The dust has settled on the white gravel roads that played host to a stage of the first official women’s Tour de France in over thirty years. The publicity caravan vehicles are back in storage and the riders are on to their next round of races.
For those who’ve spent years campaigning for a women’s event with the same iconic clout as the Tour de France, it’s still hard to believe that ASO (which owns and runs the race) really, finally did what they claimed for so long was, for economic and logistical reasons, an impossible ask.
It was thanks to a 2013 campaign led by riders Kathryn Bertine, Marianne Vos and Emma Pooley, and Ironman triathlete Chrissie Wellington and a petition that raised more than 97,000 signatures that ASO finally created La Course. This one-day race held during the Tour occasionally stretched to two days and struggled to know what it was. Was it a cobbled criterium on the Champs Elysées? A one-day race in the mountains? A devil-take-the hindmost mountain TT hybrid?
Whatever it was, it ran for eight years, but never evolved into a proper stage race as riders, campaigners and fans had hoped.
A second wave campaign was led by Donnons des Elles au Vélo, which roughly translates as ‘Let’s give cycling some women’, but which is also a pun on ‘let’s give cycling wings’. This was organised by a group of primarily French cyclists from a club in the Parisian suburb of Courcouronnes and began in 2015 but really gained traction from 2018 onwards. The women, who are joined by riders from abroad, rode the entire route of the Tour de France a day ahead of the race, in order to demonstrate that women are perfectly capable of confronting the same long distances and difficulties, over three weeks, as the men. The extensive press coverage their campaign generated in the mainstream media—where the debate over the pros and cons of a three-week women’s race was much less nuanced—had the effect of making ASO look like its directors were still stuck in a 1980s time warp.
The impression that the ASO simply didn’t care, and perhaps only grudgingly ran La Course, was reinforced by the scant attention paid to the race by the French sports newspaper l’Equipe, which belongs to the same business empire. By 2019, La Course had become one of the most prestigious one day races on the women’s calendar, yet when Annemiek van Vleuten won it in thrilling style by chasing down Anna van der Breggen, the following day’s print…
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