champion Demi Vollering.<\/a><\/p>\n“There was a lot of screaming and shouting about the women’s Tour de France this year, and it was incredible to see,” said Backstedt.<\/p>\n
“The only thing we need from now on is full coverage line to line.”<\/p>\n
Only three of the nine stages of this year’s race were broadcast live in their entirety.<\/p>\n
Backstedt contends that on a number of days, the key moments were “already done by the time the coverage happened”.<\/p>\n
“Then you can’t watch us racing – you can’t watch us being our best and showing off the best part of the race,” she added.<\/p>\n
“I think once we finally get full coverage of the race, then we’re going to be unstoppable, 100%.”<\/p>\n
Backstedt’s TdF Femmes debut followed exceptional performances throughout 2026.<\/p>\n
She had already won British road race and time trial titles plus a sprint stage at the Tour de Suisse Femmes, and retained the 2026 Baloise Ladies Tour title a year after becoming the youngest winner of the race.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, she will target more success when the 2026 Tour of Britain Women begins, as she aims to use her TdF Femmes experience to good effect.<\/p>\n
Backstedt delivered a standout ride in the time trial on stage four but missed out on the podium after finishing a close fourth, just two seconds behind Vollering.<\/p>\n
“It was maybe not the result I wanted or hoped for,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I have high expectations of myself and I really wanted to do at least a podium. So to say I want a podium but get fourth, it’s super close. But it is what it is. It was the legs on the day, and I think coming around to it, it’s still a really, really good result.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British champion Zoe Backstedt says women’s cycling will be “unstoppable” if it gets full television coverage for races…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-742762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}