The 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift achieved record viewership; the next challenge is using those eyeballs to build sustainable support for the rest of the sport.
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The town of Brest was packed. Fans lined the streets, the buses were parked down by the water’s edge, where riders were gearing up for what looked like an aggressive Stage 2 of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. I walked up the hill towards the start banner, behind Kate Veronneau (director of women’s strategy at Zwift), Loren Rowney (former professional cyclist, rider agent, and Wheel Talk Podcast colleague) and Chantel Beltman (former professional cyclist, Olympian and our driver for the day). Zwift had kindly offered Rowney and I the opportunity to ride in the VIP car ahead of the day’s race.
We waved at roadside spectators as we walked up to the car, a very smart-looking Skoda with Zwift stickers, and I was struck yet again by the evolving dynamics of the cycling fan. The race was still around 30 minutes away, yet the roadside was full of people of all ages, hoping to get a glimpse of the textured peloton as it sped past. The car takes off, and we are on course.
Throughout the day, the window was barely rolled up. Our hands were out the window, waving to the fans as we rolled through these little French towns. These are towns the race will only visit for a minute or two, depending on the peloton’s speed. And yet, the fanfare was dialed up. People were hanging out of windows, banners flapped high above the street and it was difficult to spot a spare piece of sidewalk. Everyone wanted a front-row seat to the spectacle.
Nobody, no matter their age or gender, wanted to miss a moment of the action.
This is what I find intriguing about spectating a cycling race. On TV, you see the cycling but there is a barrier between what is happening on the ground and what you’re seeing. Often the peloton looks halcyon. Especially when the TV camera captures the sunflowers as they roll past. On the ground and in the peloton, it’s chaos. The rider are jostling for position in that constant washing machine. On the roadside, it’s a blink of an eye and the pulsating peloton is gone. All that follows are the dregs of the caravan.
The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is only in its fourth iteration. In 2022, the live TV audience for the race was 23.2 million. As we will see in this article, that has increased enormously over three years. There is appetite from current and new fans alike, with the focus starting to move to: how do we get more women into bike racing and, by extension, on bikes? There is still work to be done to sustain this increase in appetite, however, the ambitious plan of Veronneau and other industry experts is starting to pay off. More businesses are waking up to the enormous reach of this event.
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