Race Across France – Destination Mandelieu 2026

From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean via the Pyrenees and the Alps, Race Across France is one of the premier events in ultra-distance cycling. Alex headed to the finish line to find out what makes the event so special – and whether ordinary sportive riders can make the leap.

By the time the Race Across France riders rolled into Mandelieu-La Napoule, each had a story to share. Some had taken on the ‘entry-level’ 200km Go’Lum Ride through the night; others had spent the best part of a week riding thousands of kilometres through France, climbing big beasts like the Galibier, Mont Ventoux and the Col du Grand Colombier. As well as sleeping in snatched bursts at roadside bus shelters, the entrants had sweated through a record-breaking heatwave.

The riders may have felt as though they’d ridden through a desert, but at the finish-line village it was a welcome oasis of calm. Riders who’d finished hours – or even days – earlier, wandered around in flip-flops and finisher’s T-shirts. Volunteers chatted with competitors they’d come to know as dots on a screen over the previous ten days. Families who’d spent the week following those same dots, finally got to celebrate together in person, as riders crossed the line in a dizzy mix of exhaustion and elation.

Unlike most cycling events, where finishers collect a medal and soon begin the long drive home, Race Across France keeps its race village open all week – night and day – so finishers from every distance can celebrate together regardless of when they cross the line. It seemed to me that nobody was in a rush to leave. 

Watching podium-finisher Privatine Feuillat get pulled straight onto the stage moments after finishing – still visibly exhausted after 1,000km and looking around desperately for a drink as she collected her award – captured the mood perfectly. By Friday evening’s prize-giving ceremony, with riders from more than 26 nations still in town swapping stories, the event felt less like the end of a race and more like the closing night of a summer festival.

It helps that Mandelieu-La Napoule, nestled on the Cote D’Azur beneath the Maritime Alps, feels a world away from the town of Hendaye on the Atlantic coast, where competitors on the longest route began their ride at the foot of the Pyrenees. After days of sleeping by the roadside, riding through the night and battling relentless heat, the finish-town offered a welcome dose of comfort.

Sandy beaches, a bustling marina, waterfront cafés and elegant hotels provide the perfect setting to recover. While the riders inched their way across France, many of their families enjoyed a holiday of their own, exploring historic landmarks, relaxing by the sea or venturing into the surrounding hills and forests on the network of cycling trails that radiate from the town. 

Just a longer sportive?

Ask a typical sportive rider what defines an ultra-distance event and the answer is simple: surely it’s like a sportive – just longer? Race Across France shows how wrong this is.

The event sits at the centre of the Race Across Series, founded by ultra-endurance pioneer Arnaud Manzanini in 2018, and now spanning nine countries. The philosophy hasn’t changed: riders are self-sufficient. No bunches to shelter in, no feed stations every 30 miles, no squishy flapjacks to stuff in your jersey pockets. Competitors decide when to eat, when and where to sleep, and how hard to push.

It isn’t reckless self-reliance, though. Basecamps along each route offer sleep, hot meals, showers and mechanical support, and every rider is tracked continuously via live GPS by Race HQ, who’ll phone riders if they stray off course or check in if a tracker goes quiet. On the flagship 2,500km event riders are required to take a minimum four hours’ rest every 36 hours – a rule enforced by the GPS tracking team back at base.

The series also offers a graduated way in for ultra cycling newbies. The 200km Go’Lum By Night ride introduces the unfamiliar challenge of cycling at speed in darkness; the 300, 500 and 1,000km rides build from there. As a result, taking on the legendary 2,500km crossing – with over 28,000m of climbing – becomes a realistic ambition for newcomers to tackle in the not-too-distant future.

French cyclist, Pauline Gaidet, took exactly that route – winning progressively longer events in previous editions of the Race Across France, before entering the 2,500km event this year. Gaidet explained what makes ultra cycling different: “You have to manage your pacing, nutrition, equipment and decision-making from start to finish,” she says. “That makes the experience more demanding, but also much more adventurous.”

When the heatwave hit

If the Race Across France already has a reputation as one of ultra-cycling’s toughest events, the 2026 edition threatened to become legendary for the wrong reasons.

As riders crossed central France in late June, a severe heatwave pushed daytime temperatures towards 40°C, prompting local authorities in the Loiret department to ban all organised sporting events on health grounds. Cancelling mid-race would have been understandable – albeit a huge disappointment to everyone who’d built their year around it. Instead, organisers redesigned the event on the fly: riders who’d already cleared the affected region continued uninterrupted, while those still approaching it were stopped before conditions turned dangerous. When temperatures eased, the 2,500km riders who’d been halted restarted from Albertville, and the 1,000km event – originally due to begin in Orléans – was relocated entirely to the cooler Alps.

Gaidet, who went on to win the women’s 2,500km title, thinks the organisers got the balance right: “Given the extreme weather conditions, it wasn’t easy to keep the event both safe and fair, and I thought the decisions they made were absolutely the right ones.”

The heat shaped the race in other ways too. Enforced cooling breaks of four to six hours during the hottest parts of the day forced riders to rethink their strategies – though for Gaidet, the enforced pauses became a tactical opening. She used them to recover properly, speak with her coach, and then attack the cooler evening hours with renewed intensity. “It’s quite paradoxical,” she says, “but that constraint actually made my race more dynamic.”

Preparation mattered as much as fitness. Knowing that the temperature in June in France can turn brutal, Gaidet prepared using a dedicated heat-acclimation training plan, upgraded to a two-litre hydration vest, and boosted her electrolyte intake. She also followed the simple, but often overlooked rule – drink the moment you feel thirsty. “I wanted my body to know that water was available whenever it needed it.”

British rider Robin Grainger, competing in his first ultra event, had less experience of riding in such heat. “I carried a CamelBak with about three litres, refilling every hour, pouring water down my sleeves and back. On climbs I was stopping every five or ten minutes wherever I could find some shade. You just had to suffer through it.”

Research & Support – Building an Ultra-Cycling Community

Race Across France’s approach to rider welfare goes beyond logistics and cooling breaks. Throughout the event, research students from the University of Dunkirk, led by Professor Rémy Hurdiel, ran cognitive tests on competitors before, during and after their rides, studying how prolonged exercise, sleep deprivation and accumulated fatigue affect alertness and reaction time. In a sport where riders make countless navigational and tactical decisions across five or six consecutive days, understanding how fatigue affects judgement matters as much as understanding power output.

L’ultra-cyclisme pour tous – Ultra-Cycling for All – is a core motto of the Race Across series. That this is more than just a pithy marketing slogan was made clear to me when I met paracyclist Boris Ghirardi. Founder of the ‘Level Up’ consultancy, he works with ultra-event organisers to make their events more accessible to para-athletes, while also preparing athletes themselves to succeed. He explained how his ‘Team Human Ride’ – made up of five riders with different disabilities – had a clear mission: “To make ultra-cycling a platform for inclusion, personal growth, and to change perceptions.” 

Each rider was paired with an able-bodied support rider and prepared by following a bespoke training plan Boris had created to help the athletes handle the physical and logistical demands of their chosen route – whether that was 200 or 2,500 kilometers. The aim was not simply to finish, but to demonstrate that ultra-cycling can be genuinely inclusive.

Between the research programme and Team Human Ride, the pattern is clear: the Race Across organisation is building a community around ultra-distance cycling, not just running a race. This is why so many riders return year after year, trusting the people behind the event who watched over them whilst they spent days making exhausted, sleep-deprived decisions.

What are you scared of?

Ask a sportive rider what scares them most about an ultra and the answers will be along the lines of: the mountains; the distance; living like a hobo; weeping-welts in the nether regions? Gaidet’s experience suggests something less ‘hurty’ and more cerebral – ultra-cycling is less about survival and more about self-discovery.

The 2,500km event was the focus of her entire season, yet she arrived at the start line with one uncertainty: she’d never ridden this far before. “I was constantly observing myself,” she says. “I was trying to understand what was actually possible for me over such a long duration, without having any previous experience to use as a reference.” 

Unlike a sportive, where success is a finishing time or an average speed, a multi-day event becomes an exercise in understanding yourself. Eat too little today and you pay for it tomorrow. Sleep too much and your rivals disappear up the road. Ignore a small mechanical issue and it can end your race hundreds of kilometres later.

What surprised her most was how quickly it all became simple. “I think ultra-distance cycling allows people to experience something that’s increasingly rare today – stepping completely outside their normal lives and focusing on very simple things: moving forward, eating, drinking, managing your energy.”

Crossing through forests, sleepy market towns and the Loire Valley before tackling landmarks like Mont Ventoux, Gaidet found the vineyards especially affecting. “These are landscapes that are part of our culture, but experiencing them by bicycle over several days is something completely different.” 

From 355km to 2,500km

If Gaidet represents ultra-cycling’s polished, experienced end, Robin Grainger was coming from somewhere else entirely. His longest ride before this was ‘Chase the Sun’, a 355km ride across England from sunrise to sunset. “I hadn’t done an ultra before. I just wanted a big challenge.”

After a decade of riding daily in London – for fitness, for his mental health, for the simple enjoyment of it – and without kids yet to plan around, he decided it was as good a time as any. France sealed it: “I love France, I’ve done numerous cycling trips there and love watching the Tour, so it looked like a great route. It was also the longest ultra I could find.”

He learned fast that an ultra bears little resemblance to a long sportive. His first night’s sleep lasted 45 minutes, spent under a tree at the edge of a children’s playground after following other riders into a village at the foot of a Basque climb. “People were crashed out on benches and under the slides. I woke up after about 45 minutes because of all the rustling and snoring.” By the end of the week he’d discovered one of ultra-cycling’s unwritten rules: “It’s better to stop alone in a field and get a proper three hours than try to survive an hour in a group like that.”

There were bigger mistakes too. Exhausted and struggling with knee pain after the Pyrenees, he checked into an air-conditioned hotel for what was meant to be a short rest. After a beer and a feast, he slept for a solid eleven hours and straight through his alarm. He woke to discover he was dead last. After a frantic 190km chase to the first Basecamp, he arrived with three hours to spare before the cut-off. He’d also packed for the wrong trip entirely – carrying a sleeping bag rated to minus 12 degrees through temperatures that never dropped below 28. “I ended up posting half my kit home” – a mistake every experienced ultra rider will smile knowingly about.

Robin went on to explain how fatigued he had become by the last day: “I had back pain and there was extreme heat. I started mixing a beer and an energy drink together as a “boost” strategy, which weirdly worked for a while. I got to midnight on the final night trying to push to the finish, grabbed a beer and a Red Bull at a bar that was still open – half an hour later I was so tired I just stopped on the side of the road, lay down fully dressed, helmet still on, and slept for an hour right there.”

Robin suffered, but he finished in the middle of the pack. A remarkable achievement in his first event and proof that an experienced sportive rider can take the next steps into ultra-cycling.

British riders make their mark

While Grainger was learning ultra-cycling’s lessons the hard way, other British riders were producing some of the finest performances the series has seen.

The headline result came in the flagship 2,500km event. Welsh rider Rhydian Morris arrived with unfinished business, having abandoned the same event in 2025 through injury after 1,500km. This year, having cleared the heatwave-affected region before racing was suspended, he continued uninterrupted to third place overall with a time just short of 145 hours – the joint best result by a British rider in the event’s short history.

Twenty-two-year-old Loughborough graduate Rufus Thomas delivered one of the weekend’s most eye-catching wins, taking the 200km Go’Lum by Night. Thomas was refreshingly under-prepared for a race winner: his Di2 cable was held in place with sellotape, he had only one bottle cage, and he’d forgotten his lights – issues that had to be rectified before he was allowed to start the race.

Setting off at one minute intervals from 8pm on Saturday, riders rode through the night before finishing on the Mediterranean coast shortly after dawn. Thomas covered the distance and over 4,000m of climbing in just under eight hours. “It was a very unique and bizarre situation. After the first hour or so I found myself at the front of the race. It was a very lonely next six hours.”

He hadn’t gone in expecting to win: “I came here not really thinking about winning, I just wanted to experience riding through the night. But once I realised I was leading, I wanted to push myself as hard as I could.”

For sportive riders weighing up their first step into ultra-distance cycling, Thomas’s ride is a useful reminder that you don’t have to start with 2,500km. The Go’Lum by Night ride exists precisely as a gateway into the discipline.

Spend a few hours in Mandelieu talking to competitors and a pattern emerges: very few riders set out dreaming of crossing an entire country. Most simply entered one event, then another, then another, until sleeping in playgrounds, chasing sunrises across mountain ranges and spending a week on a bike started to feel perfectly normal. This is Race Across France’s real achievement – an event that welcomes newcomers, encourages riders to redefine their limits and builds a community that values mutual support over individual glory.

Further reading

Race Across France: en.raceacrossseries.com/race-across-france-2025

Cycling in and around Mandelieu-La Napoule. Discover 15 road, gravel and mountain biking routes for exploring the French Riviera and the Maritime Alps: www.mandelieu.com/activities/mandelieu-sport-by-nature/bicycle-tourism/

Physiological effects of ultra cycling. Professor Rémy Hurdiel discussing his research with Arnaud Manzanini:
youtu.be/rMtetE1F4ms?si=qmyI4J9373hQIEVH

Team Human Ride: en.raceacrossseries.com/team-humanride