How the Tour de France became a $100M business

You can subscribe to Peacock for something like $7 a month and watch the TdF.

Women can complete a Tour de France. A man will likely be the best athlete in every conceivable category. But, I can’t think of a single sport neither sex could meaningfully compete in if normalised against their own sex.

And the women who ride represent the top 0.00001% of Earth's best humans in the best shape too! And their accomplishments outside any effort that the vast amount of people will ever do in a day of their lives.

Of course women can complete such races! We know this because they do it all the time. Not only that, they can even win! All we need to do is let them.

Take the RAAM (Race Across America, a gruelling almost 3000 mile race, nearly 5000km). Women are allowed to join in. This is even longer than the Tour. Not only have many women finished RAAM, in Leah Goldstein actually won. Not the women's category. The race outright. Period.

Or the Transcontinental Race (TRC, similar to RAAM but across Europe and without a support team, between 3000-4000km depending on the year). Not only have many women participated and completed it, in 2019 a Fiona Kolbinger won. And again, not the women's category. She won the 10 day race beating out the best man by 10 hours!

Both of these races show that not only can women complete the men's Tour, they could end up setting better times.

> But they will not, and cannot, EVER, be asked to ride what the men's teams do. It is just too harmfull. And impossible.

I hope that the clear evidence I gave you, the fact that women have done far more than this, and have beaten the world's best men while doing it, will make you reconsider your position in the future. It's not backed by evidence, it's just prejudice.

If you think pro athletes in other sports are clean, I have news for you. If anything cycling is one of the few sports that takes anti-doping measures seriously

Cycling is very sexist.

But to play devils advocate:

There has been a women's Tour de France for a while. It existed between 1984 and 2009. It struggled financially that whole time and was never profitable to the UCI. They canceled it in 2009 and brought it back in 2014 through 2021 as a single day event in Paris on the same days as the men's final day.

The UCI was been exploring bringing back a multi-stage women's event for at least the past several years but they had been unable to nail down a title sponsor. Apparently Skoda (the primary men's sponsor) was in early negotiations to sponsor it in 2020, for the 2021 season but then dropped out because of COVID uncertainty.

The break last year finally came because of Zwift (who financially performed well during Covid) offered to sponsor the event as a title sponsor. NBC did a lot to support and promote them as well. So we are seeing progress.

There was a lot of criticism around it only being 8 stages compared to the 24 of the mens, but most of the women actually said 8 stages was plenty because that is larger than any of their other tours (I think tied with Giro d'italia).

Progress is happening is my point.

With that being said, yes there is significant sexism still prominent in all sports, and cycling too.

The UCI is following the money, and to their credit they have been honest about that. They have routinely said, there isn't enough money in the women's sports and that's why they don't pursue it.

What we need is for the UCI to recognize the potential in women's cycling and to invest in it, knowing it might not be immediately profitable, but that over time it will gain popularity like the men's events and become profitable for them. Luckily Zwift seems to be willing to take this role for now. Time will tell. But the good news is that TdF Femmes (women's) is back for 2023. So maybe we at the beginning of what will eventually lead to a happy ending.