This article was originally published in Rouleur magazine, Issue 137
The story of the women’s Tour de France is one with a happy ending. From the perspective of 2025, the latest and hopefully permanent iteration of the event is the fourth since the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift was inaugurated in 2022; not only that, but the cycling world is still buzzing from the final-day drama of the 2024 race, which was the closest ever finish in a Grand Tour, and a three-way cliffhanger between eventual winner Kasia Niewiadoma, Demi Vollering and Pauliena Rooijakkers which went all the way to the finish.
However, it’s been a long time coming, and Maria Blower, an elite cyclist during the 1980s and one of the interviewees in Breakaway Femmes, a new documentary directed by Eleanor Sharp, cast a rueful eye at the 2022 edition, the first: “This should have been the 40th Women’s Tour de France,” she observed.
The subject matter of Breakaway Femmes is the 1980s iteration of the women’s Tour de France, which ran between 1984 and 1989 and took place alongside the men’s race. The Tour de France Féminin shone briefly but brightly for those years, not least because five of the six races saw battles between Jeannie Longo and Maria Canins, whose head-to-head in the French race was one of the greatest and most compelling rivalries the sport has ever seen. However, the Tour organisers washed their hands of the race as the 1980s ended, and more or less put the cause of women’s cycling back years, if not decades. A smaller event, not affiliated to the Tour and what’s more hamstrung by the Tour’s refusal to allow it to use any name similar to its own, stuttered and limped through the 1990s and 2000s, before it finally died a quiet death in 2009, reduced to a four-day event which nonetheless managed to fit in a 350km transfer between two of the stages.
Breakaway Femmes combines rare contemporary footage of the Tour Féminin, behind-the-scenes still photography and insightful, sparky interviews with around 40 individuals, mostly consisting of the women who raced. It has an extraordinary cast of characters, a band of sisters who are connected by the indelible experience of having ridden in the Tour, and who have been role models, conscious or otherwise, for the current generation of female cyclists.
In 1984, there was a brief burst of optimism about women’s cycling, and as importantly for the Tour organisers, the Société du Tour de France, the alluring possibility of commercial expansion. The Tour had been making early forays into internationalising the peloton, recognising after decades of cycling having been concentrated into a handful of western European countries, that meaningful expansion could not come from the old markets, but by discovering new territories. Their amateur version, the Tour de l’Avenir, had opened up to teams from Eastern Europe, while a Colombian team had been invited to the 1984 men’s Tour. But the real prize was North America, and when it was announced that the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics would for the first time include a women’s road race, the Société du Tour suddenly took notice of women’s cycling. Whether they were more interested in breaking America than investing in the long-term health of the women’s side of the sport is not certain; however, the Tour announced that in 1984 there would be a women’s Tour de France that would take place using largely the same stage finishes and a shortened version of the same routes. The former Tour director Xavier Louy, interviewed at length in Breakaway Femmes, also pointed out that it might have helped that Longo, one of the emerging stars of women’s cycling in the mid-1980s, was French.
No matter where the impetus came from, however, the women’s peloton set off from Bobigny, an unglamorous suburb of north Paris, on June 30 1984, one day after the men’s race started. As Marion Clignet, the multiple world pursuit champion (and runner-up in the 1993 Tour Cycliste Féminin) said: “It was new, it was exciting, it was an adventure, and it was about fucking time.”
The 1984 Olympics might have been instrumental in the establishment of the Tour Féminin, but it also hamstrung it to an extent. The Tour would finish in Paris on July 22, barely a week before the inaugural women’s road race was set to take place nine time zones away in California. This essentially meant choosing one or the other, and most national federations focused their efforts on the Olympics, with a motley cast of extras sent to France for the first edition of the Tour. But while higher-ranked athletes contested the Olympic road race, the peloton of the 1984 Tour Féminin made it a memorable edition. The race was absolutely dominated by Dutch riders. Mieke Havik won five stages; Heleen Hage and Connie Meijer won three apiece, and in all, 15 of the 18 stages were won by riders from the Netherlands.
However, previously unsung American rider Marianne Martin won two of the big mountain stages and took the yellow jersey.
Martin is one of the stars of Breakaway Femmes, an expansive, energetic interviewee who had to take out a loan in order to pay for her first racing bike and jacked in her job in order to ride the Tour. She won the equivalent of a thousand dollars by taking the yellow jersey, split between her team, and after ill health ended her career not long afterwards, had to work two jobs to pay off her debts. Even as a relatively inexperienced rider, she had to navigate intra-team politics in the American squad as well as deal with her rivals. The more experienced, assertive and successful Betsy King, who was based in Europe and knew the territory, was expected to be the team leader, but she had injured herself just before the Tour. Both riders still have a perspective on the tension, 40 years later, and it’s almost reassuring to see that the competitive nature that got both riders to the pinnacle of their sport against the odds still burns brightly.
That initial official Tour Féminin is still the longest version ever held, at 18 stages. And it attracted the unwanted attention of the FICP, the forerunner of the UCI, who made noises about imposing limits on the number of days women could race. The Société du Tour de France responded by splitting the 1985 race into two, but still presenting an overall winner – at that point they were still very supportive of their own project. All the more so as Longo would make her debut appearance at the race; however she would come up against the climbing talents of Italian rider Maria Canins, a former cross-country skier from the Dolomites.
The fact that these two riders would split the next five Tours Féminins between them, each time beating the other into second place meant that theirs was a historic cycling rivalry, only matched by the current run of five men’s Tours, which have seen Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard finish in the top two. Canins was a climber; Longo a more punchy sprinter by nature, though she transformed herself into a climber after she was defeated by Canins in both the 1985 and 1986 Tours Féminins. And in character, the two could not have been more different. Canins was softly-spoken and modest; Longo fiery, opinionated, confident and competitive. Tour Féminin rider Susan Elias said Canins “was a total sweetheart, and the most gracious winner you could ever imagine”. Meanwhile Betsy King said of Longo, “Her strengths were physical. Her weakness was her personality.” Even Longo’s team-mates were circumspect. Dany Bonnoront, another French rider, said, “We didn’t speak or have anything to do with each other, and it was better like that.”
However, the contrast in personalities and riding styles, and the intensity of their battles, meant that the Canins-Longo rivalry was one for the ages. And time has worn off Longo’s rougher edges, as far as perceptions go at least.
Kathryn Bertine, the Saint Kitts and Nevis rider who was a professional in the 2010s and was one of the key advocates for the resurrection of the Tour de France Femmes in 2022, made a salient point in Breakaway Femmes, that a lot of the assessment of Longo might have been tied up in her being an outspoken and ambitious woman. “A lot of people have strong feelings about Jeannie Longo,” she said. “Or any other female athlete who is outspoken. or bitchy, or unpleasant or whatever label society wants to throw on a woman who isn’t always smiles and sunshine.” Meanwhile, Canadian rider Kelly-Ann Way said that Longo “has qualities that we admire in a man but somehow it was wrong if you are a woman”.
Either way, the Breakaway Femmes interviews with Longo show a woman who has mellowed with the years, but who is still obviously fiercely competitive. And if anybody comes across as arrogant or unpleasant in Breakaway Femmes, it is not Longo, but Marc Madiot, who as the national road champion during the 1987 Tour, appeared in the post-stage television show À Chacun son Tour one day along with Longo, and aggressively provoked her and other female cyclists in a clip which reflects badly on everybody there, except Longo.
“There are masculine sports and feminine sports,” Madiot said. “A woman dancing, for me, is very pretty. But seeing a woman on a bike is ugly.” And when Longo attempted to answer, he spoke over her, saying that this was his opinion, while fellow riders Laurent Fignon and Jean-François Bernard tittered in the background. Betsy King, in commenting on the clip, said, “I think Madiot was a bit of an idiot.”
And even the Tour organisers couldn’t help bringing unconscious stereotypes to the Tour Féminin. While the men’s Tour had the Combativity Prize, which remains the only subjective classification in the race to this day, the women’s Tour awarded a ‘Prix d’élégance”. The reluctant winner, Susan Elias, said, “It’s the prize you wish somebody else got, but better yet, you wish they didn’t have at all.”
After the 1989 Tour, the Société du Tour de France decided that there wouldn’t be a 1990 race. There were various reasons, some reasonable, some less so, but with the men’s race growing fast as it entered the modern era, the logistics were becoming a headache, with the women’s peloton enduring long transfers but also having to wait until after the men had finished their stages to leave the finish area. Xavier Louy said that the race wasn’t breaking even. Some riders, including Longo and Way, felt that the race was perceived as a threat and was taking attention away from the men’s race. However, the Canadian rider Denise Kelly may have been closest to the truth. “I just felt they couldn’t be bothered,” she said.
And so the race stopped, and the heroes of the Tour Féminin took their separate paths. Some continued as athletes, and had successful careers, despite cycling’s lack of support for them. Some retired, had families, found other competitive outlets, built lives and almost got forgotten. Almost. Kelly-Ann Way said, “I challenge anybody who tries to make me invisible. I’m part of a big group of women who changed the face of women’s cycling, and nobody can take that away. We have been forgotten.” Breakaway Femmes has finally given the cycling world a chance to remember.
Breakaway Femmes is screening in cinemas in the UK on Sept 8. Tickets are only available at https://uk.demand.film/breakaway-femmes
Reserve tickets before the threshold deadline of Aug 29 for your local screening to go ahead.
Also available in Ireland https://ie.demand.film/breakaway-femmes/
