The Cheapest Bike in the Tour de France Costs $8,500. The Most Expensive Is Over Double That—Does Price Really Make a Difference?

The men’s Tour de France is arguably the highest-profile venue for cycling brands to show off their bikes. Naturally, these are some of the most expensive road bikes currently or soon to be available to riders. But have you ever wondered about the cheapest and the most expensive bike being ridden in the Tour? Is one actually better than the other?

Answering the first question is fairly straightforward, while the second is significantly less so. But I have some ideas on how to at least try to think about it.

The cheapest Tour bike a U.S. consumer can buy is the Cube Litening C:68X Pro of Intermarché-Wanty, which is available for about $8,500. That’s an excellent price for a bike with Shimano Dura Ace Di2 (with power meter), Newman Streem wheels with carbon spokes, a full carbon cockpit, and TPU tubes. You'll need to go through one of Cube's dealers, which are primarily located on the West Coast of the US.

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A close second is the Canyon Aeroad—ridden by Team Alpecin-Deceuninck and Movistar—for around $10,000, depending on which team build you want to mimic. There are some discrepancies between the team version and the one available to the public, primarily in the wheel department. Alpecin-Deceuninck uses Shimano wheels; the consumer version of the Dura-Ace bike ships with DT Swiss wheels instead. Riders can pay an additional $900 to upgrade to Zipp 454 NSW wheels, which more closely mimic the bikes of Team Movistar.

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At $3,200, the X-Lab AD9 being ridden by Astana is the least expensive frame option, but even so, it would be tough to build a complete replica of Astana’s team bikes for less than $8,500.

Just for a bit of extra context, I did the math, and the average price of a Tour de France bike in this year's race is $13,000, up from $12,472 in 2024.

By contrast, the most expensive bike in this year’s race costs an eye-watering $19,000 (approximately). It is the Colnago V5Rs and the Y1RS ridden by UAE Team Emirates XRG. Mind you, I’m doing some estimating here because the replica team bikes from Colnago are priced at $17,100. These bikes feature Enve wheels and Dura-Ace groupsets, which are used by the team, but do not include the $1,200 Enve cockpit or the various ultra-light components from Carbon-Ti or Darimo that the team regularly uses to hit the UCI weight limit of 14.99 lbs.

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Obviously, the biggest performance differentiator between the two bikes and the two teams are the riders. One way to gauge race performance is to look at the UCI team rankings so far this season. It won’t surprise you to learn that heading into the Tour, UAE Team Emirates XRG is leading the team rankings with 19,622 points. Nearly 7,000 points ahead of second-place Lidl-Trek.

Intermarché-Wanty has not been having a stellar season so far and is ranked 22nd heading into the Tour, with only 4,075 points. How much of that performance gap between the two teams is down to the bikes is impossible to answer. At the elite level, the difference between a $18,000 bike and an $8,500 one is negligible, as all manufacturers optimize their top-level race bikes for similar metrics and aerodynamic properties. While it's certainly true that some bikes are lighter and more aero than others, the gaps are much smaller than their price differences would indicate.

Certainly, Colnago would want us to believe that their bike is that much better than the Cube. Realistically, the relative performance difference between the two teams is down to their respective budgets, which they use to hire faster riders. Based on UCI budget reports leaked to Escape Collective, we know that the wealthiest teams in cycling have a budget of approximately 50 million euros. We also know that UAE Team Emirates XRG is likely to have the highest budget currently in the sport. By contrast, Intermarché-Wanty runs on a yearly budget of around 14 million euros.