Empowered on Two Wheels: The Revival of the Tour de France Femmes
Contents
<p>In July 1984, an American named Marianne Martin, riding on a shoestring and reportedly thousands of dollars in personal debt, won the first Tour de France Féminin. She rode 18 stages across France, wore yellow into Paris on the same day the men finished their own Tour, and collected prize money of roughly one thousand dollars — against the men’s winner, Laurent Fignon, who took home a sum many times larger. Martin’s victory was historic and almost immediately half-forgotten. The story of the Tour de France Femmes is really two stories: the race that existed, struggled, and died, and the very different race that was rebuilt from its memory nearly forty years later.</p>
<h2 id="before-the-beginning-a-sport-built-to-exclude">Before the beginning: a sport built to exclude</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Competitive road cycling did not merely neglect women; for long stretches it actively barred them. The men’s Tour de France launched in 1903 as a circulation stunt for the newspaper <em>L’Auto</em> and grew into the most prestigious bicycle race on Earth. Women who wanted to race in the early and middle twentieth century did so at the margins, often in the face of governing bodies that limited race distances “for their protection” — a paternalism that persisted, in the form of shorter permitted stages and fewer sanctioned events, for decades. This was the same broad pattern that kept women out of endurance sport generally; it took until 1984 for the Olympic marathon to admit women at all, a milestone in the same era as Martin’s ride.</p>
<h2 id="1984-to-1989-the-first-womens-tour">1984 to 1989: the first women’s Tour</h2>
<p>The 1984 Tour de France Féminin was organised by the Société du Tour de France, the same body behind the men’s race, and cleverly piggybacked on it: the women rode shortened versions of the men’s stages, finishing ahead of the peloton so crowds already lining the route saw both races. Marianne Martin, a climber from Michigan who had been racing seriously for only a couple of years, won the inaugural edition. She would later describe the prize money as almost an afterthought — the point was that the race existed at all.</p>
<p>For six editions the women’s Tour ran alongside the men’s. But the structural problems were relentless. There was little television money, minimal sponsorship, and a persistent legal difficulty: the “Tour de France” name and trademark could not simply be shared, and disputes over branding forced repeated changes. The Société wound its involvement down after 1989, and the event that limped on afterwards under other names never recovered the visibility of standing next to the men’s race.</p>
<h2 id="the-lost-decades">The lost decades</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Through the 1990s and 2000s a women’s stage race did survive in various forms, most durably as the <em>Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale</em>, but it was a shadow — chronically underfunded, shrinking in length, and eventually reduced from a full grand tour to a handful of stages before disappearing entirely by around 2009. Riders in this era have described racing hard mountain stages in front of a scattering of spectators and a single support car, then driving themselves to the next start, paying their own way, because there was no budget to do otherwise. The physical demands were identical to the men’s; the surrounding apparatus that turns an athletic feat into a career, a livelihood and a spectacle simply was not there. The paradox was cruel: the women racing in this period were often extraordinary athletes competing at the highest level, watched by almost no one, for almost no reward. The endurance and the audience had come uncoupled.</p>
<p>What kept the flame alive was not an institution but the riders themselves, and a slowly building campaign. In 2014 the organiser ASO — the modern successor to the old Société — created <em>La Course by Le Tour de France</em>, a single-day women’s race held on the Champs-Élysées circuit on the final day of the men’s Tour. It was, at best, a gesture: one day, no general classification, a token bolted onto the men’s finale. Riders and advocacy groups said so publicly and repeatedly.</p>
<h2 id="2022-rebuilt-not-revived">2022: rebuilt, not revived</h2>
<p>The pressure worked. In 2021 ASO announced a genuine multi-stage women’s race under the Tour de France banner, and in July 2022 the <em>Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift</em> rolled out of Paris as the men’s Tour concluded — eight stages, a full general classification, live daily television coverage, and a route with real mountains rather than a criterium loop. This was not the old race brought back to life so much as a new race built to a standard the old one never had.</p>
<p>The first modern winner was the Dutch rider Annemiek van Vleuten of Movistar, then 39 and already one of the most decorated cyclists of her generation. She began the race unwell, lost time early, and then produced a mountain performance on the penultimate stage so dominant that she finished the eight days more than three and a half minutes ahead of her compatriot Demi Vollering. The symbolism was hard to miss: a veteran who had spent her career in the sport’s under-resourced women’s ranks winning the race that ranks had spent decades demanding. The total prize purse — around a quarter of a million euros, with roughly fifty thousand for the winner — was still a fraction of the men’s, but it was a different order of magnitude from Martin’s thousand dollars in 1984.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-mountains-and-the-weather-are-the-point">Why the mountains, and the weather, are the point</h2>
<p>The modern Femmes route is deliberately hard: the organisers routed early editions over the gravel-and-champagne roads near Troyes and up brutal climbs such as the Grand Ballon and the Col du Tourmalet, terrain that makes for compelling television and settles races decisively. Mountain stages also expose riders to the full violence of a European summer — hail on high passes one hour, furnace heat on the valley roads the next — and the shifting extremes have become part of the drama. Anyone who has followed how European summers have been trending will recognise the backdrop; the same broad warming that runs through the <a href="/story/the-climate-change-chronicles-a-whirlwind-tour-through-earths-wacky-weather-history/">chronicle of Earth’s changing weather</a> now shapes how and when a mountain grand tour can safely be raced, with heat protocols and route timing under constant review.</p>
<h2 id="empowerment-as-infrastructure-not-slogan">Empowerment as infrastructure, not slogan</h2>
<p>It is tempting to frame the Femmes purely as an inspiration story, and it is one — but the more durable lesson is unglamorous. What killed the 1980s race was not lack of talent or courage; it was the absence of television deals, sponsorship, equal scheduling, and a protected trademark. What made 2022 stick was fixing those specific things. Breaking into a field built to exclude you is rarely about a single heroic performance; it is about building the boring machinery — money, media, governance — that lets the performances be seen and repeated. The same could be said of any woman who forced her way into a male-dominated arena and then reshaped it from within, from the concert stage to the boardroom, a pattern the career of a figure like <a href="/story/the-queen-of-country-celebrating-dolly-partons-legendary-journey-and-cultural-impact/">Dolly Parton</a> illustrates in a different key. Endurance sport offers the cleanest version of the argument, which is partly why the great mass-participation events such as the <a href="/story/the-great-london-marathon-a-race-through-time/">London Marathon</a> matter as social history as much as sport.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>Marianne Martin was the first American to win any Tour de France — man or woman — beating the men’s American winners to that distinction by several years, since Greg LeMond did not take the men’s Tour until 1986.</li>
<li>In the 1984 women’s race, the riders finished ahead of the men on shared stages, so spectators lining the road saw the women’s peloton first and the men’s afterwards.</li>
<li>The women’s Tour vanished largely over a trademark dispute: the “Tour de France” name could not simply be lent out, and the resulting rebrands sapped the event’s identity.</li>
<li>The 2022 Tour de France Femmes was won by a 39-year-old who started the race ill, lost time in the opening stages, and still won by more than three and a half minutes — one of the largest modern winning margins in the sport.</li>
<li>The gap between the winners’ cheques tells the whole history in one figure: roughly $1,000 in 1984 versus around €50,000 in 2022, a jump that has almost nothing to do with the riders and almost everything to do with television and sponsorship.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="closing-reflection">Closing reflection</h2>
<p>The neat version of this story is that women fought for a place at cycling’s table and finally got one. The truer version is stranger and more instructive: the place existed once, in 1984, and was allowed to collapse, and the fight of the following decades was less about breaking a door down than about proving that the door had already been open and quietly walled up again. Progress, it turns out, is not always a straight line from exclusion to inclusion. Sometimes a thing is won, lost through neglect rather than malice, and has to be won a second time — and the second victory has to be built out of contracts and cameras rather than courage, because courage was never what had been missing.</p>
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