Women's Cycling Weekly Issue 71

A weekly curation of women's cycling news and content straight to your inbox

Hello! Welcome to Women’s Cycling Weekly issue 71 🚴‍♀️

It feels like nothing has happened all week but then I remembered that last time this newsletter went out The Women’s Tour hadn’t finished yet which means I haven’t mentioned THAT final stage. An absolute *chef’s kiss* execution from Trek-Segafredo to get Elisa (who has been claiming she can’t sprint????) up there to snag those key bonus seconds. What a finish, what a great race.

The gap between WWT races now seems massive after such a jam-packed calendar up until now but the Giro Rosa will soon be upon us (with the equal parts trepidation and excitement that it usually brings) and there’s Tour de Suisse (now four stages!!) to keep us going in the meantime.

Until next week,

Amy x

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News 📰

• Details of the 2023 Women’s WorldTour calendar have been announced, with 29 events currently confirmed. The headlines:

  • The UAE Tour will launch a women’s race, taking in four stages in February

  • The Tour Down Under, Tour de Suisse and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad are all stepping up to the WorldTour

  • The Ceratizit Challenge will become ‘La Vuelta Femenina’ and is currently pencilled in for seven stages at the start of May.

  • The Giro and the Tour are staying where they are - two weeks apart in July - but the Tour of Scandinavia is moving to later in August, now three weeks after the Tour.

  • The RideLondon Classique has provisionally been demoted to ProSeries status, but the organisers may be granted WWT status for 2023 on the condition they show solid plans to broadcast all three stages.

• Cofidis’ Pernille Mathiesen has ended her career at the age of 24, after struggling with her mental health and disordered eating.

• Several nations announced their Commonwealth Games teams this week, ahead of the games in Birmingham this summer. 

  • Australia

  • New Zealand

  • England

  • Wales

• Aude Biannic has extended her contract with Movistar through to 2024.

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Read 🗞️

• Inside the team car with Le Col Wahoo at The Women’s Tour.

• Plantur Pura’s Dutch cyclocross star Yara Kastelijn on rekindling her love for road.

• “Women’s gravel: ‘We’re not racing each other,’ says Sofia Gomez Villafañe.”

• Emma Pooley on finding freedom off-road.

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Watch 📺

Trek Segafredo’s “All Access” with Paris Roubaix Femmes and Women’s Tour winner and all-round legend Elisa Longo Borghini 🤌.

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Listen 🎧

• Zwift Academy winner Maud Oudeman on Cycling Talk Podcast.

• Dissecting a down to the wire edition of The Women’s Tour on Freewheeling!

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Results 🏆

Road

Women’s Tour

Stage 6: Lorena Wiebes (DSM)

Overall:

1. Elisa Longo Borghini (TFS)

2. Grace Brown (FDJ)

3. Kasia Niewiadoma (WMN)

Mont Ventoux Dénivelé Challenge: 

1. Marta Cavalli (FDJ)

2. Clara Koppenburg (COF)

3. Évita Muzic (FDJ)

MTB

UCI Mountain Bike World Cup Leogang

XCO U23: 1. Puck Pieterse 🇳🇱 2. Line Burquier 🇫🇷 3. Olivia Onesti 🇫🇷 

Elite: 1. Loana Lecomte 🇫🇷 2. Jenny Rissveds 🇸🇪 3. Laura Stigger 🇦🇹 

Downhill juniors: 1. Phoebe Gale 🇬🇧 2. Jenna Hastings 🇳🇿 3. Gracey Hemstreet 🇨🇦 

Elite: 1. Camille Balanche 🇨🇭 2. Myriam Nicole 🇫🇷 3. Eleonora Farina 🇮🇹

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Upcoming Races 📆 

Road

18th-21st June: Tour de Suisse (2.Pro)

• Start list here

• Live on Eurosport/GCN each day

18th-26th June: National championships in most European countries

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Tour of yore 🇫🇷🥐

After Millie Robinson (who we talked about in last week’s newsletter) it would be almost thirty years before anyone else was crowned the winner of a women’s Tour de France. In 1984, the Société du Tour de France - the Tour organisers, who would become ASO - decided to put on a women’s race, modelled closely on the men’s race. Unlike the five-day, separate event in 1955, this was an 18-stage Tour which saw the women complete shortened versions of the men’s stages, usually on the same day or the day before the male peloton did. It featured 1,080km of racing, including all the big mountains and climbs, and was a gruelling affair. 

Over the course of three weeks of racing, a surprising winner emerged. 36 women started the race, split into national teams, with eyes on the Dutch and French teams who had experience racing in Europe. The American team were an unknown, no one expected an American to take the yellow jersey to Paris - but that’s exactly what Marianne Martin did. After bargaining her way into the last spot on the roster, Martin wasn’t even due to be the team’s leader, that was meant to be Betsy King, but Martin knew she was the stronger rider. After coming third on stages 1 and 8, Martin made her big move on stage 12, winning a mountain day to take the polka dot jersey. Two days later, she won again, this time taking the race lead, and would arrive in Paris as the winner of the Tour de France Féminine.

Martin and the American team garnered a lot of support during the Tour, but her journey to get there had been difficult. She’d suffered illness before the race, she trained on a secondhand bike, she had to skip work to enter races. The Tour de France Féminine was huge symbolically, but the reality for female cyclists at the time was still one of little support, despite proving they could race the same mountains the men could.

Just two years after winning the Tour, Martin quit racing in 1986, still struggling with health issues. Racing had been an expensive pursuit - pay and prizes were either tiny or non-existent, with Martin funding most of her races herself - and she spent two years working two jobs to pay off the debts she’d built up. Later, she became a professional photographer and despite being inducted in the US Cycling Hall of Fame, she sees her cycling career as a relatively small and distant part of her life: “It's not who I am; it's something that I did,” she told Cyclingnews.

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That’s all 👋

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Until next time!