Why Tour de France Femmes made me angry

In which I belatedly discover what was there all along

Hello friends,

Thank you for all of your comments, messages and reactions to last week’s letter. I’m always slightly reluctant to talk about my health problems, and then when I do I inevitably feel much better, because all sorts of people get in touch with versions of “yes, me too.” And isn’t there such an incredible power in knowing we’re not alone in our struggles?

I’m now scrambling to get everything done before I disappear into the vortex of Le Loop. Leading this event (where amateur cyclists ride multiple stages of the Tour de France, a week ahead of the pros) has shaped my summer for the past few years, and it feels very similar to setting out to race across a continent. You dive in, and as long as you keep swimming, the real world feels a very long way away. Then, a few days or weeks later, you break the surface, and all the noise and colour comes rushing back at you. I’ll be underwater now until mid July, so I’ve got some essays scheduled to go out in my absence - but I might also experiment with writing something while I’m on the road. I’m sure it’ll be very different from my usual output.

For now, here are some thoughts about the women’s Tour de France, which was gloriously resuscitated last summer, and about which Canyon and I made a film, which will be coming out quite soon.

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Tour de France Femmes didn’t JUST make me angry, of course. Mostly it made me feel happy, inspired, euphoric, hopeful, and so excited that embarrassing footage exists of me jumping up and down by the side of the road, screaming myself hoarse as my heroes went by.

I cried the first time I saw Marianne Vos in the yellow jersey. And then I got really bloody angry, because Marianne Vos has been a professional cyclist for twenty years. She is commonly acknowledged to be one of the greatest riders of our age. Why is it only now that she gets to wear the yellow jersey? Why have we been deprived of this for so long?

If Tour de France Femmes had come to fruition just a year or two later, we would never have seen Vos in yellow. We would never have seen Annemiek van Vleuten in yellow. As it is, we will never see Anna van der Breggen in yellow.

We never saw Beryl Burton in yellow. We never got to see Nicole Cooke in yellow.

Except – Nicole Cooke actually did wear the yellow jersey. It’s just that no one told us about it.