Uphill Battle: Creating and Sustaining the Women's Tour is no Easy Ride 🚵♀️
Avid cyclist and Los Angeles Sports Pundit Social Club host Kelsey Smith asks 'Does the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift have long-term staying power on a global scale?'
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By Kelsey Smith
The Tour de France is cycling’s most iconic event. It is for men.
Last summer saw the second running of a reincarnated Tour de France for women—formally, the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. It hit new heights, including a next-to-last stage in the Pyrenees, with a mountaintop finish, and a final-day time trial in Pau. Dutch standout Demi Vollering won the overall title.
Preliminary traction for the Tour de France Femmes has seemed promising. However, one can point to several other women’s leagues and events that, despite initial results, show struggle: the Premier Hockey Federation (died, summer 2023), the WNBA (survives only because of NBA financial support) and iterations of professional soccer before the NWSL (and even then, average team loses money on some $3 million to $4 million in annual revenue).
Is there enough support, emotional and financial, for the women’s Tour, known best by the acronym TDFFAZ, to continue?
Cycling as a sport has a deep history of being underfunded, male-dominated and polluted by performance-enhancing drugs. And – just because something has happened doesn’t mean it deserves to continue to. The marketplace of ideas is one thing – the real marketplace is the real tell. To survive, TDFFAZ, and women’s sports more broadly, must prove ability to compete in the real marketplace.
Unlike men’s leagues, typically funded through institutional investment, women’s are increasingly being funded through venture capital and special purpose vehicles. Kara Nortman, a managing partner at global sports venture fund Monarch Collective and a founder of the soccer club Angel City FC, is one such investor. She noted a key piece of these investments, one that has yet to be seen but will need to, are returns:
“The investment returns matter just as much as the investment purpose. I think of these deals as a form of stakeholder capitalism. Women’s sports is culture, and investors are starting to notice that potential.”
Sitting in the center of TDFFAZ: Kate Veronneau, a former Division I basketball player turned professional cyclist who is director of women’s strategy and content at Zwift, an online cycling platform.
As she tells it, reigniting the women’s race required several years of lobbying, start-stop negotiations, and convincing the Amaury Sport Organization – the ASO, which organizes the Tour de France – to get on board.
Some History:
In September 1955, 41 women lined up at the start line for the first-ever women’s edition of the Tour de France: Tour de France Femmes. Five days and 373 kilometers later, Millie Robinson was crowned champion, a title she would hold for the next 29 years.
Fast forward to 1984, when ASO reintroduced a women’s event. It lasted five years. Why canceled? Financial reasons.
The women’s race would not return until July 2022, when it obtained a title sponsor: Zwift. The first edition of the rebirth consisted of an eight-day race that began on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, in conjunction with the final stage 21 of the men's Tour de France, and ended on La Super Planche des Belles Filles, where Holland’s Annemiek van Vleuten, winner of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic time trial, was crowned the overall champion.
How and why Zwift?
In the midst of the pandemic, in 2020, the platform held the first Virtual Tour de France. This six-stage event, featuring the world’s best professional riders, went off when most professional sports had come to a halt.
“We’ve long championed parity on our platform, so for this race,” Veronneau said, “we offered equal distance and broadcast for the men’s and women’s pro fields. “The racing was outstanding, with the women’s racing even proving more entertaining than the men’s. It was clear the athletes really embraced the spotlight.”
Zwift did too, so much so that it signed on for four years – outside. In the elements. The way the Tour really is.
The Tour ranks among the world’s most watched sporting events, with an estimated 3.5 billion viewers, so most assume there has always been a race for men and for women.
From the Department of the Obvious, this presented a marketing opportunity.
Zwift’s #watchthefemmes campaign grew 800% across social media channels. Worldwide media coverage offered considerable praise, CNN calling the race a "rebirth," Cycling Weekly saying the race was a "huge step for the women's sport” and L'Équipe saying people came to see "the Tour de France without making the slightest distinction between men and women.”
Across the eight stages, the 2022 TDFFAZ attracted an average live audience of 2.9 million and in total, the race achieved a cumulative live audience of 23.2 million people. For comparison, the one-day Michigan-Ohio State 2023 football game: an average of 19.1 million viewers.
Riders praised the event.
Third-place winner Katarzyna Niewiadoma noted it was one of the most difficult races the women's peloton has taken part in. Fourth-place Juliette Labous explained she was surprised by the large crowds, saying,
“I knew there would be a lot of people, but I didn't expect as much as this."
Photographer Dominique Powers’ saw her experience significantly evolve. In 2022, she was contracted by a cycling brand to shoot the first three stages of the event, with no support for travel or accommodations. In 2023, she shot for a brand that also sponsored TDFFAZ. In addition to shooting the entire race, this brand handled accommodations and provided her with VIP accreditation and an on-the-ground support team.
On Oct. 25, 2023, race director Marion Rousse unveiled the 2024 Tour de France Femme route: eight stages across seven days between Aug. 12-18. The race is set to start in the Netherlands and then travel south into France and finish atop the iconic Alpe d'Huez.
The near-term future of the event would appear to hinge on several factors: ASO’s adaptability, evolution of the course and number of stages, fan support, and brand engagement.
Potential challenges, including changes in streaming platforms, limited prize purse funds, and validity of the athletes and their performance, underscore the fragility of keeping momentum going.
As we head into Year Three, the question remains: does the women’s Tour have long-term staying power on a global scale? For Veronneau and Powers, clearly, the answer is yes. However, the true answer remains to be seen.
“This is just the beginning,” Veronneau asserted. “Our job now, as [an] industry, [as] fans, [as] sporting media, and [as] riders – is to keep the fires burning bright. We need to work together to ensure this big moment sparks action and investment at all levels of the sport.”
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THE PODCAST
Want to hear more from my conversation with Kate?
We discuss the launch of the Zwift Academy, what community looks like on Zwift, the (positive?) impact of COVID, The launch of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, making triathlon a stadium sport, an opportunity for the Apple Vision Pro? and much, much more.
Listen to the full podcast via the link below - and I’d love to hear what you think!👇
The Sports Pundit Social Club (SPSC) was designed to enable you to hang out with other readers (i.e. exceptional folk from across the industry) without the heavy cost that often goes with traditional sports industry events.
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