I used to enjoy watching the Tour de France. Then, I took up road cycling. I went from being a track and field athlete who saw the Tour as one of the ultimate spectacles in global sport to someone who could finally see what had always been before my eyes: the absence of women in the Tour de France, other than as “podium girls.” This July, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about following an event in which the exclusion of female athletes is considered a normal state of affairs.
And yet the construction of the Tour as a male-only event is anything but natural. There are more than 100 years of history behind the Tour de France as we currently know it, representing decades of investment on the part of race organizers, fans, sponsors, and the male athletes themselves. Maintaining the cultural dominance of men’s sports takes work, from the deliberate choices of governing bodies, to the strategies of the media, to the commitment of fans year after year. This is something that we as a society have produced and maintained over time, rather than a reflection of some inherent appeal of male athleticism.
And yet women have against the odds staked a very large claim to “half the road” in cycling. Standing in the way of a concurrent men’s and women’s Tour are the very powerful institutions invested in men’s cycling, armed with a number of unfounded myths:
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Women aren’t physically capable of completing 21 stages. UCI president Brian Cookson actually said this. Had Cookson checked his facts, he would have found that the available science suggests that the longer the event, the more women close the gender-performance gap. There is no physical reason for the UCI to constrain women’s cycling relative to men’s by either distance or number of stages.
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Women’s sport isn’t commercially viable. Would the sportswear companies and sponsors invested in tennis say the same thing about Serena Williams or Maria Sharapova? Maybe, if it was the early 1970s. The marketability of cycling has everything to gain from having athletes like Marianne Vos center stage throughout the Tour, and not just on the final day in Paris.
Running a concurrent women’s Tour would be a logistical nightmare. It’s incredible how uncreative and defeatist people can be when confronted with the prospect of change. The Tour de France Féminin—the women’s Tour that was once held concurrently with the men’s—ended not because of insurmountable logistical challenges but from a lack of will to build something other than the status quo.
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The Tour de France may well be one of the ultimate spectacles in global sport, but the injustice it represents is equally stunning. When the women take to the Champs-Elysées for La Courseon the final day of the Tour, I hope many other cycling fans will wonder why they hadn’t been there since day one.
