The Tour of Japan is an annual professional

road bicycle racing Road bicycle racing is the cycle sport discipline of road cycling, held primarily on Road surface, paved roads. Road racing is the most popular professional sport, professional form of bicycle racing, in terms of numbers of competitors, events and ...

stage race A race stage, leg, or heat is a unit of a race that has been divided in several parts for the reason such as length of the distance to be covered, as in a multi-day event. Usually, such a race consists of "ordinary" stages, but sometimes stages ...

held in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

since 1996 as part of the

UCI Asia Tour The UCI Continental Circuits are a series of road bicycle racing competitions which were introduced in 2005 by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) to expand cycling around the world. The five circuits (representing the continents of Africa, th ...

. It is sanctioned by the International Cycling Union (UCI) as a 2.1 category race.

History

Tour of Japan was formed as the successor of the Kokusai Cycle Road Race which began in 1982. In 1996, Tour of Japan began as a UCI category 2-5 stage race, and became category 2–4 in 1997. It was downgraded to category 2–5 in 2002. As the UCI race system was reformed in 2005, it was included in the

as a category 2.2 event. It became a category 2.1 event in 2013. The race has only been cancelled three times in its history. The 2003 edition was canceled for concern over the

2002–2004 SARS outbreak The 2002–2004 outbreak of SARS, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1), infected over 8,000 people from 29 countries and territories, and resulted in at least 774 deaths worldwide. The outbreak wa ...

, and the 2011 edition was canceled because of the

2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami The occurred at 14:46 JST (05:46 UTC) on 11 March. The magnitude 9.0–9.1 (M) undersea megathrust earthquake had an epicenter in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tōhoku region, and lasted approximately six minutes ...

. The 2020 edition was canceled due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. The 2021 edition was held as a class 2.2 event and a three-day stage race with all domestic teams, exempted by the UCI from the mandatory invitation of foreign teams under Japan's international travel restrictions. The 2022 edition was held as a four-stages, class 2.2 event.

Past winners

General classification

Notes

External links

* *
Statistics
at ''the-sports.org''
Tour of Japan
at ''cqranking.com'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Tour of Japan Cycle races in Japan UCI Asia Tour races Recurring sporting events established in 1996 1996 establishments in Japan