Demi Vollering in shape to retain title at booming Tour de France Femmes

The fast-tracked growth of the Tour de France Femmes gathers pace on Monday, when the 2024 edition starts in Rotterdam, its first foreign Grand Départ. Less than 24 hours after the Olympic closing ceremony, 22 teams of seven riders will roll away from the Dutch city to race almost 1,000km in seven days, climaxing with a set-piece mountain finish on Alpe d’Huez.

Over eight stages, including a split stage of road race and time trial on Tuesday, the peloton will race south from the Low Countries to the Alps, via the Ardennes, Vosges and Jura. The highest point will be the 1,924-metre Col du Glandon, appearing on stage eight’s route to the Alpe, when the peloton will tackle just under 4,000 metres of climbing.

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Since the race was rebooted in 2022, the champion has been from the Netherlands, first through the now-retired Annemiek van Vleuten and last year with Demi Vollering , who clinched victory with a stage win on the Col du Tourmalet. The pair’s head-to-head on the Pyrenean giant drew a television audience of 4.3 million.

The prospect of a Dutch champion on the infamous hairpins of Alpe d’Huez is sure to draw a huge audience in the Netherlands, where Vollering has achieved superstar status, having won the yellow jersey last year and a series of other major races, including this year’s La Vuelta Femenina and the Tour de Suisse Women.

Already, with a TV audience in 190 countries, the race is poised to increase in length next year, and its rapid growth reveals the global power of the Tour de France brand. In 2023 the Tour de France Femmes also gained a 238% increase in views on social media.

For the teams and riders at the top of the financial pyramid, the mushrooming success of the Femmes has been very good news. Vollering, the outstanding favourite for this year’s race, who rides for the dominant SD Worx-Protime team, is the top rider in the peloton and the most highly valued.

Speculation surrounding her departure to the fast-developing French-owned FDJ-Suez team has been swirling for months, as have unprecedented salary figures, in the region of €1m (£856,000). In April, Nike signed up the 27-year-old on a personal sponsorship deal, having identified the Tour de France Femmes title holder as the face of the women’s World Tour.

“I’m happy for Vollering: she’s bringing up the market,” said the French rider Audrey Cordon-Ragot, who turned professional in 2008. “I am definitely earning more than I was two or three years ago.”

The French national time trial champion, Cordon-Ragot rides for the Human Powered Health team, one of the 15 women’s World Tour teams that introduced a minimum salary, of €15,000 (£12,800) a year, in 2020. “Before that it was peanuts,” Cordon-Ragot said.

Another of those benefiting from the growth surge is the leading French rider Juliette Labous, who has just announced that she will be riding for FDJ-Suez in 2025. Labous, fourth in the Femmes in 2022 and fifth last year, said that the women’s peloton was “waiting for the Tour de France to take us to a new level”.

“When I was little,” she recalled, “we watched the men’s Tour de France. But it wasn’t the same. We couldn’t see ourselves or identify with it. Young girls now have role models, which is great.”

Outwardly the picture appears rosy, but other teams, some of whom will be racing next week, are still struggling. Meanwhile, the benefits to women’s World Tour teams such as Lidl-Trek, UAE Team ADQ and Visma-Lease a Bike of sharing sponsors with big-budget men’s teams are clear. Shared resources, such as backroom staff, vehicles, equipment and logistics management gives those teams a clear advantage over lesser-resourced teams.

“We know soigneurs and mechanics at these teams that will do a men’s race one week and a women’s race the next,” Tom Varney, manager of the Lifeplus-Wahoo team, said. For the lowly British team, who announced last week that they were soon ending operations, non-selection for this year’s Tour de France Femmes, with the loss of income that represents, has been a death knell.

“Everyone knows what the Tour is,” Varney said. “They have that understanding of it. The biggest effect is that everyone is expecting more. We expect more of our sponsors, they expect more of us. That can be challenging at times.”