New UAE Tour to be launched, Tour Down Under, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Tour de Suisse all promoted, seven-day Vuelta in May, RideLondon Classique in limbo
The women's peloton racing at the Women's Tour(Image credit: SWPix)
Four events have been added to the Women’s WorldTour calendar for 2023, the UCI has confirmed, taking the total number of events in the season to a provisional 29. The additions are UAE Tour, Santos Women’s Tour Down Under, Omloop het Nieuwsblad and Tour de Suisse, while RideLondon has tentatively been downgraded to the Pro Series.
The newest addition to the calendar will be the UAE Tour, a four-day stage race to be held in February alongside the men’s race which has been held since 2019.
Three of the four added events are stage races, and the season will now kick off with a stage race, with the Santos Women’s Tour Down Under - which was cancelled in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic - now the season opener in January. The race will form part of a mini block of races in Australia, with the WorldTour Cadel Evans Road Race the following week.
The long-running Classics curtain-raiser Omloop het Nieuwsblad will join the WorldTour for its 15th edition. The Tour de Suisse, launched in 2021, has also been promoted, and will grow to four stages in 2023.
As well as the addition of races, there has been some reshuffling of the calendar, most notably the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta - registered in 2023 as ‘La Vuelta Femenina’ - has moved to May, and will be seven stages long.
There are few details available about the expanded and moved race other than how it’s been registered for 2023, but it falls in the week typically occupied by the Ruta del Sol, GP Eibar and the Navarra Women’s Classics.
Despite some discussions around the Giro Donne moving its spot in the calendar after the inclusion of the Tour de France Femmes, that remains the same in 2023, with a two-week gap between the races.
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The Tour of Scandinavia, however, will now be three weeks after the Tour de France Femmes, rather than one. The Simac Ladies Tour is also a week later.
However, the UCI may still allow the race to be WorldTour in 2023, but have said that its registration as such will be “conditional to the presentation of firm commitments concerning the live TV broadcasting of all the stages”. A decision will be taken in September.
The women’s Milan-San Remo that RCS are planning to create is not included in the 2023 calendar.
Matilda Price is a freelance cycling journalist and digital producer based in the UK. She is a graduate of modern languages, and recently completed an MA in sports journalism, during which she wrote her dissertation on the lives of young cyclists. Matilda began covering cycling in 2016 whilst still at university, working mainly in the British domestic scene at first. Since then, she has covered everything from the Tour Series to the Tour de France. These days, Matilda focuses most of her attention on the women’s sport, writing for Cyclingnews and working on women’s cycling show The Bunnyhop. As well as the Women’s WorldTour, Matilda loves following cyclo-cross and is a recent convert to downhill mountain biking.
