The 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift gets under way this weekend, with the race expanded to nine stages.
Having switched teams and signed for FDJ-Suez, Demi Vollering will be bidding to go one better than in the 2024 Tour, when she finished second to Katarzyna Niewiadoma.
With founding partner Zwift this week releasing a report that hailed a 'golden era' of women's cycling, there are plenty of talking points going into the 2025 Tour.
Here are five hot topics to pique your interest before the Grand Depart in Vannes on Saturday.
1. More, more, more…
This 2025 edition has more of everything. There’s one more stage – nine instead of last season’s eight.
There’s more climbing – over 17,000m and a mountain-fest from stage five onwards.
There's greater anticipation, after last year’s humdinger of a final stage left something of a season-ending cliffhanger.
Above all, however, there’s more competition for that coveted yellow jersey.
Road world champion Lotte Kopecky returns after missing last year's race to focus on the Olympics and, with a previous podium finish under her belt, has the potential for great things in this race.
Two past stars of the road, Anna van der Breggen and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, have come out of retirement and exile, respectively, to sample a taste of this brilliant race, while youngsters such as Gaia Realini and Cat Ferguson are part of an exciting new generation.
2. Two steps forward, one back for PFP
“Pauline Ferrand-Prévot had a great spring, but La Vuelta Femenina is the real test of her comeback,” wrote cyclingnews.com prior to the season’s biggest stage race to date in May.
But by the end of stage four, the Frenchwoman had withdrawn from the race, having lost time on the final climb.
Her coach, Jos van Emden, said that it wasn’t a climb she should have been dropped on, given her lofty ambitions for the race.
After winning Paris-Roubaix, the 2024 MTB Olympic champion – who returned to road cycling in 2025 after years out, had been backed by plenty to win the Tour de France Femmes.
Her performance at the Vuelta, however, is a reminder of the size of her task, especially when race favourite Demi Vollering cruised to a summit win on stage five.
Ferrand-Prévot later said an ankle infection meant she wasn’t in top form.
3. A bigger, better race
For the 2025 Tour de France Femmes, the addition of a ninth stage might seem like a small tweak, but symbolically it’s a huge step forward.
Nine stages sees it overtake the Giro d’Italia Women as the longest race (in stages and distance) on the Women’s WorldTour calendar.
If it already felt like the biggest event of the season, this cements it in numbers. Organisers ASO have done a shrewd job with its development.
They didn’t start too big and are happy to see it evolve naturally and gradually as interest in the race grows.
Last year’s finale, which saw the closest gap between the top two in Tour de France Femmes history, saw the race climb another rung or two up the ladder, and it could receive a further leg-up according to Le Parisien.
The French daily newspaper reported that we might see a return of Tour de France: Unchained, the Netflix series that followed the men’s race but was cancelled earlier this year, this time following the women’s event.
It’d be a further sign of the times in the booming world of women’s road racing.
4. Coming to the UK…
Fast-forward to the sixth Tour de France Femmes in 2027 for something very special indeed.
The race – who knows how many stages it’ll be by then – will start in the UK, the first time it will have ventured outside mainland Europe and the first time it’ll share a Grand Départ location with the Tour de France.
It’s unknown yet, beyond the men’s race beginning in Edinburgh, where exactly the races will head, although England, Scotland and Wales will all see action.
Further details will be announced in the autumn.
The Women’s Tour of Britain has always entertained huge crowds, and, given its importance, the Tour de France Femmes start will be of a whole different magnitude.
The impact of hosting major sporting events always comes with the caveat of legacy – how will this boost the sport in the long-term and is there a better way of spending the cash?
UK Sport, the body in charge of distributing public money to Olympic and Paralympic sport, says a “landmark social impact programme” in the run-up to the events will aim to tackle inactivity and provide lasting benefits for anyone who rides a bike.
5. Vollering returns with a vengeance
With a new team (FDJ-Suez), new motivations and free of the burdensome team dynamics that blighted her final year at SD Worx-Protime, Demi Vollering returns to the Tour de France Femmes looking to right the wrongs of the 2024 race.
A crash on stage five last year saw her lose crucial time, hand the race lead to eventual winner Kasia Niewiadoma and affected her condition for the remainder of the race.
That she wasn’t helped to chase back to the peloton by her teammates after the crash perhaps said a lot about her status in the team, given she’d signalled her intention to leave earlier in the season.
Niewiadoma showed admirable skill and courage to defend her slender lead on the final stage last year, but without that crash (or simply a better rearguard action by Vollering’s teammates immediately following the incident), Vollering would have been a clear favourite for her second title.
Crashes are part of racing, however – ifs, buts and maybes don’t matter.
Yet, given the same crash this year, it’s hard to see Vollering’s new teammates leaving her to fend for herself.
