This past weekend, you may have caught Kristen Faulkner winning Olympic gold in front of a huge, booming crowd and thought, Wow, that was cool. Too bad there's no more of it. Wrong! The Tour de France Femmes, the best women's stage race of the year, is set to kick off on Monday in Rotterdam. The race typically starts directly on the heels of the men's Tour, but because of the Paris Olympics, the Grand Départ is almost one month later.
It's quite remarkable for the Tour de France Femmes to cement such a status after only two editions. It was an unnecessary battle to get the UCI (cycling's governing body) and the ASO (the organization that runs the Tour de France) to agree to hold such an event in the first place. The women's peloton had to fight for decades to convince organizers of what was an obviously good idea, and after a handful of false starts and half-measures, they finally put together a stage race without having to qualify it with a weird name (La Course by Le Tour de France). The race was an instant success; the later start and post-Olympics hype should give this year's edition an excellent runway.
The eight-stage race has been so popular and grown so quickly because of the quality of the competition. In 2022, Annemiek van Vleuten dominated the field; although she couldn't hang with Demi Vollering in 2023 as her SD Worx team put down an incredible show of force, the racing was livelier. Riders like Ricarda Bauernfeind and Emma Norsgaard won fantastic breakaway stages, and Lotte Kopecky shocked everyone by getting on the podium.
This year, Vollering is once again the most interesting rider in the peloton, and her team is once again the strongest. She's spent months at an altitude camp with European champ Mischa Bredewold, only coming back to sea level to work for Lorena Wiebes in the Olympic road race. Vollering has been totally untouchable in stage races this year, winning all four that she's started, taking eight stages along the way, and finishing on the podium of four major one-day races. The former florist is one of my favorite riders to watch.
Vollering is steady and always seems to be in the right place. She's also a maniac who wants to win everything. "As soon as I am on the bike and I know I can win, I am a killer," she said recently. “I think you need to have this. Something comes up that is not always there in normal life. It’s a really strong feeling that you want something." Consider her race-winning move in last year's Tour. There was no gamesmanship, only a display of strength nobody could match.
But this year will be more tense. It'll be Vollering's final season with SD Worx, and the two parties were clearly not on the same page this past spring when the team announced her departure, pointing out that she turned down a "generous offer." Her team's been clear about their support for her at this Tour, and she's the clear favorite. Of the challengers, Kasia Niewiadoma and Elisa Longo Borghini are most intriguing. Niewiadoma, a Canyo-SRAM rider, finished third in each of the first two editions of the Tour, and she's never met a climb she won't try to attack on. Longo Borghini of Lidl-Trek got the better of Vollering this spring, won the Giro in a close one over Kopecky, and is racing angry after she fell short at the Olympics. Other teams could threaten: FDJ's duo of Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig and Evita Muzic and DSM's Juliette Labous are also worth taking seriously. There could be some teamwork, especially between French teams, to try and end Vollering's run.
This Tour will be a race of unprecedented difficulty, with most of the climbing backloaded. The course moves in a direct line south from Rotterdam and gets steadily harder. Crepe-flat sprint stages give way to lumpy Belgian parcours, and the race finishes with back-to-back summit finishes on Le Grand-Bornand and the Alpe d'Huez. The small time trial and the early stages will create some gaps, but the famed climb's Tour debut is fittingly grand, as it will most likely determine the winner.
This race is going to be such a party, and it's entirely deserved. The top of women's cycling is ripe for rooting interests: a clear superstar outpacing a pack of hungry, skilled riders eager to destroy her, and then a bunch of aging superstars still holding on. If Kristen Faulkner's Olympic victory served as your introduction, the Tour de France Femmes is ready to give you eight entertaining days of similar combat.
