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5 days ago
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The fourth edition of the Tour de France Femmes begins in Brittany on Saturday with defending champion Kasia Niewiadoma facing a range of new challengers as Demi Vollering seeks to avenge last year’s cruel four-second defeat on Alpe d’Huez.
While the Polish star has stated her wish to win back-to-back Tours, Vollering, who moved to the French team FDJ Suez at the end of last season, is determined to again conquer the race she won in 2023. Their duel on the slopes of Alpe d’Huez at the climax of last year’s race was one of the most gripping in the history of any Tour de France and led to the narrowest margin of overall victory ever, in either the men’s or women’s race.
Vollering, now 28, the winner of this year’s women’s Vuelta a España, Strade Bianche and three other stage races, arrives in Brittany as the outstanding favourite. Niewiadoma has made a slow start this year but comes to the race in ascending form for Canyon-Sram, having won the Polish national road race title in June and finishing third in the Tour of Switzerland.
But the pair have other rivals, with Marlen Reusser, winner of the Tour of Switzerland and second in the Giro d’Italia, and Elisa Longo Borghini, winner of the women’s Giro, leading the way. Others including Australian climber Sarah Gigante, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, winner of the women’s Paris-Roubaix, and Anna van der Breggen, third in the women’s Vuelta and Vollering’s former sports director, are among those capable of mounting a serious challenge.
The peloton will race more than 1,165km across the country from Brittany to the mountains, the stages increasing in difficulty before a final weekend of climbing in the Alps. As for the race itself, which will stage its 2027 Grand Départ in the UK, director Marion Rousse has been overwhelmed by the huge growth of its popularity.
“The women’s Tour de France is growing fast, almost too fast,” she said. “I think back to the first edition, I had a lot of questions and doubts. I wondered if it would work, if people would watch and be interested.”
In 2026 the race will move dates to a standalone start, that no longer piggybacks the interest in the final weekend of the men’s race. “Our Tour is getting too big to be run at the same time as the men’s race,” Rousse said. “We need to change the model and create our own timescale.”
The sporting demands of the race are also increasing, something that Rousse again sees as a natural evolution. This year, both the mammoth climbs of Col de la Madeleine and the brutal Joux Plane feature on the final weekend.
After last year’s cliffhanger, Rousse is hoping for another gripping ending to the nine stage race. “If it’s too hard, sometimes that causes too many differences in level, or too much time to be lost. That can kill the suspense,” she said. “Just making it super hard doesn’t make it the best race to watch.”
