The Tour de Pologne is Poland’s national stage race, first held in 1928 and part of cycling’s top tier since 2005. It usually has seven stages. The overall classification is often settled by a few seconds, on the climbs around Bukowina Tatrzańska or in a final time trial.

The first Tour de Pologne in 1928

The first edition was called the Kolarski Bieg Dookoła Polski, the cycling race around Poland. The Warsaw Cyclists’ Association and the newspaper Przegląd Sportowy organized it, a quarter of a century after the first Tour de France. On September 7, 1928, 71 riders set off from the Dynasy track in Warsaw for eight stages and 1,491 kilometers by way of Lublin, Lwów, Kraków, Poznań and Łódź. Feliks Więcek of the Bydgoszcz Cycling Club won six of the stages and finished more than an hour ahead of the next rider.

Five editions were held before the Second World War. Bolesław Napierała, known as the tiger of the road, won the last two, in 1937 and 1939.

Three-time winners in the shadow of the Peace Race

After the war Poland’s communist authorities favored a new event, the Peace Race. The Tour de Pologne came back in 1947 with four stages and a little over 600 kilometers. By 1953 it had grown to 13 stages and 2,311 kilometers, the longest edition there has been.

Marian Więckowski won three in a row from 1954 to 1956. Andrzej Mierzejewski matched him with wins in 1982, 1984 and 1988, and Dariusz Baranowski with three more from 1991 to 1993. Three wins is still the record. Ryszard Szurkowski rode the race from 1968 to 1984 and won fifteen stages without ever winning it overall.

Czesław Lang and the move to the professional peloton

Czesław Lang won the race as a rider in 1980. In 1993, when it was short of money, he took it over, put in his own money and began turning an amateur event into a professional one. Baranowski’s third win came that year. In 1994 the former world champion Maurizio Fondriest attacked alone on a hilly stage to Polanica-Zdrój, won it by six and a half minutes and kept the yellow jersey to the finish.

From 1999 to 2007 the race finished on the Orlinek at Karpacz, a climb of 400 meters in four kilometers that the riders called the Wailing Wall. In 2005 the UCI included the Tour de Pologne in its new ProTour, which is now the WorldTour.

Rafał Majka wins on home roads in 2014

Cezary Zamana won in 2003, and the next ten editions went to riders from other countries. In 2014 Rafał Majka won mountain stages on consecutive days. The second was at Bukowina Tatrzańska, where he attacked on the last climb and took the yellow jersey with a lead of 18 seconds. In the closing 25-kilometer time trial in Kraków he held on to win the race by eight seconds from Ion Izagirre. Michał Kwiatkowski won in 2018 and is still the last Polish winner.

Bjorg Lambrecht and the neutralized stage of 2019

Bjorg Lambrecht, a 22-year-old Belgian with Lotto Soudal, crashed on stage 3 in 2019 and died in hospital that afternoon. The next day’s stage was neutralized and shortened from 173 kilometers to 133.7, and the peloton rode it together without racing. A black arch on the course carried his name and his race number, 143. His six teammates rode ahead of the peloton, stopped 50 meters before the finish and stood in a line across the road, arms around each other, for a minute’s silence. The organizers have withdrawn number 143 from the race.

Remco Evenepoel’s solo to Bukowina in 2020

The 2020 race began with another serious crash: at the finish of stage 1 Fabio Jakobsen was forced into the barriers and went through them. He spent two days in an induced coma, and Dylan Groenewegen, who had changed his line, was disqualified.

On stage 4, to Bukowina Tatrzańska, Jakobsen’s teammate Remco Evenepoel attacked with 51 kilometers to go and won by close to two minutes. He crossed the line holding up Jakobsen’s race number. “I wanted to give everything today for Fabio,” he said. He won the race, as he had won every stage race he had started that season.

Mohorič beats Almeida by one second in 2023

João Almeida beat Matej Mohorič to the title in 2021. Two years later they started the last stage level on time, with Mohorič in yellow. The race was decided after 67 kilometers, at an intermediate sprint in Wilamowice, where Mohorič beat Almeida by nearly a bike length and took the larger time bonus. “If I had been a single bike length slower, then I would have lost the race,” Mohorič said. He won by one second, and Kwiatkowski, in third place, was within 17 seconds of him.

The Wieliczka time trial in 2025 and 2026

The 2025 and 2026 races both ended with a 12.5-kilometer time trial that started and finished at the Wieliczka salt mine, and both times it changed the leader. In 2025 Brandon McNulty rode it in 14 minutes 31 seconds, 46 seconds faster than the race leader, Victor Langellotti, and won the race by 29 seconds from Antonio Tiberi.

In 2026 the top 19 riders in the standings started the time trial within a minute of the leader, Christian Scaroni. Stefan Küng won the stage, and his Tudor teammate Marco Brenner, fourth overall that morning, won the race. It was Brenner’s first overall victory in a stage race and the third win of his career.

This is a WorldTour stage race in late July or August that draws teams looking to build form ahead of the Vuelta or close out their season with purpose. The route moves through the industrial south and the foothills of the Carpathians, offering a mix of sprint stages, punchy climbs, and time trials that keep the GC open until the final weekend. It's a race where emerging talent often announces itself and established names tune their condition.