Tour de France Femmes 2025 (July 26th- August 3rd)

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MagliaNera

Jul 3, 2025
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Didinho said:
So who takes/keeps yellow? Same time. Vos with a stage win or Le Court with placings? Unless Vos her jump was in front of Lippert.
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Le Court took yellow on stage placings, and interestingly that would have still been the case if Vos had finished 4th. They would then also be tied on added stage placings but "as a last resort, the place obtained in the last stage contested is used".

I had to look that one up, though :D
 
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Libertine Seguros

Libertine Seguros

Feb 20, 2010
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pmcg76 said:
Well, 30 riders finished in the same time on stage 2 of the mens race and the finish of stage 4 was much harder than either stage in the ladies version. I guess I just want to see a close race.
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The men's Tour de France just had a time spread of over half an hour down to 10th place, did we call for them to only have one mountain stage in order to keep the race close? Why should the women's péloton, who have been actively clamouring for harder races on which to showcase their abilities for over 20 years now, be punished for the men's race being boring?

Personally I really like that the final weekend sees an MTF on the penultimate day, but then a stage where the run-in isn't hard so anybody wanting to make it count has to go earlier - and offering Joux-Plane as a carrot for that - I think that is a much better option for the race than just a one-off MTF shootout.
 
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pmcg76

Mar 6, 2009
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Libertine Seguros said:
The men's Tour de France just had a time spread of over half an hour down to 10th place, did we call for them to only have one mountain stage in order to keep the race close? Why should the women's péloton, who have been actively clamouring for harder races on which to showcase their abilities for over 20 years now, be punished for the men's race being boring?

Personally I really like that the final weekend sees an MTF on the penultimate day, but then a stage where the run-in isn't hard so anybody wanting to make it count has to go earlier - and offering Joux-Plane as a carrot for that - I think that is a much better option for the race than just a one-off MTF shootout.
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Last time I checked, the mens race is over 3 weeks, the ladies 9 days. I don't necessarily thinks Paris-Nice needs 3-4 mountain stages either, and I don't see what the men's race being boring has got to do with the ladies. You seem intent on drawing parallels between the two when i have not mentioned the mens race at all, in an effort to get offended about something. I have watched enough of the womens races the last few years to know the score and how they race. Maybe I will be wrong, but we will see.
 
Libertine Seguros

Libertine Seguros

Feb 20, 2010
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pmcg76 said:
Last time I checked, the mens race is over 3 weeks, the ladies 9 days. I don't necessarily thinks Paris-Nice needs 3-4 mountain stages either, and I don't see what the men's race being boring has got to do with the ladies. You seem intent on drawing parallels between the two when i have not mentioned the mens race at all, in an effort to get offended about something. I have watched enough of the womens races the last few years to know the score and how they race. Maybe I will be wrong, but we will see.
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But the TDFF doesn't have 3-4 mountain stages. It has two high mountain stages on the final weekend, and a couple of medium mountain stages preceding it. It's a tougher route overall than last year, but doesn't have a single stage as tough as the Alpe stage last year.

I don't think the comparison to a one week race should be to Paris-Nice, but rather to the Dauphiné. And if they drew up a Dauphiné route with only one mountain stage, people would justifiably complain about the route. The other thing is that if they're trying to sell the women's race as the counterpart to the men's race, then the route should reflect it, just scaled down. 9 stages rather than 21 is not 1/3 distance, but nor is it 1/2 distance. However, a men's GT with 2-3 mountain stages would be deemed farcically easy, as we're used to there being somewhere around 6. Proportionately that would mean there should be 2-3 mountain stages in the womens' equivalent. If you were to say only one MTF? That I think is absolutely fine... and it is what we have this year. Or perhaps that the mountain stages have to be designed with more consideration for the depth of péloton and so focus more on the key-note climbs being things like, say, Aspin, Peyresourde, Croix-Fry and La Toussuire rather than Galibier, Tourmalet, Madeleine and Joux-Plane - that would be fine, I would think. Genuine mountain stages but reflecting the shorter stage distances using climbs in a shorter distance range. But the women handled more than that in the 'racing through the dark' era when the péloton had a much starker haves/have nots divide, and they didn't see clamour for removing the mountains, because for the most part both the audience and péloton were excited to have genuine mountains to race at all even if it meant losing several minutes to Fabiana Luperini or Mara Abbott in the process.

I raise the men's race because it seems like every time we get a stage with bigger time gaps than expected in women's cycling we get these discussions over whether the parcours is too hard, in a way that nobody ever does with the men. It may not have been your intention, but as we've come across this argument several times over the past few years and it crops up seemingly every time there's a decisive stage or a dominant win, it's easy to interpret that way. People complained about van Vleuten riding off into the sunset as an argument that the field was poor in quality and as an argument that the races were too hard for the women, in a way that you just would never see happen with the men, so the fact Pogačar is doing to the men's péloton now what van Vleuten was doing to the women's one then is highlighted for effect. The women have had the problem of an entire calendar of racing falling into the same style and they're only just getting out of that and developing to the point where separate specialisations are possible at the top level, of course there are going to be growing pains, but it's something we should want if women's cycling is to develop. Riders of different skillsets are becoming valued and developed rather than being a roster filler for 350 days of the year, but at the flip side of it, as professionalism increases, so parcours designs that used to be selective now are not. A stage like yesterday's is a throwback if anything, seeing as we see a lot of racing in Brétagne - on the flip side, look at how races like Trofeo Binda have gone from being one for puncheuses and grimpeuses to one won by Elisa Balsamo more often than not.
 
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Samu Cuenca

Samu Cuenca

Sep 26, 2020
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If they had raced the mountains this weekend instead, riders like Cavallar and Stiasny would most likely have lost less time by now, and Gigante could very well have won the Giro if there had been another mountain stage in that race.

So far crashes and faulty positioning have had bigger impact here than the difficulty of the course itself.
 
K

Keldergoat

Sep 6, 2023
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pmcg76 said:
Caught mosts of today's race and great to see Garcia hang on for the win. I look at these stages and ask if the women really need more than one mountain stage, when you see the gaps on stages like this?
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Quite a funny take if you look at last year's general classification with 10 seconds between number 1 and 3, and 8 minutes between number 1 and 10. Those are differences way tinier than in the Men's Tour.
 
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