The astonishing story behind the women’s Tour<\/a><\/p>\nThe Tour de France Femmes produced one of the closest finishes in cycling stage race history last year. But when the women’s Tour was first revived, it was called “ugly”.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t now if Pauline was still hanging in the finish, but in the end I sprinted a bit with Kim,” Vos said, praising her teammate’s effort.<\/p>\n
“I’m really grateful to the team and to Pauline.”<\/p>\n
The hilly 78.8-kilometre route from Vannes to Plumelec in Brittany featured two small climbs and was completed in 1 hour, 53 minutes, 3 seconds by Vos \u2014 a multiple world champion, a former Olympic road race champion and a silver medallist at last year’s Paris Games.<\/p>\n
Former Olympic time-trial silver medallist Marlen Reusser was one of 10 riders to crash some 30 kilometres from the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She continued for a while but was clearly struggling and had to abandon the stage.<\/p>\n
The second stage from the port city of Brest to Quimper stays in Brittany and is slightly more hilly and longer at 110.4 kilometres.<\/p>\n
The nine-stage race, which ends August 3, began a day before the end of the men’s Tour, set to be won for a fourth time by Slovenian star Tadej Poga\u010dar by a comfortable margin.<\/p>\n
The women’s race could be far closer.<\/p>\n
Last year provided the smallest winning margin in the history of the women’s and men’s races, with Polish rider Kasia Niewiadoma beating 2023 champion Demi Vollering by four seconds, and Pauliena Rooijakkers only 10 seconds off the pace in third place.<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cycling great Marianne Vos won the opening stage of the women’s Tour de France with a brilliant late…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,21277,82,19487,4134],"class_list":["post-26665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-marianne-vos","tag-sports","tag-tour-de-france-femmes","tag-womens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}