Women’s cycling comes full circle as Wiebes takes yellow jersey
Women’s cycling finally took its rightful place in one of France’s beloved cultural institutions yesterday (Sunday).
After years of campaigning and petitioning, a field of 144 riders set off at the foot of the Eiffel Tower just after lunchtime in scorching temperatures to embark on 12 laps of a flat 81km course around the Champs-elysees.
Dutchwoman Lorena Wiebes (Team DSM) became the first female rider to pull on the yellow jersey in this modern era of women’s cycling, obliterating her compatriot Marianne Vos (Jumbo-visma) on Paris’s most iconic boulevard, with Belgian Lotte Kopecky (Team SD Worx) third.
It was a perfectly executed race from the 23-year-old, who paid tribute to her British team-mate, Pfeiffer Georgi, for leading her around the course before she was mobbed by a scrum of photographers, all eager to snap cycling’s latest history-maker.
No sooner had Wiebes rammed on the brakes than she was surrounded by her team-mates, who doused their sprint queen with water and shoved ice packs down her top, before she celebrated on the podium holding her friend’s baby — the result of a bet she lost.
In a show of ambition, Wiebes also had her nails painted bright yellow on one hand and green on the other. That reflected how she intended to win both the yellow and green jerseys, the latter being in the overall points classification this week. Given that she is in the form of her life — this being her 16th victory in 32 days — there is a sense that she could well deliver on those targets.
“I wanted to do something special with my nails,” Wiebes said. “Originally, I wanted to do all the colours of the [rainbow] jersey but my nail artist didn’t have enough time in the day. So we decided to do two colours — the most important colours.”
The eight stages of this historic Tour are seen as a perfect way for women’s cycling to break into new audiences and grow its profile and, under the blazing sun, there was a palpable feeling that this felt like a moment.
Eight years on from winning the inaugural La Course — the criterium race launched by organisers — it was fitting that one of the activists involved in pushing for a women’s Tour de France was finally riding in one.
Vos was one of four women who led Le Tour Entier’s petition calling for a women’s Tour and the Dutch icon laid down an early marker as she took the first intermediate sprint, but did not have enough in the tank to hold off Wiebes’s challenge late on.
“This has been an aim since the beginning of the season,” Wiebes said of her victory. “The lead out was quite chaotic. But I stayed on Pfeiffer’s wheel and Charlotte Kool was still behind me. Our plan was to swap positions [with Charlotte] after the tunnel but there was too much chaos and Pfeiffer put me in a perfect position. Marianne [Vos] started her sprint really early but I expected it and I was happy that I could accelerate one more time to the finish line.
“It’s really special that the Tour de France is back for women,” Wiebes added. “It’s a really good parcours. We have everything — sprint stages, punchy stages, climbing stages — I hope we can inspire a lot of young girls to get on a bike.”
Wiebes, who won a clean sweep of stage victories at this year’s Ride London Classic, is among the major pre-race favourites to triumph in the overall classification at the top of La Planche des Belles Filles on July 31.
— Telegraph Media Group