History of the Women's Tour de France
It dates back to 1955, when the first edition was held, but it was not repeated until 1984, when it began to be held in parallel with the men's Tour, so that even the winners of both shared the final podium in Paris.
In the early 1990s, the Tour organisation began to lose interest, so a parallel organisation began to organise the "Grande Boucle" which coincided with the Tour for 2 years and then took over as its successor until 2009, when women's cycling was deprived of the biggest cycling race in the world.
However, the struggle of many female cyclists, led by Marianne Vos, resulted in the Tour organisation resuming the women's race in 2014, albeit in a one-day classic format. This format lasted until 2021, switching back to a stage race format in 2022.
The women's race returned to the international World Tour calendar 33 years later in its first edition since 1989, at least in a format similar to the men's race, consisting of a stage race of considerable length. The Grand Boucle concluded on July 31, 2022. The triumph of this new Tour was resounding, with a greater number of media covering the race, with a considerable number of hours of broadcasting and with the arrival of major sponsors who promise to make the event grow in the coming years . However, it has taken a long time to get to this situation and many of those involved, both the riders themselves and the team leaders or communication professionals, wonder if it will take the same number of years for the event to continue to grow to match the men's event as much as possible.
Marianne Martin
She was the first American woman to win the Tour de France. She was in the 1984 edition and in 2022 she was in Paris. On that occasion, the women participating in the race did up to 18 stages. However, she assures that what she experienced last Sunday in the French capital is very similar to the spirit she felt when she participated in the most prestigious event in the world of cycling. With her experience, she confirmed that things are going in the right direction.
In her reflection, Marianne Martin also recognised other aspects that showed that, although this Tour is being a success in terms of integration and the fight for women's sport, there is still a long way to go. Even steps that she herself did not even ask herself whether she should take or not.
In her reflections, she says that during those Tours, she would sometimes go to the men's hotels to have dinner with them and see that their rooms, their food and their facilities were better than those of the women's teams. However, she did not ask herself if the women should have the same because she had internalized that this was the case... She did not have any greater expectations because she was racing the Tour after 30 years of women not being able to race, and that in itself was already a great success. With her victory in 1984 she received a trophy and a prize of 1,000 dollars. The winner of the men's Tour in that edition, the French legend Laurent Fignon, received more than 100,000. A difference that may seem from another time, but it is not so much.
The winner of the 2022 Tour de France received a prize of 50,000 dollars. The total prize money was 250,000 dollars. However, Jonas Vingegaard, winner of the Grand Boucle, received more than 500,000 dollars just for arriving in yellow on the Champs-Élysées. In total, the prize money for the men's category was more than 2,250,000 dollars.
Not only is there still a long way to go in terms of the length of the routes or in terms of increasing the number of days of competition, there is also a lot of work to be done on the economic side. It is necessary to equalise the prizes and increase the number of sponsors and patronage to continue promoting women's cycling by taking advantage of the popularity that events such as the Giro Rosa or the Tour have.
Comments (0)
There are no comments for this article. Be the first one to leave a message!