LAST GASP Felix Lowe

With the women’s version of the Tour de France heading to the mountains, Felix Lowe wonders if women’s cycling is facing an uphill struggle

Our columnist on why women’s cycling deserves better than it’s getting

Over the past few years, since introducing La Course to the final day of the Tour de France in Paris, race organiser ASO has faced a bit of a dilemma. Understandably, many cycling fans have found a competitive women’s criterium on the Champs-élysées more exciting than watching tired men roll through the Parisian purlieus at 25kmh while quaffing champagne.

What to do? The venerable gentlemen of the ASO couldn’t have the one-day women upstaging its headline event. Transporting La Course to the Col d’izoard in the Alps should have been a winning move – it potentially offers something excitingly different for women’s racing and allows the Women’s Worldtour to flex its muscles without treading on the toes of the perceived big boys. Instead, it has turned into a right bunfight.

What could have been a strong and stable platform for growth has instead become mired in squabbling and backtracking. ASO has handled things as ham-fistedly as Theresa May attempting to bring home the bacon. Not only is the 67km race half the distance required for WWT races, La Course skips the Col de Vars tackled by the men and doesn’t even enter the famous Casse Déserte, instead finishing 4km short of the Izoard summit.

In a bid to present this as progress, ASO has shown more spin than Ryder Hesjedal’s back wheel, as accusations of tokenism, shapeshifting and gimmickry rain down.

How can it be progress, Nicole Cooke pertinently asked, when in 2008 the now-defunct Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale scaled the whole of the Izoard and Montgenèvre ahead of a finish in Sestrière at 2,085m? (As part of a sevenstage event deemed by Cooke more ‘Petite’ than ‘Grande’.)

ASO’S apparent lip service then seemingly morphed into a lip-sync to a pre-recorded track from those new kids on the block at Velon. The Izoard demi-race, it was announced, would be followed by ‘another equally unusual experience a few days later’. No, not a proper multi-stage race for women – something much more unusual than that.

Hot on the heels of the Hammer, La Course Part Deux would follow the men to Marseille for a pursuit-style time-trial concluding in the Orange Vélodrome and coinciding with stage 20 of the Tour.

Quite when these events will be broadcast is anyone’s guess – what with Eurosport claiming ‘every minute’ of the Tour will be shown live. (Did anyone check this with Steve in advertising?)

Let’s hope no one solos to considerable glory on the Izoard because only those who finish within five minutes of the winner will qualify for the staggered-start TT where, ASO promises, ‘the possible groupings of riders [will make] the event a completely random one’. In other words, this is about as experimental as Heston Blumenthal on a bike with a blowtorch.

We should perhaps reserve our criticism until it happens (around the same time as this magazine hits the shelves). Like the Hammer Chase, this baffling format could work. Either way, it’s an extra televised day of women’s racing in a major city. Shouldn’t we be praising ASO for not copping out with a fourth sprint on the Champs?

I understand those who oppose the welfare model that binds La Course to ASO, but rather than file for divorce there’s certainly mileage in a marriage that sees a women’s event piggybacking the Tour de France, however experimental it may be. After all, a week-long women’s race around France already exists.

Usually run in mid-august, La Route de France was cancelled this year thanks to a scheduling bungle with the UCI. Perhaps the governing body should make amends by granting the RDF the Worldtour status that would aid its growth. And if the Marseille pursuit works, how about Velon doing its part by introducing a women’s Hammer?

That way La Course could have the flexibility of venturing out of Paris to dovetail with other iconic Tour locations willy-nilly. Just a friendly word of advice, Monsieur Prudhomme: if you ever send the ladies up Alpe d’huez or Mont Ventoux, then make sure you give them all 21 hairpins or a finish beyond Chalet Reynard. That way they may patronise your race more than you do theirs. Felix Lowe once climbed just two-thirds of the Izoard, but that’s a different story