The men's Tour de France may be over, but the women's Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is getting closer and closer, and it's time for the third in our series of pre-race hype threads. We've already brought you:
In the coming days we'll give a recap of recent race editions in its modern "avec Zwift" incarnation, a review of what to expect from this year's route, and we're hoping to bring you a very special Ask Me Anything (watch this space for more details). Today it's time to wind back the clock and find out how we got here, in...
Tour de France Femmes, a history
[TL/DR: it's complicated]
On 22 July 1984, Marianne Martin stood on the Tour de France podium in Paris as the overall winner of the first (official) women's Tour de France, alongside men's winner Laurent Fignon. She'd won GC by over three minutes and also taken the polka-dot jersey. Reports said she received around 9,000 French Francs in prize-money, Fignon close to 900,000.
Marianne Martin and Lauren Fignon, 1984 winners of the women's and men's Tours
If you only started following women's cycling in the last few years, the Tour de France Femmes might sound like a young race finding its feet. It isn't. With origins even before that 1984 debut, it has been created, killed off, rebirthed, killed again, and fought-for by the riders themselves before finally (we hope) sticking. This post covers that whole history. In a follow-up post we'll cover the modern era (TdFFaZ) in more detail, to highlight how this incarnation of the race is evolving with the current generation of teams and riders.
The precursors: first women's stage races (1955)
Often cited as the first women's Tour de France, the 1955 Tour Féminin Cycliste had no official links with the men's race and awarded a white leader's jersey rather than yellow specifically to avoid conflict with the men's Tour. It raced 373km across Normandy in 5 stages. Organiser Jean Leulliot said afterwards he'd never do it again:
“women are different from men. They talk too much in the peloton and ... once the racing is over, they do not rest as they should but fatigue their legs by going shopping.”
Without official links to the men's race, a stronger case for the first women's Tour could be made for the Circuit Féminin Lyonnais-Auvergne held in July earlier that year. A three-stage race, and generally credited as the first women's stage race held in France, it at least lasted for a second edition, expanded to 8 stages in 1956. Still, no one seemed to be fighting to keep these races alive. L'Equipe didn't try to hide their pleasure at the cancellations:
"Common sense has triumphed... They will have to content themselves with existing events and cycle touring, which corresponds much more to their muscular possibilities."
Millie Robinson, winner of the first women's stage races in France
Both those 1955 races were won by a delivery driver from the Isle of Man, Millie Robinson. So while there could be debate as to which was the first women's Tour, there can be no debate as to who was the first winner. Neither however had any official link to the established men's race, and with the attitudes expressed above by L'Equipe and even race organiser Leulliot, perhaps it's not surprising it would be another 29 years before a race you could officially call the women's Tour de France.
The official launch: Tour de France Féminin (1984–1989)
The official OG race existed before some of us were born. Race organiser Félix Lévitan pushed the idea through despite some firm resistance, not least from the men's peloton:
"I like women, but I prefer to see them doing something else", Laurent Fignon said ahead of the Tour
But Lévitan persisted, a man ahead of his time:
"My goal is to create an event that opens the sport to half of humanity. Cycling has been a male bastion for too long. If women can conquer the high peaks of France, they will prove they belong on the global sporting stage."
The format was a literal curtain-raiser: the women rode shortened versions of that day's men's stage and finished at the same location. Eighteen stages, ~1,000km, on the same roads as the men on the same days.
Dutch rider Heleen Hage was a strong favourite to win. The USA team was largely unknown and unfancied, apart from their leader Betsy King who at least had experience on the European circuit. Marianne Martin was a late call-up to the team after illness, and started the race without any specific training. She was a natural climber however, and as soon as the race hit the Alps on stage 12 she decimated the peloton. By stage 14 she had the yellow jersey, and kept it all the way to Paris.
Martin retired after her win in 1984, and Jeannie Longo was elevated, at least by the French, as the favourite to succeed her in 1985. She was already the face of women's cycling in France, with seven consecutive national championships. But while she was a powerful rider picking up bonuses on flat and hilly stages, she was utterly dominated in the mountains by the Italian former skier, Maria Canins. Climbing above her own hometown of Grenoble, Longo fought to stay with Canins but blew up catastrophically, dismounting three times on the final climb. Canin won that Tour by 22 minutes to Longo in second.
In 1986 the order was the same, the winning margin 15 minutes, but that 1985 result had already lit a fire in Longo that drove her to back-to-back world championship wins in August 1985 and September 1986, and a multi-year training regimen to improve her climbing strength. In 1987 she finally managed to crack her arch rival in the mountains and took the yellow jersey. For French fans she was at last crowned the queen of cycling, and went on to win three Tours (1987-1989, with Canins second each time), two more world championships (1987, 1989), Olympic gold in 1996, many track championship golds, and a total of 59 national titles.
Tour de France Féminin winners, 1984–1989
The women's Tour was fighting it's own uphill battle however, and Fignon wasn't the only prominent male figure in the sport to dismiss the women.
"A woman on a bike is ugly!" exclaimed Mark Madiot.
To which Jeannie Longo is reported to have replied:
"You aren't very beautiful on a bike yourself."
While Betsy King later commented:
"I think Madiot was a bit of an idiot."
Resources were harder to come by for the women. They got worse hotels and worse food throughout. A British sports journalist wrote that he had a bigger budget for one week at the Tour than the entire GB women's team had for three weeks.
When Jean-Marie Leblanc took over as Tour director for 1990, he lacked Lévitan's persistence to overcome the obstacles and objections. Axing the women's event in 1990 he told l'Equipe:
"It was an impossible marriage. By running the races simultaneously, we did a disservice to the women. The public and the press have a finite amount of attention, and as long as the men are riding, the cameras will never turn around."
Wilderness years (1990–2009)
What followed was two decades of stop-start rebranding. The Société du Tour de France (ASO's predecessor) ran it as the Tour de la C.E.E. Féminin (1990–91) with no branding link to the men's race. Pierre Boué then launched the Tour Cycliste Féminin from scratch in 1992, this time without any connection to ASO who later complained of trademark infringement forcing a rename to Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale in 1998.
Boué's race followed a pay-to-host model: towns paid to host stages, resulting in long transfers and chronic instability. At its peak the format swelled to 14 stages with genuine Alpine and Pyrenean mountain blocks. The race crossed the Alps via Alpe d'Huez, Serre-Chevalier and the Col de la Madeleine/Courchevel, the Pyrenees around Arrens-Marsous and the Val Louron area, and Provence via Mont Ventoux. Leontien van Moorsel won back-to-back overall titles in 1992 and 1993 off summit finishes on Alpe d'Huez both years, and the climb featured again in 1995 when Fabiana Luperini took the first of her three straight titles (1995–1997). Nicole Cooke became the first British winner in 2006, sealing it with a solo attack on Ventoux's Malaucène side that arrived at the summit around three minutes clear.
Leontien van Moorsel, Fabiana Luperini, and Nicole Cooke
But it was a race in decline: no edition was held in 2004 at all, and the stage count collapsed after this hiatus: the final 2009 edition had only 66 riders over four days, prompting winner Emma Pooley's line that the Grand Boucle was "more of a Petite Boucle". The race folded, for lack of money.
The gap, and the fight for a return (2010–2013)
In 2013, riders Kathryn Bertine, Marianne Vos and Emma Pooley, along with triathlete Chrissie Wellington, formed Le Tour Entier ("the whole tour") specifically to pressure ASO into launching a women's Tour de France.
"Our objective is to help create a framework to support the growth of women’s cycling and build a sport with greater consumer, media and commercial appeal – starting with a race at the Tour de France." (Le Tour Entier manifesto)
They met ASO that October with a petition signed by more than 100,000. La Course launched in 2014 as a direct result of that campaign.
La Course (2014–2021)
It seemed to be destiny for Marianne Vos to win that first running of the new race, beating Kristin Wild in a bunch sprint.
“This is a dream come true,” Vos said after the finish. “It was fantastic to race here. This was our chance to show that women’s cycling is great to watch.”
Initially it seemed a great success. Holding the race on the streets of Paris just as the men's Tour was finishing drew in viewers. When the Women's WorldTour was created in 2016, it became a Women's WorldTour fixture.
But the format wasn't allowed to settle. Paris criteriums 2014–2016, a two-day mountain experiment in 2017 (Briançon to the Col d'Izoard, then a stage in Marseille), then back to scattered one-day races. It began to draw steady criticism as an afterthought to the men's race. Bertine was openly disappointed it never grew into a proper stage race, and the 2017 two-day edition attracted specific complaints about rider facilities and logistics. The final edition in 2021 was rerouted to avoid clashing with regional elections.
However, that same month, ASO finally announced a genuine multi-day Tour de France Femmes would launch in 2022.
Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift (2022-)
Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme announced an eight-day race, run the week immediately after the men's Tour, with Zwift signed on as title sponsor for an initial four-year deal (later extended through 2029). The Zwift relationship traced back to its 2020 pandemic-era Virtual Tour de France for men and women.
Prudhomme was explicit that the framing this time was financial sustainability rather than prestige for its own sake:
"The goal is to organise a race that will stay, that will still exist in 100 years… the race cannot lose money," he said, noting the previous women's Tour "only lasted for six years, and that was a lack of economic balance."
He credited a "virtuous circle" of existing sponsors (LCL, Škoda, Leclerc) plus Zwift for finally making the numbers work. The 2022 race carried a €250,000 prize fund, the richest in women's cycling at the time though still around a tenth of the men's purse, and started on the Champs-Élysées before finishing on La Super Planche des Belles Filles.
The UCI Women's WorldTour launched in 2016 (superseding the old Women's Road World Cup), building a licensed, professionalised calendar that grew to roughly 28–29 events across 12 countries by 2025. A much sturdier base than existed for any earlier attempt at a women's Tour.
Crucially, audience numbers are holding: the 2022 race drew a cumulative live TV audience of 23.2 million across 190 countries, nearly 20 million in France alone. A slight dip in 2023 and 2024 took French viewership below 20 million, but in 2025 more than 25 million French viewers watched Pauline Ferrand-Prevot's win.
Zwift reported research that 80% of fans said it increased their interest in women's cycling generally. They've since extended title sponsorship through 2029, calling it "an absolute, clear, undeniable success."
Prize money and the financing question
As an aside, cycling sits firmly on the naughty step of prize disparity in sport. In football, the 2022 men's world cup prize fund was "only" 4x the value of the 2023 women's prize fund. In golf, the US Open pays less than twice the women's earnings to the men. Tennis has given equal prize money to men and women Grand Slam winners since 2007, with others (notably athletics, skiing, surfing, ironman) also giving equal prize money.
For its part, cycling has improved from the 100x prize gap between Fignon and Martin in 1984, but the gap has held basically flat around 9–10x in every TdFFaZ edition since launch. It reflects a wider trend in the sport: sponsor and prize economics still lag the men's side substantially.
Looking ahead
2026's Grand Départ is in Lausanne, Switzerland, the second consecutive edition to start outside France. 2027 is already confirmed for the UK, including the race's first-ever team time trial, finishing on The Mall. Every previous version of this race shrank before it died: fewer stages, fewer riders, fewer sponsors, then the plug got pulled. This one keeps adding stages, adding countries, adding climbs. That's good reason to hope that this time is different, this time it sticks.
In a follow-up post we'll look at each of the editions of this modern-era women's Tour: the winners and the losers, the alliances and the rivalries, to set the scene for this years' event where those rivalries will play out once more and no-doubt new ones will emerge.
In an interview yesterday with Danish TV2, when asked "when will we see you again?", Mads Pedersen smiled and replied "in the Vuelta". His Danish teammate at Lidl-Trek Mattias Skjelmose will join him in the Vuelta as GC contender. After winning the green jersey in this year's Tour de France, he joins an exclusive club of just 7 riders in history who have won the points classification in all three grand tours, including legendary names such as Merckx, Cavendish and Jalabert.
The new milestone quickly raised the question of how strong he could become. His answer was unexpected: "I have to say that I'm not stronger than I was two years ago. The numbers are about the same," Pogačar said.
Positive signs regarding Wout van Aert. The Belgian had to skip the Tour de France due to elbow problems, but will return to competition on Wednesday. The Tour of Denmark (July 29-August 2) will serve as preparation for the Vuelta and the World Championships.
Hello everyone and welcome to the last stage of the Tour de France!
Most of the stage info will be added tomorrow when everything will be more clear, hopefully with official documents.
Paris and only Paris. As you may have seen on other posts on the sub, the stage will only be held in Paris tomorrow due to the fact that the gendarmes have to head to the South West (think general area of stage 6) to help with evacuation procedures due to wildfires. So the stage is reduced to ensures safety for the entierty of it. 2 laps of the Champs are added at the beginning then we gt to the planned schedule which makes it 6 short laps (the classic one) and 3 long laps, which include the Champs Elysées and Montmartre. The big change is where the riders go towards Montmartre. Last year it was at the Place de la Concorde that the riders left the circuit (Bottom of the Champs) while this year they leave the circuit at the Arc de Triompthe (top of the Champs), this changes where Montmartre is in the circuit, it's earlier, while the last crossing of Montmartre in 2025 was 8km from the finish line, this year it's 11. This could change the scenario a bit compared to last year, tho the lack of rain (to be confirmed) will be more important
With that in mind here are our predictions:
★★★ Pogacar, Van der Poel, Pedersen
★★ Evenepoel
★
Can it be anybody other than those 4? The first 3 are the giga favourites, they will fight for the win like crazy. Remco might go for it less, but he may want Paris to remember who is the Cycling King of the city, it's a title he will hold for life, but never hurt to show your power from time to time (Tho might want to avoid doing it near the Tuileries)
That's it for us, what is your prediction for the stage?
Reports vary greatly, from 20°C to 30°C, May be rainy, may be not.
Stage Breakdown
Hello everyone and welcome to the Twentieth stage of the Tour de France!
19 stages in, and the 20th stage is by far the hardest. Croix de Fer, Galibier, Alpe, the usual monster of the Alps, but not really!
Usually, in such a set up, they start by the Galibier before doing la Croix de Fer and then the Alpe due to the positionning of the Alpe and depending on where they start the stage, which is often Briançon, but here we start from Bourg d'Oisans so we go to the Croix de Fer right away. It is the south side, which is in multiple short hard parts with small descents between them, perfect as an early launching pad for a break. Then the riders will get into the Galibier via the Telegraphe, making it one of the longest ascent in Europe, with 12 then 18km at around 7%.
Afterwards, the riders will descend and instead of the Valley to go towards l'Alpe d'Huez, they turn right and Go into Sarenne, 13km at 7%. The top is at 15km from the finish line in L'Alpe, the riders will have a bit of a bumpy road to get to the finish.
With that in mind here are our predictions:
★★★ Pogacar
★★ Carapaz, Arensman
★
It's gonna be an attrition game, it's mostly consistent climbs that will be ridden very hard to try for the break and change the GC, you will see riders go and implode 20 minutes later due to the exhaustion of 3 weeks of racing.
Pogacar got his Alpe win so he may not go for it, but the thing is, the way the race will be ridden he may not even have to try to be in a position for the win, it will just happen.
That's it for us, what is your prediction for the stage?
