Very disappointed in the issues for the Women's Tour, mainly as it confirms the very thing I had initially feared and felt my fears had been allayed - that while Britain had a real cycling boom, this was unfortunately something of a fad - not from the perspective of riders, as Britain is really churning out great young quality riders in both genders, but in terms of sponsors and hosts, as well as from the organisational standpoint some noteworthy misconceptions about what constitutes exciting racing really hurt things. I really feel that Britain needs a race organiser or preferably more than one that truly understands how to utilise the terrain at their disposal. A lot of the sponsors and stage hosts want the image of a bunch kick to put on their promotional materials, but a close race settled in a bunch sprint with small time gaps might sound good to somebody who knows nothing about the sport, but most organisers in traditional cycling hosts are aware that most sprint stages are transient, they don't live long in the memory, and much of the time they don't exactly provide riveting action that hooks the audience in either. There are of course exceptions.
I was raising these concerns about the Women's Tour back in about 2015, and it really looked like they'd resolved them - the best editions were in fact the 2016 and 2019 editions - both editions which were won by Britain's own Lizzie Deignan, which you'd have thought gave them ample material to try to capitalise on that. They'd introduced a first hilltop finish in 2019, they brought in the ITT in 2021, they'd got an extra stage... so I thought they'd got over that 'hump' so to speak. I thought, well, they aren't going to deliver on the hype that it was going to be one of the true highlights of the women's calendar - at first it got that simply because the women were being treated like stars in a way pretty much nowhere else did, but swiftly the lack of decisive racing and insipid parcours rather tamed the enthusiasm (Emma Johansson was taking podium selfies and celebrating one of her best career experiences at the 2014 edition, after the 2015 edition she said she wouldn't return unless they improved the route to give opportunities).
It's not unique to the Women's Tour - if you look at the one race in Britain that consistently over-delivered it was the Tour de Yorkshire, which was the one organised by an experienced overseas race organiser. The ToB and WT organisers may be a bit more hamstrung by not being the Tour de France organisers, but it seemed like a lot of the time, even if they were limited by the towns that were bidding, the stages provided in pro races in Britain left a lot to be desired, many being lazily-drawn loops around a county studiously avoiding readily available obstacles that would significantly improve the potential of the race to deliver action, and many featuring some chaotic finishes including extremely technical run-ins with a lot of road furniture, which might have been ok had they used those obstacles at their disposal but without them, ended up turning into demolition derbies.
Britain still has incredible untapped potential for racing. I honestly think you could make the best stage race for classics men and women ever conceived in the country, using things like the cobbled bergs of Halifax, the Ardennes ramps of Yorkshire and the Peaks, the relentless back-to-back hills in urban areas in South Wales, and the mostly unexplored terrain of Scotland (although the paucity of significant urban areas that are in such areas is very much a limitation there I'm afraid, and most of the time when Scotland does host a stage in the men's ToB it's between Peebles and Dumfries, in the least interesting county of Scotland topographically, or on the Glasgow circuit.
However, I also thought that (possibly with the whole Brian Cookson thing and also a great deal of striking-while-the-iron-is-hot with cycling being the 'in' thing in the UK at the time) giving WWT status to the RideLondon Crit over so many better, more challenging, rewarding and interesting races was disgraceful at the time, and completely counter-intuitive to how to grow the sport. Because it had such a good prize pot, the RideLondon Crit was always going to draw a decent audience, but how are we ever to entice people to watch women's cycling when the best coverage we can muster is an hour of a pan-flat circuit going directly up against the men doing a race nearly four times as long and including several hills?
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