RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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SportsMoney Why It Took 119 Years To Build A Tour de France For Women By Lindsey Darvin ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I am an expert on leadership, policy, and equity in sport and esport. Follow Author Jul 31, 2026, 09:30am EDT Jul 31, 2026, 10:32am EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Summary The fifth Tour de France Femmes highlights a century of deliberate exclusion for women in cycling, contrasting sharply with the men's race. Historically, women's events were "failed by design" due to underfunding, lack of media, and brand suppression by organizers, not a lack of interest or athletic capability. Myths about female fragility and commercial value, perpetuated by institutions like the UCI and biased sports science, systematically prevented growth. Despite women comprising 40% of global cyclists and demonstrating high engagement, competitive pathways were denied. The TdFF's current success proves that investment, proper marketing, and infrastructure are key to fostering participation and viewership, challenging a long history of institutional neglect. The goal now is to further expand this vital race.
On Saturday, Aug. 1, a field of 147 riders representing 21 teams will roll out of Lausanne, Switzerland, for the fifth edition of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. While the competitive product heading into these nine days of racing is undeniable, the short history of the event deserves far more scrutiny than it typically receives. The men’s Tour de France was first contested in 1903, while the women’s version, operated by the very same company in the Amaury Sport Organization, did not exist in any comparable form until 2022. That gap of more than a century was the result of a series of myths about women, their interest levels, their bodies, and their commercial value that were never supported by evidence and that continue to shape how cycling invests in half of its potential athletes and fans.
Women have been systematically locked out of cycling and competitive sport more broadly. And while most countries have played a significant part in constructing those barriers, France has also played central role and continues to lag behind in approaching equity. Before the 1920s, competitive sport in France was treated as an exclusively male domain, and when women began participating in greater numbers, the medical establishment responded with unfounded claims that strenuous exercise threatened female fragility and reproductive health. Similar claims were also making their way around the globe. The early Olympic movement reinforced those same attitudes by barring women from major track and field events altogether.
It ultimately took a Frenchwoman to force meaningful change. Alice Milliat grew tired of waiting for the International Olympic Committee to act, so she organized independent international competitions and launched the Women's World Games during the 1920s in a direct challenge to the governing bodies of the era. Her pressure campaign eventually pushed the Olympic movement toward broader inclusion for women.
The concept of a women's Tour de France is far from new. An early attempt at a women's stage race surfaced in 1955 and was quickly abandoned when organizers declined to invest in its future. The most prominent effort arrived decades later when the Tour de France Féminin ran from 1984 through 1989, producing genuine racing on French roads and legitimate stars of the sport, before collapsing due to limited budgets, unstable sponsorship, and almost nonexistent media coverage. The successor to the Tour de France Féminin, the Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, operated for years in a state of underfunding before fading from the calendar entirely.
The standard retelling holds that these races failed, and that framing deserves to be challenged directly because it converts a chain of deliberate decisions into something resembling natural market selection. These races were failed by the institutions surrounding them. Broadcasters declined to televise the events, which meant sponsors saw limited return on investment, which meant budgets remained small, which meant the races could never grow into sustainable properties. That self-reinforcing cycle of invisibility was then cited as proof that the product lacked a market.
After removing its own women’s events, the Tour’s ownership tightly guarded the Tour de France brand name, which prevented independent organizers from building a properly branded and funded equivalent for years. In a similar way, the US has experienced this type of suppression through branding within NCAA March Madness , when the women were banned from using the ‘March Madness’ branding and logos until the 2022 tournament. The same year the Tour de France Femmes began.
Beyond these discriminatory actions, the Union Cycliste Internationale compounded the problem for decades by enforcing strict limits on how far and how long women were permitted to race, restrictions that were rooted not in physiology but in the same unproven anxieties that Milliat had been fighting in the 1920s. Cycling executives treated women's racing as a minor novelty rather than an elite athletic competition worthy of equal scheduling and promotion, and every layer of the sport's infrastructure was arranged in ways that ensured a women's Tour could not thrive. Its inability to thrive was then offered as the justification for never building one.
The most used argument against investing in women’s sport suggests that the interest simply does not exist, and that participation gaps are based on individual inherent preferences rather than opportunity. It also happens to be the most thoroughly debunked argument in the history of sports policy, because the United States effectively ran the experiment that disproved it. Before Title IX in 1972, fewer than 300,000 U.S. ...
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