The Diagonal of Queens
The 2025 Tour de France Femmes route preview
In a desperate search for offseason content—which would not be a problem if more monument winners went on The Masked Singer—I’ve been kicking around the idea of ranking my favorite race days of 2024. Much like the All-Wheelysports Team, it’s useful both to memorialize the people and events who defined this season, and to get extra content out of cool shit that happened.
But I don’t know if I want to do a full top-five or top-10 list, or dispense with the fiction and just write another 1,500 words on Stage 8 of last year’s Tour de France Femmes. Because I still can’t believe that shit happened: Three riders still alive on GC within meters of the finish line, counting back the seconds to see if the sentimental favorite and perennial runner-up could hang on for the biggest win of her life. All set up by a total meltdown by the team of the defending champion earlier in the race. The hommes could never dream of such a thing.
All of this is to say I’m pretty pumped for the sequel. ASO and race director Marion Rousse1 announced a course that goes along with what I’ve been asking for from women’s stage racing: Longer races and more challenging climbing.
It’s nine stages, which is the longest TdFF ever, but still not record-breaking for women’s cycling in general. The Giro routinely goes to nine or 10 stages and even stretched out to 14 at the turn of the century. So it’s an incremental embiggening of the challenge.
Which is fine. I mean, look, incrementalism is having a really bad week in general, but my concern with lengthening the women’s grand tours isn’t about hitting the magic number of 21 stages. Though that’d be nice to see someday. It’s about making these races feel less perfunctory. Back when the Tour of California was a thing, the guys would get a week of racing with a time trial and at least one proper mountain stage, while the women would get two flat stages and a “GC” stage that was mostly flat but had one medium-sized hill at the end. And the big European stage races—except the Giro Donne—were rarely any better
Leaving aside the insulting smallness of Wage Gapping the climbing challenge in a race, organizing races like this also stunted the development of the sport. Why would a rider train for big mountains when she could win the Tour de France as a glorified puncheur, and would never race the Tourmalet or Alpe d’Huez in anger anyway?
This race might only be nine stages, but it’s substantial. In the previous three editions of the TdFF, since it became a proper stage race, the stages lined up across one corner of the country. You can do a lap of France in three weeks, but in eight days all you get is a little toodle around Occitania.
In 2025, the ladies will start in Brittany, at the far northwest corner of the country, and head straight across to the Swiss border. The tagline for this year’s race is “The Diagonal of Queens.”