One of the Most Exciting Moves of This Year’s Tour de France Femmes Happened Today. And Fans Missed It.

Almost immediately after the start of today’s stage, EF Education-Tibco-SVB rider Kathrin Hammes made one of the moves that will be remembered during this year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

The 34-year-old German attacked straightaway, putting a minute into the peloton within the race’s first eleven kilometers. By the time she reached the day’s first climb—the category 3 Côte du Peyroux—she was away by a minute-forty. A few kilometers later, she hit the cat-4 Côte du Pératel two-minutes clear of the peloton.

A few chasers bit into her lead and by the time Hammes reached the cat-4 Côte de l’Escurotte, she was forty-seconds clear of Jumbo-Visma’s Coryn Labecki and one-minute-forty ahead of the peloton.

Eventually, as most breakaways are, Hammes was caught, swallowed up the chasing riders. But her hammer-down sixty-kilometer solo attack was a thrilling, white-knuckle effort that netted her seven total points in the Queen of the Mountains classification. It was, outside of the action at the finish line, perhaps the most exciting bit of racing the Tour de France Femmes has yet seen this year.

Or at least it seemed that way on social media.

Because the whole of Hammes’ Herculean effort happened before the television broadcast even started and this reporting comes from the cobbling together of a series of tweets, Instagram posts, and updates from the Tour’s official race accounts.

In just two years, the Tour de France Femmes has made tremendous strides to become the premier race on the women’s calendar.

However, today’s attack proves that there is still a long way to go to make this the world-class event it deserves to be.

Of course, a lack of coverage in America is not an issue exclusive to the women’s WorldTour. In fact, unless you have Peacock or FloBikes or GCN+, watching the whole of any bike race on television is often impossible. This lack of coverage even applies to the men’s Tour de France, not only the biggest bike race on the calendar but one of the biggest sporting events on Earth.

It’s something of a feedback loop that Tour organizers and television partners must overcome if we ever hope to enjoy full race coverage in America, something that is, at this moment, infinitely more important to the survival of the Women’s WorldTour than it is the men’s.

That is, not enough people tune in to the Tour de France Femmes to make full coverage viable. But if full coverage is not available, then how can more people tune in? How can we try and watch something that isn’t there?

Surely, it’s more nuanced than that, what with sponsorship dollars and eyeballs, impressions, and the like. After all, I’m just a cycling fan trying to watch a bike race. But if women’s racing is going to continue to grow, it needs to be able to reach as many fans as possible regardless of how many kilometers are left in the race.

Now, as I write this, Fenix-Deceuninck’s Julie Van de Velde is on a solo attack of her own, well over two-minutes ahead of the peloton with just twenty-eight kilometers to go. She’s already locked in the polka dot jersey for tomorrow and is now charging toward a potential Tour de France stage win.

Thankfully, now that the broadcast has started, we can all watch in real time, to see if Van de Velde can hold on until the very end.

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