Eneco Tour

The Eneco Tour is a six-day men's cycling stage race across the Netherlands, held in mid-October and classed 2.1 on the UCI calendar. It was first held in 2025 as the NIBC Tour of Holland and took the name of a new title sponsor, the energy company Eneco, in 2026. A women's race, the Eneco Tour Women, has been part of the same event since that year.

The Eneco Tour crosses the Netherlands in six days in the middle of October, when most of the road season is over. It starts after dark with a prologue in a park in The Hague, goes to the hills of South Limburg and to a former landfill in Drenthe, and ends on a circuit in Arnhem. The race is young: it was held for the first time in 2025, under the name NIBC Tour of Holland.

Is this the same Eneco Tour as the Renewi Tour?

No. The energy company Eneco once gave its name to a stage race through the Benelux countries that began in 2005. That race later became the BinckBank Tour and has been called the Renewi Tour since 2023; it is held in August, and the two races have nothing to do with each other. Eneco came back to cycling in 2026, after ten years away, as the title sponsor of the Tour of Holland, in a three-year deal with an option to extend it to five. With the new name came a women’s race in the same week, the Eneco Tour Women.

A Dutch stage race again, 21 years after the last Ronde van Nederland

The Netherlands had been without a stage race of its own since the Ronde van Nederland was last held, 21 years before the Tour of Holland. The idea of bringing one back came from Richard Plugge, the manager of the Visma-Lease a Bike team, and the events company TIG Sports took on the organization. Roxane Knetemann became its race director.

The organizers wanted the race to look different from the old one. The road stages were laid out on circuits, which made the course easier to secure and let the crowd see the riders more than once. At the start of the evening prologue each rider waited behind a drop gate of the kind used in BMX racing, with a countdown light where an official would stand. A bonus sprint, the Red Bull Kilometer, was added to the road stages.

Why stage 3 of the 2025 Tour of Holland was canceled

The first edition ran from October 14 to 19, 2025. Ethan Hayter won the four-kilometer prologue in The Hague by 0.28 seconds and the 15-kilometer time trial at Etten-Leur two days later, and he led the race. Then came the stage through South Limburg. The race had no police escort that week, because of a NATO conference in the country, and relied on volunteers to keep traffic off the course. After 30 kilometers a car drove onto the route and the riders were stopped. While they waited a second car appeared, and they refused to go on. Thijs Rondhuis of the organization told the team directors that 25 traffic controllers had not turned up. “We can’t do this without police,” he said.

The VAM-berg, a summit finish on an old landfill

The next day’s stage went to Drenthe and the VAM-berg, a hill made from a former rubbish dump and the highest point of the province. The riders climbed it lap after lap. Hayter, who was ill, abandoned with about 95 kilometers to go. Christophe Laporte, who had won the European title on the same circuit in 2023, attacked 29 kilometers from the finish with Lukáš Kubiš and caught the day’s breakaway. One rider from that break stayed with them: Timo de Jong of the Continental team VolkerWessels. Kubiš attacked on the cobbles near the top, De Jong followed, and on the last 300 meters he came past for his first professional win. Laporte was second and took the lead, 37 seconds ahead of Kubiš.

On the last day Danny van Poppel, the Dutch champion, jumped out of the bunch on the final lap in Arnhem, reached three riders ahead of him and won the stage. Laporte finished in the bunch and won the race by 37 seconds from Kubiš, with Jakob Söderqvist third at 1:05. He had missed about seven months of racing that year with a virus, and it was his first win of the season.