THE BATTLE FOR A WOMEN'S TOUR DE FRANCE

Tom Davidson uncovers the story of the Tour de France Femmes, together with the trailblazers who campaigned to make it happen

- Tom Davidson

Kathryn Bertine has a bone to pick with journalists. “The one thing that drives me bonkers is when the media refers to the current Tour de France Femmes as the first Tour de France for women,” she says, the exasperation clear in her voice. “It drives me mad when professional journalists obviously don’t do their research.”

If you know her story, you’ll understand that the former cyclist has every right to be annoyed. After a sequence of false dawns for women at the Tour de France, once in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s, Bertine made it her mission to give herself and hundreds of others the chance to race on cycling’s best-known stage.

Today, she’s heralded as the key driving force behind La Course by the Tour de France, the event that ended a 25-year female absence from the race, and paved the way for the modern-day Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. It’s with La Course that this story begins.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly from her home in Tucson, Arizona, Bertine starts from the top. “How much time do you have?” she laughs, before launching into the narrative.

“I got my first pro contract in 2012. But it was before that, in 2009, as I was climbing the ranks in amateur cycling, that it made no sense to me that there weren’t women at the Tour de France, when that is the one race that everybody knows.”