Tour de France: Unchained is hanging up its yellow jersey. Season 3, which brings eight episodes of the competition and controversy around the 2024 Tour de France to Netflix, will be its last. You’ll recognize the format of this series – Netflix loves a winner, and Unchained applies Formula 1: Drive to Survive thinking to the sport of professional cycling. The dynamic between monster-funded teams and those with more limited budgets, and the deep drama between individual riders and their charged-up egos – “Fuck you, man!” one guy shouts in a clip as he kicks at the spokes of an opponent – is all on offer as Unchained gets moving with its third season. So let’s join le coeur du peloton – the thick of the riding group – as the series preps for the first stage of the 2024 Tour: from Florence to Rimini in 206 kilometers and seven backbreaking, but all-important climbs.
Opening Shot: In an introductory sequence that seems to last a little too long, the opinions of various riders, team managers, executives, and cycling journalists and observers all boil down to one thing: big money is taking over pro biking.
The Gist: Appropriate to this point, Season 3 of Tour de France: Unchained opens not in Europe but at a glitzy promo event in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, which is literally held on top of a skyscraper. Team UAE has the financial support of ADQ, a UAE-based sovereign wealth fund, with an operating budget astronomically higher than many competing bike teams. It has an entire front line of guys who would each be the best lead rider on any other team. But for the 2024 cycling season and the three-week ultimate test that is the Tour de France, the bulk of Team UAE’s financial and human resources are devoted to one thing: helping Tadej Pogačar win.
Pogačar was on the podium, in a Team UAE shirt, in 2022 and 2023. But he was not the champion, and Seasons 1 and 2 of Unchained tracked the elite Slovenian rider’s battles with Team Visma-Lease a Bike and its lead rider, the Dutchman Jonas Vingegaard. In an interview for Season 3, Pogačar calls the season up to the beginning of the ‘24 Tour a success, and touts Team UAE’s better equipment, better training – even its better food, prepared by a staff of chefs and nutritionists – as keys to his success. And while every other team sees Pogačar as the guy to beat, even if their more realistic goal is to simply win one single race stage, Pogačar himself is in a direct battle with Vingegaard, who won the 2023 Tour.
Tour de France: Unchained also interviews Vingegaard, who is hitting the Tour after being badly hurt in a crash three months before. But it also finds stories below the level of these elite riders, like a talented young upstart riding for Team Aréka B&B, or Frenchman Romain Bardet, who scores one for national pride and the underdog teams when he crushes an early stage. Returning to its fascinations with big money sponsorship, Season 3 of Unchained will also assess extreme sport heavyweight Red Bull’s further moves into pro cycling. And is it true that a winner of the Tour de France is only born once a generation? Because in Unchained, that’s what the bike bros are saying about a flashy young Belgian rider named Remco Evenpoel.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The executive producers behind Tour de France: Unchained applied their wildly successful Formula 1: Drive to Survive format to the series, a format they’ve also used for Break Point, which followed the ATP Tour, Full Swing – about golf and the PGA – and a 2024 series for Netflix that focused on Six Nations rugby.
Our Take: Season 3 of Tour de France: Unchained leans heavily on the David and Goliath aspect of professional cycling today, where Big Bike reaps much of the rewards while the relative little guys scrap for relevance. Which…duh? In Major League Baseball, it’s always small market clubs versus big market ones. In the English Premier League, the squabbles over people with big pockets parachuting in to purchase clubs are constant. There are just so many stories about untold wealth gaming the system – any system – it’s become rather exhausting.
Which is why, for us, Unchained is most enjoyable when it concentrates on the smaller battles. The individual conflicts happening at ground level, even when that ground is at a 13% gradient. (Feel the burn!) It’s really gripping whenever the series plays the ligament-shredding grind of a multi-kilometer climbing stage against cutaway interviews with those individual riders. What was a guy thinking when he chose to breakaway from the peloton? Did he have a sense of his lead, what with all the crowd chaos and bell-ringing and chase cars and coaches badgering in his ear? It’s a perspective traditional coverage of the sport just can’t achieve, and helps open up Tour de France: Unchained and professional cycling itself to noobs, casuals, and superfans alike.
Sex and Skin: Well, lots of wiry guys either shirtless after a race or otherwise working their way into and out of skintight jerseys.
Parting Shot: “We can fuck up the fourth stage.” When Tadej, with one of his coaches, says these things, it doesn’t read as motivation. Instead it bleeds confidence, maybe even an ounce or two of arrogance. “Zamotimo stvari,” Pogačar adds in Slovenian. “Let’s fuck things up!”
Sleeper Star: Top-line talents like Pogačar and Vingegaard aren’t going away. But we like the thoughtful, eager aura that seems to follow around promising Team Arkéa rookie Kévin Vauquelin. In Unchained, the cutaway interviews with Vauquelin have the feel of those “get-to-know-you”’s conducted with young athletes during the Olympics. Bonne chance, Kevin!
Most Pilot-y Line: “The first stage of the Tour is unlike any other. The yellow jersey’s the prize, and it’s a unique part of every Tour. And on this first stage, anything can happen.”
Our Call: Stream It. Tour de France: Unchained is a solid look inside the high-stakes world of professional cycling, with the legendary Tour de France as its race centerpiece. All the grueling work of a season, all the bike-to-bike griping, and every chance for glory, condensed into 8 episodes.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.