“If you look closely, it’s a Classic every day,” said race director Marion Rousse of the route for next summer’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
All nine stages, from Leeds in Yorkshire to France’s Puy de Dôme, were unveiled in a ceremony inside Paris’s Palais des Congrès on Thursday. Those in attendance wooed at the highlights – stage two’s “mini Liège-Bastogne-Liège” through the Peak District, the following day’s London team time trial, the closing Queen stage’s volcanic finale – and the excitement was justified: this is a route that promises surprise and suspense. And yet, the finale may be a damp squib.
In each of the previous five editions of the Tour de France Femmes, the organisers have built the route around fabled climbs of old. They ticked off the Col du Tourmalet in 2023, Alpe d’Huez in 2024, the Col de la Madeleine in 2025, and this summer, the most mythic of them all, Mont Ventoux.
Next year’s route dodges both the Pyrenees and the Alps, and is designed instead towards a crescendo on the Puy de Dôme, the volcano that towers over Clermont-Ferrand. At 170km with 3,840m elevation, the final stage is perhaps the only true mountain stage of the race. It’s here that the yellow jersey will be decided. It’s also a stage that risks being a flop for the fans.
I was on the Puy de Dôme in 2023 when the men’s race returned to the mound after 35 years. Why had it taken them so long? The area is protected as a Unesco World Heritage site. As such, its final four-or-so kilometres, a twisting road barely four metres wide, is closed year-round to cyclists.
When the Tour went back three years ago, it did so on one condition: there would be no fans on the volcano. Journalists and photographers had to apply in advance for a pass to report from the top. I watched the race from the car park 5km from the summit, where security bodies stood firm to turn people back, and guard the nature behind them.
As everyone in the sport will tell you, it’s the fans that make cycling. That stage, won by Michael Woods, was proof of that. With nobody at the road side, it made for an eerie and soulless ascent. I fear it could be similarly underwhelming for the women’s race next August.
“It’s up to the Puy de Dôme department to decide with us,” Rousse said of the fan logistics, “but we’re looking into having people at the finish. We’re talking about between 3,000 and 4,000 spectators at the summit, because it’s our final stage with the podium ceremony at the summit. We also need to preserve this climb.”
Four thousand fans are better than none, but that number pales in comparison to the crowds this race deserves. There may have been 10 times that on Mont Ventoux this summer.
Time trial conundrum
As well as the final six stages, the details of stage three’s team time trial were also announced on Thursday. Rousse's list of landmarks included on the 18km London course made her sound as if she was reading out the place names on a Monopoly board: Downing Street, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park, and the Mall. It's so central it made a Frenchman sat behind me in Thursday’s ceremony gasp. “Très stylé,” – very cool – he said under his breath.
This team time trial, naturally, comes at the expense of an individual one, which has been dropped from the course for 2027. The decision was made to show off the collective element of the sport (and undoubtedly to keep London’s roads closed for as little time as possible), but it may take some of the sting out of the general classification.
Let’s not forget that this summer’s ITT in Dijon shook up the contenders; it catapulted Marlen Reusser into yellow, ruled Pauline Ferrand-Prévot out of the running, and gave Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney something to chase. It ended up being one of the most important stages.
Reusser, present at the route presentation, was understandably disappointed about the omission. “I think it’s missing an individual time trial,” the world champion said. “A team one is cool – it’s my favourite discipline – but it’s very different for making gaps in the general classification.”
As for the other days, there’s a lot for the stage hunters to get excited about. Stage two from Leeds to Sheffield, with seven categorised climbs including Winnats Pass and Snake Pass, is Grand Départ GB managing director Paul Bush’s favourite – “it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” – and could see early GC blows.
Stages five and seven, too, should draw out a fight. The former boasts the Classics-style recipe Rousse likes to cook up, while the latter brings the route’s first uphill finish to La Loge des Gardes.
The big question, though, remains: will we have a similarly close GC fight as this year? Ahead of the final day in Nice, Niewiadoma trailed the eventual winner Vollering by just eight seconds. Rousse and her organising team expect tension until the end. But it may be an anticlimax if there are few fans on the Puy to see it.