Feature: Can women race a three-week Grand Tour?

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Annemiek van Vleuten (Mitchelton-Scott) wins La Course(Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com)

While Simon Yates made history as one of three British riders to win all the men's three-week Grand Tours in one year, women's cycling made history in a more modest way, with the first-ever women's stage race at the Vuelta a España – all two days of it. While the mountains of Andorra, Covadonga and the Balcón de Bizkaia provided an epic stage for the men, the women got to show what they could do with a flat team time trial, followed by a sprinter's circuit race around Madrid.

Over the summer, the subject of equality in men's and women's racing has been a frequent topic, with debate continually revolving around the same themes: why isn't there a women's Tour de France? Why is it so hard to watch the Giro Rosa? Why, with the exception of the Giro's 10 days of racing, does the UCI only allow six days maximum for a women's stage race, while the minimum number of stages for a men's Grand Tour is 15?

"To me it's really obvious – there's no physiological or any other reason why women couldn't also do a three-week event," says Dr. Ross Tucker, of Science of Sport, which draws on the latest scientific research to shed light on debates and controversies within the sporting world. "Of course they are capable of it. The only barrier is a socio-cultural one." He points out that, "elite marathon runners all run 160 to 200km per week, male and female, and that's over many more weeks than three.

"Cycling seems to me to be where running was in the 1940s," he adds. He cites the famous case of the 1928 Olympics, where a number of women allegedly collapsed at the finish of the 800m running race (a myth, incidentally, that was effectively debunked in a 2012 Runner's World article). The Olympic committee used this early example of 'fake news' to limit women's track racing to distances of no more than 200m – for the next thirty years. It wasn't until 1984 that women got to run the marathon in the Olympics.

That same year saw female riders get their first Olympic road race. But while there are no longer any distance limits for female runners, who compete in ultra marathons and Iron Man triathlons, the distances for female cyclists are still severely truncated compared to men. For example, in a WorldTour stage race, the maximum distance for an individual women's stage is 160km, while for a men's stage it's 240km. The maximum average daily distance is 140km for the women and 180km for the men. Those are differences of between 22 and 33 per cent. This doesn't even take into account the other ways difficulties are removed from women's races, such as this year's controversial World Championship route in Innsbruck, where women won't be riding the notorious 'Hell Climb' that features on the last lap of the men's race.

The irony is that women are arguably better endurance athletes than men. There's no shortage of anecdotal evidence suggesting they have a natural talent for going long and hard, and there are even a few stories of them beating men in this respect. In 1940, Pat Hawkins broke the Australian men's record for seven days' continuous cycling. More famously, in 1967, Beryl Burton broke a men's record of nine years' standing in the 12-hour time trial.

The qualities that make for a good endurance athlete are arguably more complex than what makes a good sprinter, and it's consequently hard to compare men and women with scientific precision. In running, however, "if you match men and women for performance at shorter distances, the women outperform the men at longer ones," Tucker says. So if you compare men and women who have similar 10km or 21km times, "the women tend to be faster than the men at the marathon. And this is not universally true, but it is broadly the case." It appears that, "other factors help women relatively more than men. These may be metabolic, may be psychological, [we're] not really sure, but women do come into their own over longer distances.

"There is such a thing as the female triad – eating disorders, amenorrhoea and decreased bone mineral density – which is more common in sports where weight is a factor, and of course cycling will be such a sport," Tucker acknowledges. "However, I'd contend that what we see in men's cycling these days is actually not all that different." He cites research revealing reduced bone mineral density in elite male riders and points out; "I don't think anyone can reasonably think athletes can get as skinny as the ones we see in men's cycling without a combination of extremely aggressive dieting (which is a euphemism) and doping. I doubt even the most enthusiastic supporter thinks that the extremes of endurance sport are healthy. Or they shouldn't."

Cycling, of course, has a long history of being physically punishing. Famously, Henri Desgrange, the Tour's founder, once fantasised about making his race so hard, only one rider would make it back to Paris. When the Pélissier brothers caused a scandal by abandoning it in 1924, they spelled out in gothic detail the ways in which they suffered: "We're drained all the time by diarrhoea," they told journalist Albert Londres. "We can't sleep at night. We're twitching as if we've got St Vitus's Dance... And our toenails. I've lost six. They fall off a bit at a time all through the stage." Then they emptied out their pockets to show what helped them get through it all: "There's cocaine for our eyes and chloroform for our gums…"

We're a long way now from the 400km stages that were a feature of early 20th century racing, but it's a concern for riders' wellbeing that lies at the heart of the UCI's limitations – not just for women but also men – on the number of days and overall distances in races. (Perhaps equally importantly, those limitations seek to eliminate any perceived 'need' to dope, given a lot of cheating in endurance sport is not really about going faster, but suffering for longer.)

Iris Slappendel has her doubts the UCI limits women's stage racing simply for health reasons. A recently retired pro, she heads up The Cyclists' Alliance, which works closely with the UCI and other stakeholders to improve conditions for female riders. She points out that many of the UCI's rules have been in place for many years, and have been slow to evolve, adding that until a few years ago there were even regulations regarding the average age of riders on a women's team. The limitations on stage races were introduced in 2001 or 2002, however, not 1972, which doesn't count as ancient history if you were born in the 20th century.

Thibaut Pinot's dramatic abandon from this year's Giro d'Italia with pneumonia suggests the UCI could also do more to prevent male riders from pushing themselves to such physical extremes. Perhaps the men, too, should have shorter races? When asked if the UCI discussed these concerns, their spokesperson said, "The UCI Medical Commission is very attentive to the fact that the Grand Tours does not go through the exhaustion of riders and dropping out for medical reasons. Regulating the duration of the stages should allow a better recovery of the riders, without affecting the show of the race," which suggests they reckon they've already got the right formula for men.

What makes these disparities between men and women suspicious, apart from the sense that the UCI isn't paying proper attention to sports science, is the fact that they exist at much shorter distances, such as the 4,000m Individual Pursuit for men on the track, compared to the 3,000m for women, or the men's 1,000m sprint time trial, compared to the women's 500m. What possible justification can there be for these differences, other than simple, old-fashioned chauvinism?

This summer a group of women made headlines by riding the Tour de France route one day ahead of the men. It was an impressive achievement, although no doubt cynics will point out that it wasn't ridden as a race. They might want to consider this instead: in 2014 teammates Evelyn Stevens and Trixi Worrack rode two back-to-back stage races – the women's Giro Rosa in Italy followed by the Thüringen Rundfahrt in Germany – entailing 17 consecutive days of racing and what would have been a more than eight-hour transfer between both countries.

We should also mention Alfonsina Strada, who in 1924 became the only woman who has ever been allowed to participate in a men's Grand Tour. The same year the Pélissiers left the Tour de France in a huff, Strada rode the entire 3,613km Giro d'Italia, featuring 12 stages averaging over 300km. After a crash that broke her handlebars on the eighth day of racing, she failed to make the time cut and was taken off the GC, but she was nonetheless allowed to continue to the end. Out of the 90 riders who started, she was one of only 30 who finished.

But even very recently, there was a golden age of women's stage racing that most people, it seems, have completely forgotten. Women's racing entered the modern era in 1984 with the Olympics and with the first women's Tour de France. That Tour was created by the same race organiser, and was held on the same roads and on the same days as the men's race. Félix Lévitan would in all likelihood have made it exactly the same, were it not for the UCI capping the race at 18 stages and limiting the stage distances. A host of women's stage races were launched that year, including the Ore-Ida Women's Challenge, which eventually became known as the toughest women's stage race of all, with 17 days of racing. Inga Thompson won it in 1987 and 1990, when the UCI refused to ratify it.

By the late 1990s there were three major stage races on the women's calendar: the somewhat tamed yet tremendously successful Women's Challenge, then sponsored by Hewlett Packard, which offered the biggest prize purse of any US race, male or female, and the women's Giro and the Grande Boucle Féminine (as the women's Tour de France was now known), which were both two weeks long. French TV offered one hour highlights of the latter race every evening.

The decline of women's stage racing since the early 2000s is a long and complex story that warrants unpacking in greater detail, but to put it briefly, the problem of sponsors walking away is only a fraction of the story, an outward symptom of a blight affecting the whole ecosystem of women's racing. "There's been a lot of outstanding and quite astonishing decisions made by the people running the sport," says Cooke, "and it has all led to an essentially very tragic downfall of the women's Tour de France."

This brings us to the elephant in the room: for all that might be said about the brilliance of striving to put on a women's race that was the equal of the Tour de France, one person I spoke to who prefers to remain anonymous said that those early years of the women's Tour did a lot of harm to the women's sport. The event was chaotic; the teams were hastily cobbled together and featured amateurs who in most instances had never ridden together, let alone competed in a stage race. They had no idea of tactics. A few brilliant riders would dominate the race, while the rest of the peloton trailed behind, like participants in cyclosportive. It wasn't, according to my source, very exciting to watch. As a consequence, the boy's club of cycling correspondents didn't bother giving it the time of day.

All this changed in the early 1990s with the end of the Soviet Union and the arrival of some highly competitive and motivated Lithuanian riders who became a catalyst for the – by now more experienced – women's peloton to up its game even further. The same person who critiqued those early years of racing declared that by the end of the decade, women's cycling was as exciting as anything you could watch on the men's calendar. Unfortunately the cycling press had already walked away.

Because women's teams are much smaller than men's teams, and consequently don't have the resources to send two sets of riders to two simultaneous events, having races that clash is something the UCI seeks to avoid at all costs. The UCI also pointed out that they haven't received any applications for a three-week women's race, but added: "The UCI would of course be open to exploring future opportunities should they arise in the future."

Slappendel contends it could be fairly easy for a well-run six-day stage race to get permission to extend to ten days. Indeed she indicated there was interest from within the UCI to do just that with the OVO Energy Women's Tour of Britain – widely regarded as a beacon of modern women's stage racing, with fully televised stages and an equal prize purse to the men's race – but that resistance to expansion came from other quarters.

This is perhaps the moment to consider the economics of women's racing, and the argument that no one watches women's racing, and so it has no appeal for sponsors. Consequently, women's stage races are not worth the effort that goes into putting them on, since organising races is an expensive business, and no matter how passionate the organisers might be, they have to, at the very least, break even. Why would anyone in their right mind organise a three-week women's race?

Thankfully this argument is becoming increasingly dated. Women's cycling is growing, both professionally and recreationally, and media coverage, thought it still leaves a lot to be desired, has vastly improved in the last ten years. The emergence of new brands making women's-specific products generates advertising, which in turn puts pressure on media outlets to cover the women's sport more extensively. Teams and riders are no longer waiting for traditional media but finding their audiences directly via social media. Olympic success – and the TV coverage that came with it – in Britain in particular has turned some of these riders into celebrities with followers in the hundreds of thousands.

The UCI, too, has thrown its weight behind efforts to secure more TV coverage. After the creation of the Women's WorldTour series in 2016, TV viewer figures of the races increased by 55 per cent, from 80 million in 2016 to 124 million in 2017, and that figure is set to be much greater by the end of this season. Likewise, broadcast hours increased from 310 to 650 hours in the same time frame. These things are cumulative, generating further interest, coverage and revenue.

Moreover, the OVO Energy Women's Tour, and the Women's Tour de Yorkshire, both of which made historic decisions to offer equal prize purses for the men's and women's versions of their races, and which have so far shown no outward sign of financial distress since their creation in 2014 and 2015 respectively, suggest that a properly planned and implemented women's stage race is certainly financially viable.

For even the most dispassionate observer, it's hard not to agree. This year's race went viral on social media with its nail-biting finale in which Anna van der Breggen seemed to have the race in the bag, only for Annemiek van Vleuten – with a Giro Rosa victory in her legs – to come up from behind and overtake at the very last moment, winning by a second. It was widely hailed as one of the most exciting bit of racing during this year's Tour de France.

Cromwell also points out that women race differently to men; the women's peloton is much smaller, with teams fielding six riders in a race instead of the men's eight or nine. That in turn affects the style of racing, since it's harder for a six-person team to control a race. Women's events are therefore less predictable but arguably more exciting. "It has a different style to it," explains Cromwell. "That's what people have to understand and that's what makes it beautiful.

But a race with as much clout as the Tour can also be a curse, as Slappendel points out. In men's cycling, "teams depend on whether they ride the Tour de France or not. The Tour – and with that, ASO – has a huge grip on men's cycling, which makes it complicated to change things. So if you look at it that way, I would say 'no, it's better that we don't have a Tour de France being so powerful in our sport.'"

But Slappendel also acknowledges that, "every young cyclist girl or boy watches the Tour de France, so it's the most important thing in cycling." La Course, even with its one-day format, is astonishingly potent. "I was speaking with Annemiek [van Vleuten] last week and she was like, 'well, I won the Giro, but everything that happened at La Course had such a big impact on the people around me and therefore also on me'. Everyone could watch it live and it's been watched very well. That's on the other hand."

All the women I spoke to would like to see improvements made to the women's season as a whole. "We have to work with the UCI, with the race organisers, to make a good race calendar. Make a story from beginning to end," says Slappendel. Perhaps more urgently than a women's Tour de France, the riders would like to see more women's versions of the Classics, with races like Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège at the top of their list.