This article originally appeared as part of the Cyclingnews 25th anniversary series, and to mark such an important milestone, the editorial team published 25 pieces of work that look back at the sport over the last quarter of a century.
The men’s Tour de France (opens in new tab)is rich in history, with its beginnings in 1903. A women’s version found its roots much later, and under a different organisation, as a one-off multi-day race won by the Isle of Man’s Millie Robinson in Normandy in 1955.
The women’s peloton wouldn’t see their first official launch of the women’s Tour de France until 1984, and American Marianne Martin won it. It was an 18-day race held simultaneously as the men’s event and along much of the same but shortened routes with shared finish lines. The Société du Tour de France, which later became part of Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) in 1992, managed both events.
The women’s Tour de France ended in 1989, and while ASO went on to organise women’s one-day races like La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, La Course, and the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes, the women’s peloton had not been included as part of the official Tour de France for the past 30 years.
Cyclingnews launched its first pages on the internet in 1995, six years after the women’s Tour de France had ended. We followed the lineage of the Tour Cycliste Féminin, which had started in 1992, and the re-named Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale until it came to an end in 2009.
Pierre Boué organised the Tour Cycliste Féminin and the Grande Boucle, and although it was not the women’s Tour de France, it was one of the most prominent women’s stage races of that period, and widely regarded as a women’s French Grand Tour.
In this feature, we take a look at how Cyclingnews covered the Tour Cycliste Féminin and the Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale through the 90s and early 2000s, along with ASO’s introduction of La Course in 2014.
Twenty-five years on from the start of Cyclingnews, an ASO-run women’s Tour de France, of the kind that existed from 1984-1989, takes place from July 24-31 in 2022 at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
Women’s Tour de France 1984-1989
We would be remiss not to highlight the inaugural edition of the women’s Tour de France in 1984 with memories from the overall champion Marianne Martin.
Following her historic victory, the next editions were won by Italy’s Maria Canins (1895-86) and France’s Jeannie Longo (1988-89). The Société du…
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