An expansion of La Course, the women’s event run alongside the Tour de France, is in the offing for 2017. A spokesman for the Tour organisers, Amaury SportOrganisation, would not comment in detail on speculation that La Course is set to grow to several days next year butconfirmed that “the format will be different in 2017”. ASO added that more details will be revealed next Tuesday, when the route for the men’s Tour is announced in Paris.
La Course has been run for the past three years as a criterium on the Champs-Élysées circuit on the final day of the men’s Tour de France, a format which has drawn criticism from top women racers such as Lizzie Deignan, née Armitstead.
Its probable expansion in 2017 was revealed by the organisers of the Thüringen Rundfahrt, Germany’s top women’s stage race, who stated on their website that they had been forced at the last minute to change their 2017 dates, because of a possible clash with an “expanded” women’s Tour de France.
Thüringen has been brought forward two days, to the apparent annoyance of the organisers who pointed out on their website that they had been planning their 30th anniversary edition for some time and were at an advanced stage. The German race was initially scheduled for 14-20 July but is now expected to run from 12-18 July, they said.
The 2017 men’s Tour de France will finish on 23 July in Paris, meaning that, assuming the finish of La Course were to remain the same, the way is now open for the French race to expand to as many as three or four days.La Course was launched in 2014 as a one-day event enabling ASO to experiment with the re-introduction of a women’s event alongside the Tour de France following a campaign involving leading lights in women’s racing – including the Olympic medallist Emma Pooley – who called for the resurrection of the women’s Tour de France, which was run by the men’s Tour organisers from 1984-89.
The event was then run separately from the men’s Tour and continued outside the aegis of the Tour organisers in various forms and under different names until 2009. The Tour organisers ASO continued to run women’s events, most notably the Fleche Wallonne and Ladies Tour of Qatar, and after the inception of La Course, they introduced a similar event on the final day of the men’s Tour of Spain.
When La Course was launched, ASO would not be drawn on whether it would expand beyond a single-day format on a closed circuit, but the women’s calendar has developed rapidly in the last three seasons, and the inception of a women’s Tour de Yorkshire along an identical route on a place to place stage of the men’s event this spring showed that logistically it could be done.
