The third version of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift guarantees to be a memorable one, with the primary international Grand Depart within the Netherlands, extra possibilities to take stage wins at biking’s largest race and a historic finale up Alpe d’Huez all on the menu.
Flat routes in The Hague and Rotterdam, a double stage on day two and a Classics parcours en path to Liège carry the race again into France on day 4 earlier than the GC motion appears set to kick off proper from the Vosges to Le Grand Bornand and on the well-known 21 bends up l’Alpe.
Racing has been moved from its unique late July spot to mid-August so France might account for the Paris Olympics, which means there are further kilometres within the legs with the anticipation constructing greater than ever all through the lengthy season.
The stakes are excessive and there’s something on supply for everybody because the peloton race for the yellow chief’s jersey sponsored by LCL, inexperienced factors jersey sponsored by Škoda, polka-dot mountains jersey sponsored by E.Leclerc, white finest younger rider jersey sponsored by Liv, staff classification sponsored by Krys, most aggressive rider sponsored by Teisseire, plus after all the stage victories sponsored by Zwift.
Cyclingnews highlights the largest speaking as we stay up for the eight levels of racing, ending with a double hors categorie summit finale on August 18, that can crown the winner of the 2024 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
Get limitless entry to all of our protection of the 2024 Tour de France Femmes – together with breaking information and evaluation reported by our journalists on the bottom from each stage because it occurs and extra. Find out extra.
Giro, Olympics, and Tour, oh my!
There is not any disputing the jam-packed summer time schedule that has taken the skilled ladies’s peloton throughout the Giro d’Italia, the Paris Olympic Games and into the Tour de France Femmes.
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Competing in back-to-back Grand Tours and including the magnitude of the quadrennial Olympics in between could be a tricky ask for even essentially the most completed racers.
Therefore, riders who had been chosen to characterize their nations on the Olympic Games have additionally been compelled to choose and select the Grand Tours they’d give attention to; some have opted to race all three occasions, whereas others have skipped one as a result of it wasn’t unimaginable to carry peak kind for 5 – 6 weeks and count on high performances.
The Tour de France Femmes’s defending champion, Demi Vollering, selected to skip the Giro d’Italia Women this yr regardless that she would have been one of many favourites to win the general title after she had already received La Vuelta Femenina and has continued a stage racing profitable streak by means of Itzulia Women, Vuelta a Burgos and Tour de Suisse.
She as a substitute opted to preview the Tour de France Femmes route whereas on a coaching camp in her camper van earlier than competing on the Olympic Games in Paris. She heads to the Tour in high kind, possible well-recovered from a searing spring marketing campaign and able to deal with her yellow-jersey defence.
Last yr’s Tour de France Femmes mountains classification winner and runner-up, Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM), selected an analogous pathway, skipping the Giro and racing on the Olympics and the Tour.
On the opposite hand, Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek) determined to give attention to the Giro d’Italia, the place she secured the general victory on residence soil. While she was disenchanted together with her efficiency on the Olympic Games, she now heads to the Tour de France as a darkhorse contender, with the staff more likely to give attention to Gaia Realini for the GC.
Whatever the pathway riders have chosen to take to get to the Tour de France Femmes, we are able to all count on to see an in-form peloton and an exhilarating battle for the yellow jersey.
Muzic and Labous lead French hopes
Half of the 2024 Tour de France Femmes might happen outdoors of France as Rotterdam performs host to the primary international Grand Départ, nonetheless, residence French hopes shall be seeking to star and internet each the primary stage win and podium end on GC.
FDJ-SUEZ’s Evita Muzic and DSM-Firmenich PostNL’s Juliette Labous would be the key hopes for the general, having been two of the very best climbers in current seasons. Muzic can be one of many few riders to beat defending champion Demi Vollering in a summit end this season, whereas Labous has taken fourth and fifth on GC on the previous two editions of the Tour.
They’ll be teammates subsequent yr as Labous joins the French squad FDJ-SUEZ however for 2024, they are going to be vying for the highest spot for a house rider and hoping they will write themselves into historical past on one in every of France’s most well-known climbs – the legendary Alpe d’Huez.
The first 16 levels of the Tour de France Femmes have seen 12 completely different winners from the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany however none but from France, with the closest being Muzic with second on the gravel stage behind Marlen Reusser.
A scarcity of French success has additionally been current all through the jersey competitions, with Cedrine Kerbaol’s finest younger rider win in 2023 being the one French victory of any kind because the ladies’s Tour de France was revived as a stage race in 2022.
Kerbaol (Ceratizit-WNT) will as soon as once more be on the Tour this season, though ineligible to defend her white jersey. However, she makes up half of a complete host of French expertise chasing that first stage win, reminiscent of veteran TT skilled Audrey Cordon-Ragot (Human Powered Health), former nationwide champion Victoire Berteau (Cofidis) and 19-year-old super-talent Marion Bunel (St Michel – Mavic – Auber93 WE).
Bunel is actually set to be a giant a part of France’s future in ladies’s racing having already proven she has the power to take action as a teen, taking fifth on Jebel Hafeet on the UAE Tour in February which landed her fifth total behind the likes of Lotte Kopecky and Neve Bradbury. She then went on to beat Muzic uphill to Chamrousse on the Alpes Gresivaudan Classic in simply her neo-pro season, so shall be one to observe.
Could this be France’s yr to star at its residence Tour de France Femmes?
Wiebes, Vos and Kool to dash for residence yellow jersey
An opening stage within the Netherlands offers the proper likelihood for the quickest ladies in biking to battle it out on flat roads of the nation which dominates ladies’s biking for the primary yellow jersey. Dutch stars shall be among the many most probably candidates: Lorena Wiebes, Marianne Vos and Charlotte Kool. But who amongst them can thrill residence followers with a house? Or will they be upset by the likes of Italy’s Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek)?
Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime) has been the celebrity of sprinting virtually ever since turning professional in 2018 with Parkhotel Valkenburg, with big success at DSM, earlier than cementing her title because the quickest sprinter with an enormous transfer to ladies’s biking’s high staff – SD Worx-Protime – final season.
While she was challenged by her former DSM teammate and final lead-out rider Charlotte Kool (DSM-Firmenich PostNL) for a lot of the 2023 season, sickness dominated Kool out of lots of their scheduled early season duels, and Wiebes has additionally merely been stronger.
It’s been a yr of actual battle for the DSM rider with simply 1 win added to her palmarès in comparison with the 18 Wiebes has netted, with six of these seeing Kool take second behind her compatriot.
Wiebes has not simply saved profitable on the identical charge in recent times however expanded her property past simply pure bunch finishes. She’s a greater than succesful Classics rider, with a fantastic skill to outlive over climbs and nonetheless dash whereas the purer sprinters like Kool drop behind. This may very well be key on the undulating fifth stage to Amnéville.
Stages 1 and a couple of would be the big goal for Kool and Wiebes however they received’t be unchallenged, removed from in, in actual fact, with ladies’s and maybe biking’s best ever rider Marianne Vos additionally aiming for residence wins within the The Hague and Rotterdam.
After taking two stage wins and the inexperienced factors jersey within the inaugural version of the Tour de France Femmes, Vos struggled to seek out high kind in 2023 and suffered ache and an absence of energy in her left leg for which she underwent iliac artery surgical procedure.
2024 has seen her properly again to her finest, beating Lotte Kopecky to win Omloop Het Nieuwsblad for (amazingly) the primary time in her profession, earlier than happening to take wins at Dwars door Vlaanderen, Amstel Gold Race – forward of Wiebes, and the Vuelta Femenina the place she netted two stage wins and the factors jersey once more.
While Balsamo appears like the one rider quick sufficient to problem the Dutch trio ought to she take the beginning, Emma Norsgaard’s win from the break on stage 6 into Blagnac finally yr’s race offers the proper blueprint for attacking as a substitute of ready to get beat by Wiebes. It must be a captivating dash battle in these opening two Netherlands levels however watch out for doable crosswinds.
Ending on a excessive atop Alpe d’Huez
The organisers of the Tour de France Femmes have persistently raised the bar for every version, particularly with regards to its mountain passes. In 2022, the occasion was routed up Le Markstein and La Super Planche des Belles Filles, in final yr it took on Col d’Aspin and the Col du Tourmalet.
This yr, they’ve upped the ante but once more, with the race set to finish on a excessive atop essentially the most iconic ascent in Tour de France historical past—Alpe d’Huez.
“Well, the legend of the Tour de France is usually written in its mountain passes. So it would not get higher than Alpe d’Huez,” race director Marion Rousse advised Cyclingnews in an unique interview that featured as a part of our countdown to the third version of the Tour de France Femmes.
“It’s a climb identified all through the world, and with its 21 numbered bends, has been a dramatic stage within the males’s Tour. Of course, the winner could have her identify written on one of many bends.”
Alpe d’Huez has been the location of many biking battles all through the lads’s Tour de France and has additionally appeared in choose editions of the earlier variations of the ladies’s race.
The climb has additionally served as a profession catalyst for a lot of riders within the ladies’s peloton, who had both watched the lads’s peloton race up its unforgiving switchbacks or had hung out coaching on its slopes.
No longer does the ladies’s peloton need to dream about racing up Alpe d’Huez as a part of an official ASO-run ladies’s Tour de France; they may deal with it in actuality on the finish of stage 8 finale on August 18, the place the winner of the yellow jersey shall be topped.
In conserving with historical past, every of the 21 hairpin bends is called after no less than one rider. The twenty first bend is called after Fausto Coppi, who received the Tour de France in 1949 and 1952. Other riders honoured with bends embrace Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, and Bernard Hinault.
It stays to be seen who will triumph on Alpe d’Huez and have her identify etched into one in every of its bends on the 2024 Tour de France Femmes.
Can anybody problem Demi Vollering?
After dropping out solely to the good Annemiek van Vleuten within the first version of the Tour de France Femmes, Demi Vollering (SD Worx-Protime) reached her full potential on the second try, dominating the uphill terrain to assert the yellow jersey by 3:03 over teammate Lotte Kopecky final yr.
2023 was by far her finest season, with an historic Ardennes triple coming alongside her total victory on the Tour. Her begin to 2024 wasn’t fairly as profitable, with it taking, by her requirements, an age to internet her first victory – 13 race days
Vollering went all the Spring Classics and not using a win, regardless of podium finishes at Strade Bianche, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, nonetheless, shortly proved she was nonetheless on high with a run of gorgeous stage race performances in May and June.
Vuelta España Femenina, Itzulia Women, Vuelta a Burgos and the Tour de Suisse appearances led to eight WorldTour stage wins, 4 total GC titles and a return to absolute peak kind for the Dutch climber. Vollering was on high once more with nobody presenting a lot of a problem.
There had been sturdy rides by the likes of Evita Muzic and Neve Bradbury to take strong podium finishes, nonetheless, the general titles by no means appeared doubtful for Vollering, who heads into the Tour because the heavy favorite.
The reply then, it will appear, lies with ways, not legs. Canyon-SRAM and Lidl-Trek have proven nice ingenuity of their challenges to unsettle the dominant SD Worx-Protime’s run of wins, however knocking Vollering off high spot is a complete different check.
Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek) and Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM) are two of the savviest bike racers and on groups prepared to attempt every little thing on the uncovered Dutch roads, tough Classics terrain to Liège and the opportunity of a raid within the Vosges on stage 6.
It’s but to be seen who will emerge as Vollering’s key contender, nonetheless, she most positively will not simply be afforded a pink carpet journey to the foot of Alpe d’Huez the place she will journey off to glory.