director tour de france

Friday, April 26, 2024 7:21 pm (Paris)

• Tour de France

Who is Marion Rousse, the director of the women's Tour de France?

A former professional cyclist, the director of the Tour de France Femmes has carved out a niche for herself in a male-dominated world.

By  Robin Richardot

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Marion Rousse, 30, keeps adding to her list of roles in the cycling world. A former racing cyclist and a pundit for France Télévisions, she is now also the director of the Tour de France Femmes, which will take place from July 24 to 31. Despite an attempt in 1955, and several editions in the 1980s (marked by rider Jeannie Longo's success), the women's version of France's most important cycle race has never managed to establish itself.

"When I was a little girl, I watched the Tour de France on TV in awe. And when I started my career, I suspected that I would never have the chance to race in it," Ms. Rousse wrote on social networks after being nominated as director of the Tour de France Femmes in October. "Women riders have felt for too long that they were not legitimate, because they did not participate in France's number one cycling event. This isn't a gift being given to them, they deserve it," she said recently.

A family of cyclists

Born in the north of France, Ms. Rousse grew up in a family crazy about cycling. Three of her cousins – Olivier Bonnaire and David and Laurent Lefèvre – were professional riders. Her father, a machine operator, participated in amateur competitions. "I used to follow my father in all his races, even in my stroller," she said.

At the age of six, she said she wanted to ride too. Her father refused. Her mother then helped her to take her first cycling proficiency certificate in secret. "A week later, my father took me on my first ride and he never let go of me again," she said. Her idols at the time were all men. "Of course, I knew Jeannie Longo. But I never saw her compete, so I identified more with men," she explained.

A focus on media

Ms. Rousse says she has "naturally" integrated into this male-dominated world. In 2012, she won the French national road race title. Thanks to that accolade, she was invited on to Les Rois de la pédale ("Kings of the Pedals"), Eurosport's flagship cycling program. "At the time, I didn't want to be in the media at all," she said, adding: "I went there to understand the world of TV."

A few months later, Guillaume Di Grazia, editor-in-chief of the program, offered her a job as a pundit for the 2013 Tour of Spain. "At the time, I was wearing three hats: racing cyclist, TV pundit and I was working at the Etampes town hall because my salary as a sportswoman was not enough. But it was too hard," she said. She retired from the sport two years later, when she was just 25, to devote herself entirely to her television career.

Sexism and life on screen

In 2017, Ms. Rousse became the first woman to commentate the Tour de France on France Télévisions. "I couldn't make any mistakes. I didn't want to be the girl they put there just because they needed to have one," she said. In spite of her successful career as a commentator, which has won her praise in the cycling world, Ms. Rousse is still a target for sexist comments – notably about her private life. She was married to cyclist Tony Gallopin and is now in a relationship with two-time cycling world champion Julian Alaphilippe.

She is used to brushing aside nosy questions and says her private life does not affect how seriously she takes her work. She has served as deputy director of the Tour de la Provence since 2019 and of the Tour de Savoie Mont-Blanc since 2020 – and now she'll be applying the same discipline to the Tour de France Femmes.

Robin Richardot

Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr ; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.

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Home > Events > Cycling > Tour de France > History > Directors

Tour de France directors

Here is a list of each of the directors of the Tour de France.

• 1903 to 1939 Henri Desgrange
• 1947 to 1961 Jacques Goddet
• 1962 to 1986 Jacques Goddet and Felix Levitan
• 1987 to 1988 Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet
• 1988 to 1989 Jean-Pierre Courcol
• 1989 to 2005 Jean-Marie Leblanc
• 2005 to present Christian Prudhomme

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• Trivia The tour started in Denmark with 3 stages, with ca. 1,6 million spectators on the side of the road. 4 stages was won by Danes (Magnus Cort, Jonas Vingegaard, Mads Pedersen and Jonas Vingegaard) and ended With Jonas Vingegaard as the overall winner of the yellow and dotted jersey. On a side note, another dane won a stage in Tour the France Femmes ( Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig)

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Tour de France: analysing what makes cycling’s premier race exciting

Professeur en Stratégie et en Entrepreneuriat, TBS Education

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Gaël Gueguen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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In 2019, the Tour de France changed its rules so that teams consisted of eight riders instead of nine. Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour, justified the decision by citing safety issues (fewer riders, therefore less risk of crashes) and the dynamism of the race (fewer riders, therefore fewer locked-in stages). The change was initially proposed in 2017 by the International Cycling Union (UCI), and other major races such as the Tour d’Italie (the Giro) et the Tour d’Espagne (the Vuelta) also followed suit.

While the change was controversial , major sporting events often adjust their rules to improve safety, spectacle, fairness or possible economic interests; Formula 1 is a classic example.

With the 109th edition of the Tour de France starting on 1 July in Copenhagen, Denmark, how does the future look for La Grande Boucle ?

Slipping interest from spectators – but also a rebound

Commentators and viewers of the Tour de France are entranced with its storied past, and many assert that it was better “before” – there was more uncertainty, more spectacle, fewer locked-in races. The thought is that cycling epics of the past were because technological had not yet taken over from the human factor, and the striking black-and-white images of the classic battles bring the idea home. Philosopher Roland Barthes called the Tour de France a “modern myth” and linked it to the importance of collectively held beliefs built in the past.

Technology such as radio headsets that relay orders from team managers and components that measure riders’ power are regularly accused of dulling the Tour de France. A decade ago, we were already paying attention to the impact of radios on the course of the races , and the debate is far from over.

While the Tour’s viewership has been steadily falling in recent years , the 2021 edition had an overall audience of 42.4 million , a record. The creation of half-stages, time bonuses, the introduction of different jerseys, intermediate sprints and other measures have all been taken to make the race more dynamic, the last two editions of which were won by Slovenian rider Tadej Pogacar.

Does this mean that such changes have helped the Tour de France become more interesting to follow?

The value of the yellow jersey

For the sake of consistency, our analysis will take as its starting point the 1969 tour, when branded teams returned , more than five decades’ worth of data.

Over the past 50 years, the average speed of the race has increased (nowadays, just under 41 km/h) while the total distance has decreased. The equipment is also better, the teams are more structured, and the preparation of the riders is even more serious. The proof is in that the drop-out rate in the Tour de France has been falling – more than ever, the presence of team members is essential right to the end.

The following figure shows the percentage of final drop-out rate and the average final speed.

We can also see that there is a clear decrease in the average gaps between the final winner and the runners-up. The following figure shows, for the last five decades, the gap between the winner and his runner-up and between the winner and the third.

Could this be a sign of a race that is becoming more and more competitive? One should be wary of such an interpretation, as the gaps can be controlled while minimising the risk, thanks to the work of the team members who control the race. So what objective criteria allow us to think that a Tour de France is truly disputed and potentially interesting to follow?

Deliberately putting aside the jerseys or stage victories, the interest of the race is often linked to the “battle” for the yellow jersey (the first in the time classification). In other words, if control of the yellow jersey is uncertain, there should be a greater interest in following the race.

The uncertainty inherent in the control of the yellow jersey is based on two dimensions: the strong variation of the riders wearing it throughout the race and the weakness of the final gaps.

The 2010s, the era of “controlled” Tours

Based on the data collected on the website procyclingstats.com , we made a series of measurements for each Tour concerning the number of different yellow jersey wearers, the number of days the final winner held the jersey, the number of the stage that saw the last yellow jersey change hands, and then, as seen above, the final gaps between the first three.

An analysis allows us to position and rank the 51 Tours de France since 1969 as shown in the following diagram. (Note that while the US rider Lance Armstrong’s seven victories were withdrawn due to doping, the data has been retained for statistical analysis.)

The top-left quadrant (in red) corresponds to the Tours that are strongly dominated (large gaps and few different yellow jerseys). We will call them “locked” races, and they’re often the least interesting to follow. We will find a good number of Tours from the 1970s with the domination of the Belgian champion Eddy Merckx. The last “locked” Tour was in 2014 with the victory of Italian Vincenzo Nibali when several favourites abandoned.

The top-right quadrant (in orange) corresponds to Tours where the number of riders wearing the yellow jersey has varied greatly, but the final gap is significant. This is a classic pattern during the 1980s when large gaps were created. These are “open and then closed” Tours.

The bottom-left quadrant (in blue) shows Tours where the final gaps are smaller but the control of the yellow jersey is higher. These are the “controlled” Tours, the basic trend of the 2010s with the victories of the British team Sky with Bradley Wiggins, Christopher Froome and Geraint Thomas.

The racing patterns of Spain’s Miguel Indurain in the 1990s are linked to this category. With the strength of his team and his domination of the time trial, the winner does not need to open up a big gap. It is a scientific management of the race where the “marginal gains” prove decisive and the suspense is short-lived.

The bottom-right quadrant corresponds to the most interesting Tours de France – in our opinion – because the final gap is small and there was a strong variation in the yellow jersey holders. They include 1983 (the first victory of Laurent Fignon, with 20 different stage winners), 1987 (Irishman Stephen Roche and his neck-and-neck race with Spanish rival Pedro Delgado), 1989 (which ended with American Greg LeMond winning by a mere 8 seconds over Laurent Fignon) and 1990 (also won by LeMond). The 2019 Tour de France, with the victory of Colombian Egan Bernal and the pugnacity of France’s Julian Alaphilippe, was a pleasant surprise.

Our results clearly indicate the advent of races where the gaps are small but where the final winner emerges very early on; these “controlled” Tours are dominant in the recent past (2010s).

Technology does not explain everything

Yes, the cycling authorities are right to change the rules of the races to encourage more dynamism, but the Tours back in the “glory days” were not necessarily more exciting. Certainly, the reduction in the gaps between the frontrunners suggests that the latest Tours de France show a greater control of the race: the winner, without failing, keeps his opponents at a close distance. The banning of technology (earpieces, power meters, GPS) may make sense, but the recent trend is similar to that of the 1970s, which were devoid of such informational tools.

Technology does not explain everything, and regulation of team composition seems more sensible than a ban on technology used in racing (like the 2009 attempt ).

The question of the viewer’s perception of the race also seems to be crucial to better understand the problem. Historically, the Tour has been a race magnified by the written press and then by the radio, which have capitalised on a few race facts to tell what the audience could not see.

The stages are now covered in full, with cameras more important than pens, GPS transponders placed on the bikes and the real-time processing of data indicate to everyone the precise position of the riders.

Uncertainty, in economic theory, is based on an absence of information. The viewer is less and less in a state of uncertainty and this changes his or her perception of the race. As a result, a moderating effect may appear, which indicates that races without a real battle will be perceived as much more boring, whereas races with a lot of action will be more appreciated. This effect amplifies the relationship between the actual event and the viewer’s perception of it, will continue to grow with the technologies available to the viewers and the media.

It is therefore even more crucial that the rules be modified, possibly in a heuristic way, to encourage the appearance of exciting race events. It’ll be interesting to see how the 2022 Tour turns out, to find which quadrant it ends up in.

This article was originally published in French

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Tour de France

Tour de france director: ‘remco evenepoel has that x-factor, that unexpected and brilliant thing’, frenchman lauds remco evenepoel’s defiance in vuelta a españa, says debut tour win is possible..

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Remco Evenepoel is set to make his Tour de France debut in 2024 and race director Christian Prudhomme is predicting fireworks.

Evenepoel is one of the most talented young riders in the sport and is seen by some as the most likely challenger to highly tipped riders such as Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič.

“Obviously Vingegaard and Pogačar will be the big favorites,” Prudhomme said at the launch of the 2025 Tour Grand Départ in Lille on Thursday, according to Sporza . “But Evenepoel does have that X-factor, that unexpected and brilliant thing. He can suddenly turn things upside down.”

Evenepoel won the 2022 Vuelta a España and then powered to victory in the world road race championships. He started the 2023 Giro d’Italia as arguably the biggest favorite, but had to withdraw while in the race leader’s jersey due to Covid-19.

He chased further Grand Tour success in the Vuelta a España and appeared perfectly poised to strike until suffering a rare off day on stage 13.

• Remco Evenepoel rebuffs Tour de France cynics at Vuelta a España: ‘Mentally I’m kind of unbreakable’
• Destination Tour de France: Remco Evenepoel ‘learned a lot’ from sparkling Vuelta campaign
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However he bounced back the following day by winning the stage, and also scooped stage 18 plus the mountains jersey.

That single-mindedness and resilience impressed Prudhomme.

“It struck me how he was able to bounce back after a setback,” he said. “I thought he would give up, but we saw the opposite. He made a spectacle of it with his attacks.”

A powerful climber and arguably the best time trialist in the world—as shown by his 2023 world title in that discipline—Evenepoel is also a strong race tactician and one of the most aggressive riders in the bunch.

And while he is just 23 years of age and is yet to ride his first Tour, his fans will hope that his lack of experience in the event won’t stop him from scaling the top step of the podium.

Indeed, Prudhomme doesn’t rule out a surprise.

“He can win. But what is certain is that he will leave his mark on the race and therefore also on the overall victory.”

‘How can you love the bicycle and not love Belgium?’

The first three stages of the 2025 race were unveiled on Thursday, beginning in Lille. Although the opening stage from and to that city skirts the Belgian border, it doesn’t actually cross it. Somewhat tongue in cheek, a journalist at Thursday’s presentation asked Prudhomme what he had against that country.

“This is a choice for France and not against Belgium,” he answered, smiling. “We are never against Belgium. After all, how can you love the bicycle and not love Belgium?

“After consultation with various authorities, we have decided to have the start only through Northern France and therefore 100% through France.”

• A Return to Home Soil: Details Revealed of Lille’s Tour De France Grand Départ 2025

He pointed out that Tour organizer ASO is no stranger to Belgium.

“We will be there for the Ardennes Classics, for Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège. For men and women, as you know. Yes, we are completely in France, we return to France after three years abroad. But you certainly can’t say we don’t like you.”

To further the point, he also noted that the final stage of next year’s race could suit the national cycling hero.

“The 2024 Tour, where Evenepoel will be at the start, ends with a time trial on July 21. And then you think we don’t like the Belgians?”

The point was made in jest, but also in anticipation. A final day scorcher of a TT is possible from Evenepoel, and perhaps a lot more too.

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Tour de France won’t finish in Paris for first time in more than a century because of the Olympics

This photo provided by the Tour de France organizer ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation) shows the roadmap of the men’s 2024 Tour de France cycling race. The race will start in Florence, Italy, on June 29, 2024, to end in Nice, southern France on July 21, 2024. (ASO via AP)

This photo provided by the Tour de France organizer ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation) shows the roadmap of the women’s 2024 Tour de France cycling race. The race will start in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on Aug. 12 2024 to end in Alps d’Huez, French Alps, on Aug. 18, 2024. (ASO via AP)

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PARIS (AP) — The final stage of next year’s Tour de France will be held outside Paris for the first time since 1905 because of a clash with the Olympics, moving instead to the French Riviera.

Because of security and logistical reasons, the French capital won’t have its traditional Tour finish on the Champs-Elysees. The race will instead conclude in Nice on July 21. Just five days later, Paris will open the Olympics.

The race will start in Italy for the first time with a stage that includes more than 3,600 meters of climbing. High mountains will be on the 2024 schedule as soon as the fourth day in a race that features two individual time trials and four summit finishes.

There are a total of seven mountain stages on the program, across four mountain ranges, according to the route released Wednesday.

The race will kick off in the Italian city of Florence on June 29 and will take riders to Rimini through a series of hills and climbs in the regions of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. That tricky start could set the scene for the first skirmishes between the main contenders.

Riders will first cross the Alps during Stage 4, when they will tackle the 2,642-meter Col du Galibier.

“The Tour peloton has never climbed so high, so early,” Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said.

And it will just be just a taste of what’s to come since the total vertical gain of the 111th edition of the Tour reaches 52,230 meters.

The next big moment for two-time defending champion Jonas Vingegaard and his rivals will be Stage 7 for the first time trial in the Bourgogne vineyards. The first rest day will then come after a stage in Champagne presenting several sectors on white gravel roads for a total of 32 kilometers that usually provide for spectacular racing in the dust.

Tour riders will then head south to the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, then return to the Alps for a pair of massive stages with hilltop finishes, at the Isola 2000 ski resort then the Col de la Couillole, a 15.7-kilometer (9.7-mile) ascent at an average gradient of 7.1%.

There should be suspense right until the very end because the last stage, traditionally a victory parade in Paris for the race leader until the final sprint takes shape, will be a 34-kilometer (21.1-mile) time trial between Monaco and Nice.

“Everyone remembers the last occasion the Tour finished with a time trial, when Greg LeMond stripped the yellow jersey from the shoulders of Laurent Fignon on the Champs-Elysees in 1989, by just eight seconds,” Prudhommne said. “Thirty-five years later, we can but dream of a similar duel.”

There are eight flat stages for the sprinters, leaving plenty of opportunities for Mark Cavendish to try to become the outright record-holder for most career stage wins at the sport’s biggest race.

The route for the third edition of the women’s Tour will take the peloton from the Dutch city of Rotterdam, starting Aug. 12, to the Alpe d’Huez resort. The race will feature eight stages and a total of 946 kilometers.

AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports

Tour de France Director: In 2024, we will have four great champions – Pogacar, Vingegaard, Roglic, and Evenepoel – on four different teams

The Tour de France director, Christian Prudhomme, expressed concern about the proposed merger of Jumbo-Visma and Soudal-QuickStep, fearing that having Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel on the same team could impact the spectacle of the race.

However, the collapse of the plan, with Primoz Roglic moving to Bora-Hansgrohe, will result in the presence of the four main Tour contenders competing for different teams in 2024, which ended up being praised by the Frenchman in an interview with the Spanish newspaper AS.

Col du Galibier already in the 4th stage

The 2024 Tour will feature a new route that includes an early passage through the Col du Galibier, already in the 4th stage, but Prudhomme played down the idea that the stage could anticipate the end of the competition before arriving in Nice.

“I don’t think so. We are fortunate to have exceptional cyclists who attack when expected, but also when no one imagines,” said Prudhomme.

“Tadej Pogačar attacked on the Champs-Elysées [in 2023]. He knew he wouldn’t win the overall, but he was still trying.”

Concerns about the Jumbo-Visma and Soudal Quick-Step merger

“What worried me a bit were the rumors about the merger of Jumbo and Soudal, with Jonas and Remco on the same team. But instead, there will be four great champions, Pogacar, Vingegaard, Roglic, and Evenepoel, on four different teams, which should make for an excellent Tour de France.”

Unprecedented finish

For the first time in history, the Tour will finish outside the Paris area to avoid a clash with the Olympics, which start on July 26. The 2024 Tour will conclude in Nice on July 21.

The new finish features a Time Trial on the last day for the first time since Greg LeMond finally defeated Laurent Fignon in 1989.

The 34 km route from Monaco is demanding, with cyclists climbing La Turbie and Col d’Èze on their way to the finish along the seaside at Promenade des Anglais.

Prudhomme acknowledged that his ideal scenario would be a repeat of the last-minute drama presented by Fignon and LeMond in 1989.

“We dream of that, obviously, but we don’t know what the reality will be,” said Prudhomme. “In the recent past, we’ve seen that a Time Trial at the end of the Tour can change everything, as in 2020 at La Planche des Belles Filles with Pogacar and Roglic.”

“It will be a challenging Time Trial, with over 30 km in length and 700 meters of ascent. It’s a day for champions. For the champions of the Tour de France.”

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Stage 1 | 06/29 Florence > Rimini

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João Medeiros

The science behind Chris Froome and Team Sky's Tour de France preparations

When Chris Froome is racing, he imagines he has a bag of coins to spend. Every time he wastes energy, he needs to pay. He pays whenever he's pedalling against the wind. He pays when he moves up the peloton during a climb instead of waiting for a flat road where he can get maximum drag off the riders around him. He even pays for trivial manoeuvres such as collecting bidons of water from the support car that follows riders during a race. He pays because all these moments imply an acceleration, an intensification of effort that puts Froome in the red.

In physiological terms, the moment that requires payment is called the threshold: the point beyond which you cannot ride comfortably for a long period of time. At any given stage of a race, Froome will try to spend as little time over that threshold as possible, even if that means losing his position within the group. Froome is attuned to it. As he crosses that threshold, he starts feeling his body screaming at him to slow down. He starts breathing faster as his muscles demand more oxygen.

Then comes the pain. When it comes, he embraces it, knowing that it's highly likely that his rivals are in even more discomfort. He might look around the peloton checking for symptoms in the riders' body language. Alberto Contador, the Spaniard from team Tinkoff and winner of all three Grand Tours - Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España - hides it well, grimacing for just a second. Nairo Quintana, from Colombia, sits very still on the bike, his face expressionless.

Froome, on the other hand, is perhaps the most obvious in his suffering. Elbows out, head down, ungraceful. But pain is sometimes a signal for Froome to make his move, especially if he has made his savings, carefully 
considering the energy that went into every single pedal stroke. He knows that when it comes to the final climb at a key stage of a Grand Tour, the rider with the most coins left is the one most likely to win.

That's what happened during stage ten of the 2015 Tour de France . It was the first mountain of the Tour, a hilly 166km stretch of road between Tarbes and La Pierre-Saint-Martin in the Pyrenees that finished at an elevation of 1,610m after 15.3km of climbing. Froome, who weighed 67.5kg at the time, averaged a power of 414 Watts during that climb. With 6.5km to go, he accelerated for 24 seconds, averaging 556 Watts. It was a devastating attack that left Quintana, his nearest opponent, for dust, and a performance so spectacular that journalists questioned its provenance.

In the subsequent press conference, Tim Kerrison, Froome's coach, told reporters that it was not unexpected considering some of the numbers the rider had achieved in the past. For instance, Froome's average power over 60 minutes, including the run-in to the climb, was 366 Watts, and Kerrison pointed out that Froome had exceeded that level on 15 occasions since 2011, in racing and training. Furthermore, his heart rate readings indicated that he had reached the stage feeling fresh and in good physical condition. In other words, he had saved most of his coins. "It's great when you manage to save as much as possible and you're ready for the last climb," Froome says.

Matt Jancer

Kathy Gilsinan

"You know you're going to lay it all out there and just go for it." Of course, Froome's extraordinary performance wasn't just a direct result of his natural ability, but a by-product of his training. Kerrison was able to cite exactly how many times Froome had exceeded the power output number that he registered at Pierre-Saint-Martin; after all, he's been tracking data from every single pedal stroke his riders take, both in racing and training, for more than four years. That data is the foundation for the comprehensive and detailed training programme that all Team Sky riders undertake. "I work on the basis that everything we do is probably wrong," Kerrison says. "There are sure to be better ways of doing things. Pretty much every day we do things differently. The riders understand why we do things the way we do. They can always see how it relates to the overall picture."

Chris Froome, 31, has blue eyes and close-cropped hair. His body shape is ectomorphic, with long, lean limbs. His demeanour is quiet but polite and inclusive. When we sit down to talk in the living room at Team Sky's house in Nice, he asks for permission before reclining on the sofa. He either looks straight at the ceiling or across his shoulder directly at WIRED when making a particularly salient point, such as the moment he began to have confidence in himself as a rider and started being smarter about his racing style. He used to be careless with his energy. He was impulsive. Or sometimes team tactics dictated he had to attack at the beginning of the stage and, by the time the race reached the key moment of a climb, he would have nothing left to give.

It's not that Froome lacked the natural capacity; he always knew he had, as he puts it, a "big engine". He just didn't know how to use it. When he was tested in a physiology laboratory in July 2007, in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was told that the maximum rate at which he could consume oxygen - a physiological parameter that goes by the name of VO2max - was 80.2ml of oxygen per minute per kilo of body weight, and his threshold power sat at a 420W. These were the numbers of a potential Tour de France champion.

When Froome joined Team Sky in 2010 from Barloworld, he would produce incredible numbers in training, frequently much higher than his teammates, even though unbeknown to him at the time his body was ridden with parasitic flatworms (a disease called bilharzia, for which he was eventually treated). And yet, he was inconsistent when competing. By the 2011 season, Team Sky's performance director Dave Brailsford was considering dropping him from the squad. His standing in the team was such that the pre-race plan for the 2011 Vuelta a España said: "[Teammates] Xabier [Zandio], Morris [Possoni] and Froome will do their best to survive as long as possible and will fetch bottles, etc." He finished that Vuelta in second place, ahead of Bradley Wiggins, Team Sky's leading rider at the time. That, he says, was the big turning point in his cycling career. A year later, when Wiggins won the Tour de France, Froome finished second.

"I began to understand that I belonged with the best climbers," Froome says. "I wasn't struggling the way I thought I would be." He gained confidence and learned how to use his internal engine. When he repeated the physiological test in August 2015, his values hadn't shifted much - VO2max was now 84.6 and his threshold power 419W - the difference was due to his weight 
loss of 5.7kg. These were the numbers of a two-time Tour de France winner.

In 2009, when Dave Brailsford announced the creation of Team Sky, Britain's only professional race cycling team, the goal was to win the Tour de France within five years - a bold target considering that Britain never had much tradition in road cycling.

Winning the Tour de France had been a dream Brailsford had harboured since he was a teenager. He was brought up in a mining village in North Wales, and in 1983, aged 19, he decided to try competing in the Tour de France. He stuck his bike inside a cardboard box and bought a one-way ticket to France. "I grant you, I was a bit naive and didn't really appreciate the magnitude of the challenge," Brailsford says. "I went to the end of a bike race, when everybody arrived with their cars. I looked around for the nicest kits, went up to them with my bike in its box and said,
"Hi, can I race for your team?" And they were all like, "What?"

Brailsford ended up spending four years in Saint-Étienne, failing to race at the Tour de France, failing even to become a professional. He eventually returned to the UK and completed a degree in sports psychology followed by an MBA at the University of Sheffield Management School.

In 1997, he was hired by British Cycling as an operations director to look over its business side. The programme was run by Peter Keen, a respected sport scientist known for his innovative approach to coaching. As performance director, Keen was taking steps to modernise an underfunded, understaffed team with no infrastructure for proper training. In 1998, after the announcement of Lottery funding for sports in the UK, Keen put together an ambitious and detailed plan entitled the World Class Performance Programme. He stated his vision clearly: to make the UK the world's top cycling nation by 2012. Few people believed it was possible.

At the core of his plan was the application of a scientific and rational method to the art of cycling performance. It was a clear break from a past dominated by a mindset rooted in tradition, low self-belief and an unwillingness to explore new technology. British Cycling hired performance analysts, physiologists and biomechanists. "We had a lack of history in terms of cycling. There were no 
professional cycling coaches, so we hired smart sport-science graduates, "Brailsford says. "You might say that with hindsight that was a great decision. We were lucky to have this group who came up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas. Nobody ever said that something 
was not going to work."

Perhaps the most significant step early on was the acquisition of a set of power meters for the bikes, which allowed the measurement of the energy per second the cyclists could produce: their power output, in other words. Whereas before, cyclists had to rely on monitoring heart rate, speed and perceived exertion - all parameters that were easily influenced by environmental factors and had nothing to do with performance - power output was an objective measure and was the perfect tool for performance-based training. It allowed track cycling to become a data-driven sport.

The power meters, along with other technologies like video analysis and aerodynamic testing, allowed British Cycling performance analysts to create a systematic analysis of the numbers - lap times, cadences, power outputs, drag factors - that their riders could produce. They would also do an in-depth analysis of the numbers that were needed to win races, a process they called analysis of the demands of the event. "We would go to the nth degree in terms of truly understanding what winning looked like," Brailsford says. "This allowed us to create a document called 'What It'll Take to Win'. We spent more time than any other team in the world doing that particular work."

By the time Keen left in 2003, Brailsford had inherited a British Cycling team that had already accrued significant success in the Olympics. Alongside its emphasis on sport science, Brailsford introduced an organisational principle called "Performance by the aggregation of marginal gains". As a philosophy, it was akin to a widely known business concept known as Kaizen, popularised by Toyota, which requires the implementation of a culture of continuous improvement. In fact, the name "marginal" came to Brailsford as he was reviewing some studies he had done during his MBA on marginal costing. In cycling terms, it meant breaking down everything that goes into riding a bike and looking for the one per cent shifts that would make a difference. It seemed obvious to Brailsford that going after big ideas was difficult to do on a daily basis, but small gains, which were often overlooked, could be regularly aggregated to create meaningful change.

"Marginal gains came out of the magnitude of change required, in terms of where we were and where we wanted to get to," Brailsford says. "And then, equally, I know this sounds a bit contradictory, the margins of victory. You could win a race by one-tenth of a second. And you're thinking, 'OK, if we could win a race by one-tenth of a second, all these little things over here could equate to one-tenth of a second. So, why won't we do them?'"

After the Beijing Games in 2008, with Brailsford still at the helm, British Cycling had become one of the most extraordinary success stories in the history of sport. Atlanta 1996: two medals, 12th place; Sydney 2000, four medals; Athens 2004, four medals and third place; Beijing 2008: 14 medals and first place. This was the sort of epic British success story that Brailsford wanted to replicate 
in road cycling with Team Sky.

"When we created Team Sky, we sat down with a blank sheet of paper and said: "Right, we're going to create a professional cycling team. How should we do it?'" Brailsford recalls. "We took what we'd learned and tried and tested over the years in British Cycling 
and put it all on the page."

During its first year of operation, Team Sky became well known for its relentless application of marginal gains, in stark contrast with the traditional professional teams at the time. Team Sky's jerseys were designed with a thin blue line that ran down the spine to symbolise the narrow margin between victory and defeat, made from a special black fabric that reflected heat. It hired Honda's Formula 1 logistics manager Gwilym Mason-Evans to gut the inside of the team bus and completely redesign it. It employed a team of carers who would go to the hotels where the riders would be staying to remove mattresses, vacuum the beds underneath and replace them with mattresses and pillows made of elastic foam that had been individually customised so that the riders could maintain the same posture every night. It taught its riders how to wash their hands properly, made them carry hand gels at all times and forbade handshakes to prevent the spreading of illnesses during competition. It had bike-fitting sessions using 3D motion-capture technology in Valencia, Spain. It ordered the manufacture of a Perspex cocoon in which the team could warm up away from crowds and the media.

The sporting results, however, were disappointing. Bradley Wiggins had finished fourth at the previous Tour de France riding for Garmin-Slipstream. Now Team Sky's main contender, he finished the next in 24th place. "We'd come into the sport thinking that we knew a lot, we'd won all these Olympic medals and it was going to be easy," admits Fran Millar, Team Sky's director of business operations and head of winning behaviours. "Bradley was having ice baths and drinking cherry juice and all sorts of stuff, but he just wasn't fit enough. Dave said that we had concentrated too much on the peas, and not on the steak."

Prior to the start of the 2010 season, Brailsford hired Australian performance analyst Tim Kerrison. He was a former rower with extensive experience of coaching and as a sport scientist for swimming. He had been exclusively involved in swimming since 1998, working with a group of female sprinters who went on to have a very successful 2004 Olympics in Athens. "There was this ingrained culture of swimming which was very conducive to developing good aerobic distance-based, endurance-based athletes, but not sprinters," Kerrison says. "We recognised if we do what we've always done, we'll get what we've always got. That needed to change. Let's forget everything we know about swimming and the way everyone trains and think from first principles. What do we know not just about swimming, but other sports and physiology and training science?"

Most training programmes at the time were based around the idea of periodisation. "It's essentially the way the emphasis of training shifts over time," Kerrison says. "This can include a greater emphasis on workload or recovery, or a shift in the emphasis of the type of training within a training block." Traditionally, periodisation involved an initial training period which was predominantly focused 
on endurance and aerobic capacity, with more intense anaerobic workouts that included speed and power training added later in the year as a competition approached.

"We turned the conventional periodisation idea around," Kerrison says. "It made more sense. One of the foundations of sports training is specificity, which means that everything you do in training has to be related, to some degree, to what you need to do in competition. So we began working on the team's anaerobic systems from the very beginning, developing their strength, speed and power. Only later did we lay on more aerobic training."

Kerrison had been working as a sports scientist for the British swimming team since 2005 when Brailsford contacted him. He had already received a job offer from England Cricket that he was about to sign, and although Kerrison had never worked with cyclists, Brailsford convinced him to join Team Sky. "I grew up thinking that the Tour was one of the ultimate sporting challenges," Kerrison says. "I still think it is. I can't think of many things more challenging and special to me than winning the Tour de France. So it's a meaningful goal. How realistic it was, I wasn't sure."

When Kerrison joined Team Sky in late 2009, Brailsford told him that they were not expecting anything from him until November 2010. His mission was just to follow the team around as they competed for their first Tour de France. They hired a camper van, nicknamed Black Betty, which Kerrison shared with fellow performance analyst Matt Parker, then Team Sky's head of marginal gains. Kerrison spent this time taking notes and talking little. "He travelled round with the team working with our power data and not really visibly much else. Everyone was just, 'Who is this weird Australian who lives in a camper van?" Fran Millar recalls.

At the end of 2010, after the first season of racing, Brailsford told Kerrison, who had been in cycling for about a year, that he was going to coach Bradley Wiggins and that he had to formulate a plan to win the Tour de France. "I did what I had done with the sprint swimmers in Australia: go back to the very first principles," Kerrison says. "It was a huge benefit to not have my judgment clouded by all the other stuff I didn't know and just quickly work out exactly what I needed to know. We needed to forget about the culture, and forget about all the bullshit and the peripherals."

One of the first things Kerrison did was to try and find out exactly what it would take to win the Tour. After all, much of the success of British Cycling had been built around a methodical analysis of an event's demands and knowing what it took to win. "Riders used power and trained for power to a certain extent," Brailsford says. "They would download their training information into the system and get nothing back, so they stopped doing it. Kerrison changed all that. Our compliance rates, in terms of riders, when they're at home downloading the data, went through the roof, because they all started seeing how it affected their training plans."

Kerrison adopted a database system called Training Peaks in which the athletes could download the data so that he could study it. Using this data, Kerrison did a power curve analysis for each athlete that showed, for a given duration - from one second to three hours - how much power a rider could sustain. ("It's an ongoing thing now," Kerrison says. "Every day we have a new current power curve for the riders. Over time we have built up a knowledge of what this means and how to interpret it.") Then, based on the data available for previous Tour de France winners and on extrapolations, he estimated the power curve corresponding to what it would take to win the Tour de France. "Those were the demands of the event," Brailsford says. "We compared the capacity athletes had against what was needed to win and trained the athletes against that."

Kerrison also understood that Team Sky would need good climbers that could perform at altitude and at high temperatures. "A lot of decisive moments in the Grand Tours are performed at well over 1,000 
metres, sometimes as high as 2,500 metres," Kerrison says. "So if you're not able to perform at that level, then you're screwed, basically."

The body adapts to training at altitude, mostly through respiratory adaptations, recalibrating to different levels of oxygen. To address this, Kerrison scouted Europe for high-altitude camp locations, eventually deciding on Tenerife. "Britain doesn't have high mountains and heat so our cyclists weren't used to it," Kerrison says. "I did start to question if we were going to be able to compete with guys who spent their whole lives growing up riding in the mountains at altitude in the heat."

Still, Kerrison wondered how quickly the athletes would be able to adapt, so at the start of their first Tenerife camp, they tested their athletes' efforts at altitude and at sea level. On day one, the average difference in the athletes' threshold between sea level and 2,100 metres was about 70W. By day three, it was 35W. After two weeks there was no difference. The riders had acclimatised.

When Kerrison presented his plan to win the Tour de France, he essentially said that they had to forget about the details until they got the basics right. For Wiggins, those basics were conditioning, weight management, time trialling and performing at altitude and in the heat. "We were so caught up with the bells and whistles and all the clever stuff," Brailsford says. "We delivered all of that in year one and it didn't work. We didn't get our basics right. That was a big learning and Kerrison was a bit part of that. We decided on a new mantra that winter: 'Doing the simple things better than anybody else.'" That year, Bradley Wiggins crashed out on an early stage of the Tour, breaking his collarbone. In 2012, however, he became the first British rider to win it.

One afternoon in April 2016, Kerrison is at the wheel of one of Team Sky's Ford Mondeos following Froome as he pedals a few metres ahead in the hills around Nice, in the south of France. He had already completed most of this training plan for the day: two flat efforts on the time trial bike - 15 minutes and 12 minutes - with about five minutes of recovery in between. Then he took part in a 20-minute climbing effort on the time trial bike before switching to a road bike and was now on his final effort: 12 minutes of "spiked efforts" building up to four minutes of threshold. "Froome's anaerobic threshold is on around 450 Watts, but he rarely does anything at a constant pace," Kerrison explains. 
"He might do one minute about 30 Watts over threshold and then three minutes with ten Watts under threshold. Overall, the effort over that period of time would be at threshold."

This goes back to Kerrison's idea of specificity. While sometimes the pace is constant at a race, other times it is very dynamic, with pace changing all the time. That's what Froome is training for. Of course, on a more fundamental level, what Kerrison is manipulating in his mind is a more complicated set of equations describing the various cause-effect relationships between a training load and a physiological adaptation.

Consider the interplay between the distinct aerobic and anaerobic motors of an athlete. In simple terms, below the physiological landmark of the lactate threshold, the body is able to clear lactate as fast as it is produced. Above that threshold, it accumulates.

"People think developing the anaerobic system is a bad thing because it produces lactate and lactate is bad," Kerrison says. "It's only bad if you can't remove it. Otherwise, it gives you power. When I was in Australia we had some distance swimmers who, no matter how hard we pushed them, just didn't produce any lactate. I'm not sure whether that was because they weren't producing any or because they were efficient at removing it. We found out when we first measured Chris that it was the same. He would do a maximum effort and when we measured lactate there was nothing. Based on what I knew from swimming, I knew this was really promising. He was producing incredible power and whatever lactate he was producing he was able to remove. That indicated that we needed to increase his anaerobic capacity - his ability to produce lactate - because he had an ability to remove it."

Kerrison then adds another layer to the consideration of Froome's physiology: the nutritional fuel he uses for this aerobic effort. This fuel is a mixture of carbohydrates and fats, which are metabolised in different proportions depending on the intensity of the effort. The more intense the effort, the more carbs are required. But to Kerrison, even the way the body fuels can be trained and adapted, shifting it towards a type of metabolism that specifically benefits a rider racing the Tour de France.

"We restrict carbs in training and this shifts the metabolism," Kerrison says. "It drives an adaptation that makes the body become more efficient at using fat as fuel. So up to a certain intensity, say 200 Watts, Froome will predominantly be using fat as fuel. A significant portion of a typical five-hour stage is ridden at a relatively low intensity, meaning he'll be burning mostly fat, saving the carb stores for the more intense stages of the stage where it's needed the most - for example, the final mountain climb."

According to Kerrison, the interaction between those three types of metabolisms - carbohydrate-fuelled aerobix, fat-fuelled aerobic and anaerobic - is the foundation of Froome's training plan. When we return to Team Sky's house, Kerrison shows WIRED a five-page checklist that he keeps for each of his riders. It includes items such as power curve analysis, demands of the events, fat-carb metabolism, heat and altitude. There are 74 factors, qualitative and quantitative, that encapsulate Kerrison's understanding of what it takes to win.

It's the blueprint of what it takes to become a Tour de France winner, a title that Froome is defending this year after victory in 2015. He won it pretty much the same way as he had in 2013: by riding the first mountain stage very aggressively and earning a substantial advantage early in the race. That strategy caught everyone off guard. It wasn't part of Team Sky's plans; it was a decision that Froome made a couple of weeks before the start of the Tour and even Kerrison wasn't sure it was the best way to race.

Indeed, by the penultimate stage, Froome was struggling physically, exacerbated by a chest infection. Quintana, second in the general classification and 3'10" behind the leader, attacked relentlessly. "It was one of the days I had to fight the hardest to keep the yellow jersey," Froome recalls. "The pain was severe, but I knew that once I got to the finish line it would be done."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Adrienne So

David Nield

Brenda Stolyar

10 Inspiring French Women

Inspiration

Reading time: 0 min Published on 12 March 2024, updated on 15 April 2024

They are changing the way we view female artists. Militating for a more inclusive society, making music, encouraging solo travellers along with champion cyclists. Celebrate International Women's day in the footsteps of some of the most innovative women across France. From the Arcachon Bay to the Champagne cellars and the Loire Valley, let yourself be inspired for a potential upcoming trip to France!

Cécile Debray, Director of the Musée National Picasso-Paris

Center Pompidou, Musée de l'Orangerie, Musée Picasso... The professional career of Cécile Debray, who has been head of the Musée national Picasso-Paris for the past two years, could serve as a thread for a nice stroll through the Parisian museums.

With major exhibitions such as "elles@centrepompidou" dedicated to female artists along with the redesign of the Musée de l'Orangerie, this art historian and curator has set herself a new challenge: "rebuild desire around Picasso". This year, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, she is coordinating the program Célébration Picasso planned in 12 French museums. A beautiful itinerary in the footsteps of a sacred artist but also of a committed woman!

Visit the Picasso-Paris National Museum

Marie-Amélie Le Fur, President of the French Paralympic and Sports Committee

Triple world champion in para-athletics (100 m, 400 m and long jump), with nine medals including three gold at the Paralympic Games, what do you think makes Marie-Amélie Le Fur run? A tremendous energy urges the young woman, now retired from competitions, to continuously act and share the sporting flame of the youngest and shift the glance of others on disabilities. President of the French Paralympic, Sports Committee and co-president of the Athletes' Committee Paris 2024 , the champ from the Loire Valley intends to benefit from the next Olympic Games in France to bring the spotlight onto the world of handisport. A new challenge for the one who dreamed of being a professional firefighter, but found another way to share hopes and dreams for future generations.

Learn more about the French Paralympic and Sports Committee

Aurore Sterling, founder of Hortense.Green, an eco-housing platform

Can we travel sustainably? For Aurore Sterling, founder of the start up platform Hortense.green, gathering high-end eco-responsible accommodations , mainly located in France, the answer is definitely... yes! With a master's degree in finance from the University of Paris Dauphine, the travel enthusiast has envisioned a virtuous model based on a rating tool for accommodations (150 questions!) and a backing to the eco-friendly transition. Her motto: "Let's carry on traveling but in a more conscious and mindful way!

Find an eco-responsible accommodation on the Hortense.green platform

Marie Sabot, founder of the eco-responsible music festival We Love Green

Immersed in the world of music but aware of the negative environmental impact of festivals? Marie Sabot has found the answer: in 2011, this well-known producer and programmer founded the first eco-friendly festival, We Love Green. A popular musical event attracting thousands of festival-goers each year in June in the Bois de Vincennes. Sustainable practices (solar panels, waste sorting, recycled furniture, compostable tableware, locavore and fair trade catering with redistribution of unsold goods, etc.), social mix, conferences and the "greenausore" as the Provencal woman attached to the land humorously calls it. It is still an ongoing process but it all sounds very promising!

Participate in the We Love Green festival (the 2023 edition takes place from June 2 to 4)

Christina Boixière, founder of NomadSister, a platform for solo travelers

Born in Taiwan, lived in Great Britain, Italy and Germany, it’s in the wine region of Bordeaux, France, that the multilingual ex-sales manager (speaking fluently Chinese, English and French!) settled down to create her one of a kind company. An avid solo traveler since she was 17 years old - she has travelled to more than 30 countries, mostly staying with locals. With a wealth of happy but occasionally unhappy experiences, Christina Boixière launched NomadSisters in 2019. A platform that connects travellers with trusted hosts. More than 1,500 have been validated in France, ready to host solo female travellers for free in complete safety. Trusted people ready to open their doors and welcome you with open arms.

Discover NomadSister, the community of solo travelers

Bénédicte Baggio artisan fish smoker in the Bay of Arcachon

When she started her culinary blog My Little Spoon, Bénédicte Baggio had no idea that it would take her so far! Passionate about gastronomy since a young age, this native of La Rochelle left her job in communications and digital marketing to invest in local products, co-creating Fumette, the first artisanal smokehouse in the Archachon Bay in 2019. Selection of wild smoked fish caught locally from the Ile de Ré salt marshes and beech wood from naturally managed forests. It was enough to invent new locavore recipes for this mother of three who defines herself as an artisan (smoked) fisherman!

Discover Fumette, artisanal fish smoker in Cap Ferret

Séverine Frerson cellar master at Perrier-Jouët in Champagne

She is the eighth cellar master of the house Perrier-Jouët . The first woman to hold this position since the founding of this prestigious champagne house by Rose-Adelaïde Jouët and Pierre-Nicolas Perrier in 1811! A logical succession for this native of the Champagne region, with a degree in oenology, whose sensitivity to textures, touch and the relationship with living beings is in line with the house's natural imprint. Her objective: to reinforce the good practices of this vineyard, which is certified as a high environmental quality agriculture and sustainable viticulture in Champagne. Didn't she receive the keys to Eden, the mythical cellar where the most precious bottles are kept?

Visit the Perrier-Jouët Champagne House

Marion Rousse, Director of the Tour de France Women

As a child, when she competed against boys and had her first cycling club license at the age of 6, Marion Rousse carefully followed the Tour de France on television, without imagining that cycling would become her whole life. Daughter of an amateur cyclist, this young woman with a bright stare inherited from her northern origins, has become an icon of women's cycling. At the helm of the women's Tour de France with Zwift, the second tournament of which will take place this year from July 23rd to the 30th. Following her career as a television consultant, the former French road cycling champion in the U23 category (at 20 years old!) intends to inspire others to join her. With this 100% female edition, little girls can finally dream of completing the Tour de France!

Follow the second edition of the Tour de France for women

Linda Hazi, General Manager of Domaines de Fontenille en Provence

"Mindful of the earth, mindful of the people" is a house slogan that seems to have been tailor-made for Linda Hazi, the new general manager of Domaines de Fontenille. A collection of eco-friendly hotels created in the Luberon around a manor house and a sustainably cultivated educational vegetable garden. Sensitive to the new challenges of the hotel industry, this former sales director of the beauty and cosmetics brand Sephora France, she will be competent enough to develop her expertise. In addition to the opening of Domaine de Chalamon in Saint-Rémy de Provence in May, the group is preparing to inaugurate Fontenille Bien-Etre in Oppède-le-Vieux, in the Luberon , a new concept with activities such as yoga, wellbeing treatments, and locavore cuisine with menus prepared by a naturopath. A return to her roots for the woman who began her career at L'Occitane Provence!

Staying at the Domaines de Fontenille

Dominique Crenn, Chef of the Golden Poppy restaurant in Paris

Her first gastronomic experience? A family lunch in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Brittany, her beloved region, when she was eight years old. It was a turning point for this 50-year-old boxing and judo enthusiast, who became the first woman in the United States to earn three stars at her restaurant Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco. Today, the chef, who defines herself as an artist, is fulfilling a long-held wish: to settle in France. In the spring, she took the helm of the gourmet restaurant at the new La Fantaisie hotel in the 9th arrondissement called Poppy or Californian Poppy. A nod to the creative cuisine of this extraordinary chef, who is attached to both her roots and her culture. Local and sustainable products , zero plastic and zero waste, this granddaughter of Breton farmers has not finished weaving links between the table and nature!

Discover Dominique Crenn's cuisine at the Golden Poppy restaurant, at the La Fantaisie hotel, in Paris

Voir cette publication sur Instagram Une publication partagée par Dominique Crenn (@dominiquecrenn)

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Marion Rousse appointed as director of Tour de France Femmes

Course for the first edition of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift to be announced by former French champion this week

The organisers of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift , Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), have appointed 2012 French cycling champion Marion Rousse as director of the eight-stage women’s event beginning in 2022.

The long-awaited revival of a women’s edition of the Tour de France is set for 24 to 31 July 2022 with the course of the inaugural edition to be announced on 14th October at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Now that Rousse has been appointed as the director she will be the one to deliver the much anticipated route.

"When I was a little girl, I watched the Tour de France on television with admiration, and when I started my career, I suspected that I would never have the opportunity to race in it,” said Rousse, who retired from professional cycling in 2015.

“So, of course, I was very proud to be asked to take charge of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, especially because we want to do our utmost to make it a dream for little girls to participate."

Since retiring, Rousse has been a consultant for France Télévisions, and became the deputy director of the four-stage, 2.Pro, Tour de la Provence in 2019.

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“Women's cycling has come a long way in recent years, partly thanks to ASO, but it still lacked a reference stage race with real media coverage. Now that I have accepted this mission, I intend to invest myself so that it becomes a ritual among the public... and for a long time because this is not about launching a race for two or three editions."

In May, Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme confirmed that the ASO would launch the women's Tour de France in 2022. There have been various versions of a women’s Tour de France over the years and the one-day La Course was introduced in 2014.

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At the time it was seen as a stepping stone to a more substantive event but reverted to a one-day race after briefly shifting to a race and then pursuit format over two days in 2017.

Just as La Course began with a race on the Champs-Élysées, it has already been revealed that the new Tour de France Femmes will begin on the famous Parisian avenue which hosts the final stage of the men’s Tour de France on the day that the women’s race begins.

"If the event is to become the premier race for women's cycling, it was obvious to call on the best ambassador of this sport, known and appreciated by the general public as well as the experts,” Prudhomme said in a statement. “And her immediate enthusiasm to join us confirms the momentum behind the creation of the event."

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