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from Clermont-Ferrand to Pau via the Tourmalet

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The women’s Tour de France will start from Clermont-Ferrand on July 23, 2023, event director Marion Rousse announced on Thursday when unveiling the route for this second edition. Run in eight stages, the women’s Grande Boucle will end on July 30 in Pau.

After a 1re edition in the east, heading south for the women’s Tour de France. The route unveiled Thursday October 27 in Paris by the director of the event, Marion Rousse, will visit three regions – Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie – for eight stages to be covered from July 23 out of nearly 1,000 km, with a course starting from Clermont-Ferrand which will offer the Tourmalet as a justice of the peace.

After crossing the Massif Central and passing close to the Lascaux cave, the queen stage will take place in the Pyrenees, with the sequence of the Aspin and Tourmalet passes. The finish will be judged at the top of this mythical summit, at an altitude of 2,110 m, as in 1994, 1996 and 2000, during previous versions of the women’s Tour de France which existed in different forms before disappearing end of the 2000s for lack of funding and then to be reborn in 2022.

The Tour will end on July 30 with a 22 km individual time trial in Pau, a novelty compared to this year.

After the successful bet of the rebirth, marked by phenomenal audiences (20 million viewers on France Télévisions) and the world everywhere on the roadside, the 2023 edition inevitably comes with its share of questions to know if the event can be long-lasting, the past curiosity effect.

>> To read also: Fervour, falls and the Netherlands in force… What to remember from the first Tour de France Women?

“This year, people really got into the game, they got attached to the women riders and they watched the Tour for the same reasons as for men’s cycling. But we remain cautious. It’s still a fragile object that we need to anchor. The goal is to have a solid Tour de France and not to go faster than the development of women’s cycling,” said Marion Rousse in an interview with AFP.

Although many women’s teams are now backed by the elite formations of the men’s squad, the gap with the men remains significant, especially in terms of density.

“That’s also why we don’t want to embark on a 10-day Tour de France right away, even if we want to grow in the long term. The Tour brings sponsors, light, money. But there is still a lot to do,” adds the former runner.

This also applies to salaries, even if the International Cycling Union (UCI) has established a minimum salary for World Tour teams (first division) which must reach 32,100 euros per year in 2023.

“Don’t burn your wings”

Last year, several controversies accompanied races offering ridiculously low “prize money”. For the Tour de France, the endowment has not changed: 250,000 euros in prize money, including 50,000 for the winner. It is ten times less than for the winner of the men’s Tour de France. But for Marion Rousse, it is “rather to compare with an eight-day race for men like Paris-Nice”, for once less richly endowed than the women’s Grande Boucle (144,300 euros, including 16,000 for the winner).

“Like the number of racing days, we hope to evolve on that too. But it’s also about not burning our wings and having to go back in a year or two,” she said.

“We don’t want to go faster than the music. The event must become permanent, settle down”, abounds the director of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme.

In the meantime, the Tour de France Women continues to grow with the expansion from six to seven riders per team. Marion Rousse also measures the growing popularity of the event by the number of messages she receives.

“From now on, I am contacted directly, from municipalities abroad as in France who want to have the two Tours, girls and boys. We really feel that people have already appropriated the women’s Tour. They have realized that girls on a bike, it works.”

With AFP

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