The petroculture peloton: Will Edinburgh’s ad ban drive Big Oil out of the Tour de France?

The atmosphere is always electric at the Tour de France – cycling’s showpiece event – and the 2026 Grand Départ in Barcelona this weekend will be no different. But at the 2027 Tour de France beginning in Edinburgh, there could be a striking departure from the race’s previous editions, with some sponsors on the riders’ jerseys, as well as the banners and signage lining the road, being covered up.

In 2024, Edinburgh banned high-carbon advertising across council-owned spaces. The policy bars publicity and sponsorship deals with fossil fuel companies, airlines, airports, arms manufacturers, cruise lines and makers of fossil-fuelled cars.

For Ben Parker, the Scottish Greens councillor who first proposed the ban, the implication is clear: cycling’s fossil fuel sponsors, such as oil major TotalEnergies and petrochemicals giant INEOS, should be prohibited from displaying their logos in any of Edinburgh’s public spaces.

This would be an unprecedented situation for the Tour. Speaking to Play the Game, Parker describes an ongoing “energetic back and forth” within the council and with the race’s organisers, Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), over how far the restrictions can go.

“It feels like there are some political groups in the council who are happy to see the policy pass, but only insofar as we have a nice shiny policy, not that we actually necessarily use it”, Parker says. Some within the council have argued that jersey sponsorship is outside its control, and Parker thinks the council “should have been stronger in the 2027 Grand Départ bid to say, ‘you want to come here, but we want to make it really clear that our city is a city that doesn't welcome fossil fuel companies, and that needs to be reflected in jersey sponsorship’”.

Every councillor agrees, however, that council-owned infrastructure must adhere to the policy. This would mean that TotalEnergies may have to change its plans to launch a “major promotional campaign” targeting the millions of spectators along Edinburgh’s roads as the Tour de France’s energy partner. ASO declined to comment on this.

The last time the Tour visited the United Kingdom for the 2014 Grand Départ in Yorkshire, a study revealing the event’s social and economic impacts included 2.3 million visitors to the region, 52% of attendees saying they were inspired to cycle more, and 102.3 million GBP (~135 million USD) positive economic impact for Yorkshire.

But Parker says that determining which organisations are permitted to host events in Edinburgh’s public spaces goes beyond the financial aspects of positive impact and legacy. “Can there be a positive legacy from an event where all of the strings are being pulled by organisations who have no interest in setting a positive legacy because they are fossil fuel companies that have no place in future societies?”

Staining the sport

Fossil fuels are the dominant cause of climate change. According to the New Weather Institute, the burning of oil, gas and coal contributes to 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of carbon emissions, increasing instability in people’s lives through heatwaves, floods and storms.

Whether it is teams, races, or national federations, fossil fuel sponsors are everywhere in cycling. To name just a few, Tadej Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates, far and away cycling’s top-ranked team, is sponsored by XRG – the gas and chemicals subsidiary of UAE state oil company ADNOC. The Vuelta a España, the Spanish equivalent of the Tour de France, is sponsored by oil giant Eni in the form of its “renewable” arm Eni Plenitude. The Belgian national federation is sponsored by Esso, a brand controlled by oil and gas mega corporation ExxonMobil, while British Cycling is sponsored by Shell, despite heavy initial backlash.

This is in a sport predicated on a widespread, minimally polluting form of transport, at a time when cities around the world are trying to boost cycling to decarbonise how people get around. As an outdoor endurance sport pushing athletes to their limits, road cycling is uniquely exposed to the very climate crisis those fossil fuel sponsors help to worsen.

At the 2022 Tour de France, Team TotalEnergies rider Alexis Vuillermoz collapsed from heatstroke at the finish line of stage nine, vomiting in temperatures that surpassed 40°C. He was taken to hospital and later diagnosed with a skin infection that required surgery.

“One of the worst days on the bike of my life”, he said after withdrawing from the race. “Exhausted from the first few miles, impossible to swallow anything. And 200km like that is long, very long”.

Parker says Edinburgh’s councillors recognise that fossil fuel sponsorship lacks public support and that the Tour’s high-profile will increase awareness of this tension. “Since we introduced the policy, I have only had positive emails from members of the public saying that this is clearly a sensible thing and they are very supportive.”

The contradiction of a sport that brands itself as sustainable being bankrolled by a polluting industry also puts athletes in a difficult position. In conversation with Play the Game, cycling journalist Matt Rendell points out that riders who favour less fossil fuel advertising have little room to say so: speaking up would set them against teams backed by fossil fuel sponsors, narrowing their options in a sport where most contracts are short-term.

Some riders have shown an interest in confronting climate change. 2023 Tour de France stage winner Michael Woods tracks his carbon footprint and encouraged others to do the same, but few riders have said much publicly since. Parker believes that the Edinburgh Grand Départ “needs to be used as a moment” where riders can feel more comfortable talking about climate change and fossil fuel sponsorship. If riders are wearing jerseys with covered-up fossil fuel sponsors, they are likely to be asked by the media what they think about it anyway.

At the 2025 Play the Game conference, Chris Horbel, a professor at the Department of Sport and Social Sciences at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, described how many athletes care more about the climate crisis than they let on, fearing backlash, while knowing they cannot solve this problem alone: “we need to keep in mind that it is natural for athletes to do everything they can to perform well in their competition. And some of the necessary actions might be detrimental for that, so we need athletes to speak up, but also to have issues taken up at other levels, the international level in particular, because this is where international competition is regulated”.

The perfect backdrop

Although welcoming high-carbon sponsors looks self-destructive for the sport, the fossil fuel industry has much to gain from the arrangement. “Cycling is so serviceable for them, isn't it?” Rendell says. “Rural France, and the landscapes the Tour goes through, offers such a perfect opportunity for oil companies to do what you cannot otherwise do, which is make this terrible product be associated with lovely little rural communities and beautiful landscapes, and these young, vigorous, incredibly healthy men and women on their bikes.”

This may seem straightforward when put like that, but research has found that people associate the collective emotion of sport with the brands that sponsor it.

Fossil fuel companies deliberately engage in sportswashing: marketing that distracts the public from harmful practices elsewhere. Over time, fans build positive associations with these brands, overlooking harmful practices and absorbing deceptive messaging: that these companies are reducing overall emissions, investing significantly in renewables, and that renewables are now a major part of their businesses.

Research has shown that by 1971, Total Oil (now TotalEnergies) received warnings of the “potential for catastrophic global warming from its products”. After becoming more informed in the 1980s, the company began “promoting doubt regarding the scientific basis for global warming” later in the decade, before settling on a position in the late 1990s of “publicly accepting climate science while promoting policy delay”.

The company continues to prioritise fossil fuel investment, with 14-16 billion USD of annual net Capex planned between 2027-2030. Of this, ~5-6 billion USD per year will be allocated to new oil and gas projects, compared to ~4 billion USD for low-carbon energies.

TotalEnergies has faced advertising bans and greenwashing rulings in the UK, France and Germany. In June 2026, the Paris Judicial Court ruled that TotalEnergies must account for climate risks linked to emissions from its oil and gas products, and set out plans to mitigate them within six months.

When asked about a Paris Judicial Court’s decision in October 2025 that TotalEnergies misled consumers with false claims about tackling climate change and reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, the company said the court “ordered the removal from its French affiliate’s website, aimed at its customers, of three paragraphs concerning the carbon neutrality ambition. Contrary to what certain media reported, the claims relating to the communication campaign associated with its name change in 2021, as well as those targeting its institutional communication on the role of natural gas and biofuels in the energy transition, were all rejected”.

ClientEarth is one organisation that successfully sued TotalEnergies for its misleading environmental claims. After Total Oil rebranded to TotalEnergies in 2021, ClientEarth lawyer Jonathan White argues, the energy company used its own cycling team to make it seem like TotalEnergies was focusing more on renewables, when it was actually promoting its image and business to sell more fossil fuel products.

“Fossil fuels are the dominant cause of climate change, and the increasing lives and property lost through heatwaves, floods, storms and instability from climate change”, White tells Play the Game. “This makes any promotional green claim by such fossil fuel companies very likely to be misleading.”

“The Tour de France will need to consider the judgment finding that TotalEnergies deliberately misled the public to ensure they are not involved in TotalEnergies advertising messages which have been judged false or misleading”, White adds.

After TotalEnergies’ rebrand, French cyclist Alexis Vuillermoz was quoted on the team’s website saying, “we are proud to wear the colours of the TotalEnergies group, which is truly opening up to other energy sources. We are talking more and more about the energy mix. This mix of colours perfectly represents our society of tomorrow".

At COP30, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné described the extended life of oil and gas as the “reality”, which Ben Parker says is “a really dangerous regression” and “not founded on any scientific basis”.

“What is the reality is that there is no liveable future possible where we see more oil and gas extraction, and that has to be the beginning of any conversation around the future of those industries”, says Parker.

Ahead of the 2025 Tour de France, TotalEnergies agreed to become jersey sponsor of British team INEOS Grenadiers (now Netcompany-INEOS) and end the sponsorship of its own team at the end of 2027. Pouyanné said the partnership with INEOS “expresses our shared interest for the Tour de France and elite cycling”.

INEOS, itself one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world, has previously called for the UK government to exempt the chemicals sector from climate taxes and lobbied aggressively to allow fracking in the UK.

The role of cities

Edinburgh is not the only city to have banned fossil fuel advertising. The Hague was the first city in the world to do so, a ruling White believes gave other cities confidence that “the wind of this judgement is behind them”. Stockholm and Göthenburg are implementing similar high-carbon advertising bans, while Sydney and Amsterdam have also voted to bar fossil fuel adverts from public spaces.

In 2022, France became the first European country to ban fossil fuel ads, although it was criticised for still allowing gas adverts and event sponsorships. Over 100 major UK companies have also called for a national ban on fossil fuel advertising. ClientEarth’s White says that “we need the spread of fossil advertising bans at the local level to be met with national and EU-level legislation to prohibit fossil fuel advertising outright”.

If the ban is upheld in Edinburgh for next year’s Tour, more cities are likely to question why they allow fossil fuel advertising. Freddie Daley, research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex, and campaigner for Cool Down and Badvertising – two organisations pushing to end high-carbon advertising in sport – recognises that if more city-level advertising bans are introduced, it would become “very difficult” for the Tour to keep staging Grands Départs abroad, and for the sport to keep passing through locations across its worldwide calendar.

If the 2027 Tour evades the full extent of Edinburgh’s fossil fuels policy, Daley warns that “the race could set a dangerous precedent for sport to become the only avenue for fossil fuel companies to advertise in cities with fossil fuel advertising bans”.

Will Edinburgh be the beginning of the end for fossil fuel money in cycling? Not on its own. One Grand Départ, however symbolic, will not sever relationships that fund teams, races and national federations across the sport.

But Edinburgh matters less as a single ban than as a test case, because the peloton has been here before. Tobacco money used to be prominent across cycling too, until changing health habits and the law made it untenable. The fossil fuel reckoning may arrive the same way, when the sport that sells itself on clean air can no longer afford the contradiction.

What about cycling’s governing body?

As an increasing number of cities and nations consider closing the door to fossil fuel advertising, should cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, be doing the same in its duty to the sport and its athletes?