The Tour de France Femmes has earned more days. But is that what women’s cycling needs?

Yellow had changed shoulders. Favourites had cracked. Mont Ventoux had blown the race apart, before the battle between Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma Phinney went all the way to the final stage. 

Vollering had sensed it from day one. “I think this whole Tour is going to be like this,” she told assembled media after the opening stage in Lausanne. She was right.

So when the race ended after nine stages, the increasingly obvious question returned. Why stop there?

For Cédrine Kerbaol (EF Education-Oatly), sixth overall in Nice, the answer is simple. “Extending it to two weeks would be a great step forward for the coming years,” the Frenchwoman told French television after the finish.

Her team manager, Esra Tromp, has no doubts about whether the women’s peloton could handle that extra load. “Physically, we women can absolutely handle it,” she told WielerFlits.

The level of the racing seems to support her point. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma | Lease a Bike), the 2025 champion, said she produced what she described as her best ten-minute power during stage five and still lost contact with the leaders. “So many riders now are able to ride at a high level. It’s crazy,” she told TNT Sports. “In one year, the difference is huge.”

With the level of the women’s peloton rising so rapidly, the riders’ physical ability should no longer be seen as the main barrier to a longer Tour. 

The more important question is what the consequences of expansion would be for teams, the calendar and women’s cycling as a whole.

More days would also mean more of the most valuable commodity in professional cycling: Tour de France exposure. 

A longer race means more television time, more regions, more roadside fans and more opportunities for sponsors to be seen. Stretching the Tour across three weekends would make that effect even bigger.

For teams, and for the sport as a whole, that extra visibility has real value. The Tour is already the biggest commercial platform in women’s cycling. Adding a few more days would increase that value and create more moments for fans to connect with the race, the riders and the teams, ultimately strengthening their connection with the sport itself.

So what’s the argument against it?

The strongest warning comes from inside the team cars. SD Worx Protime sports director Danny Stam told WielerFlits that a bigger Tour risks becoming so important that it pushes other races down the priority list. 

Women’s teams, he noted, typically have around 16 riders, compared with 28 or 30 at many men’s teams. Asking those smaller squads to support a much larger Tour, while maintaining a full season elsewhere, changes the equation considerably.

Fenix-Premier Tech manager Philip Roodhooft also warned that the current women’s calendar is becoming a growing concern.

Roodhooft estimates that the season contains only 25 to 30 racing days with real commercial value, including the Giro d’Italia Women, the Tour de France Femmes and the leading one day races. “The investments have become too big to accept the calendar as it is,” he told WielerFlits. “Salaries are being paid that are beyond all logic.”

The question, then, is whether expanding the Tour de France Femmes should really be the priority, or whether women’s cycling would benefit more from raising the profile of the calendar as a whole.

There is a sporting danger too. This year’s Tour contained 18,795 metres of climbing, the most yet, and it was striking that the front group was often whittled down to its bare bones long before the finish. While the overall level of the peloton has risen dramatically, its depth may still need more time to catch up.

That means any expansion should focus not on adding more mountains, but on creating more stages where different types of riders have a genuine chance to compete.

Tour director Marion Rousse appears to share that concern. Speaking in Nice, she questioned cycling’s instinct to equate progress with difficulty.

“We can make the race harder, but do we want to? Not necessarily,” she said. “Sometimes, when you make stages too difficult, it actually kills the suspense because everyone just watches each other.”

That gets to the heart of the debate.

The Tour de France Femmes no longer has to prove that women can race for longer. 

There is also still plenty to improve within the current format. Only three of the nine stages were broadcast live from start to finish, with the remaining stages receiving only partial coverage.

Race director Marion Rousse believes that could soon change. “There’s a real discussion to be had with France Télévisions about broadcasting every stage in full,” she told Cycling Weekly. “The women deserve it, and it works well in terms of audience figures.”

For Rousse, the fact that fans are now asking for more coverage is itself a sign of progress. “Five years ago, we were wondering whether it would work. Today, people are asking us why we’re not broadcasting the whole stage. Things are moving in the right direction.”

The next step, then, is not only about adding more, but also about making more of what is already there.

It is understandable that nine days of compelling racing have left us wanting more, and there is a strong case for gradually expanding the race to ten, eleven or twelve days, as long as that growth does not come at the expense of the suspense and unpredictability that made us embrace the race in recent years.

Rousse has already left the door open to that gradual expansion. Her concern is whether women’s cycling can build the structure underneath it quickly enough, and that is where the real focus should be.

Whether the Tour de France Femmes lasts ten, eleven or twelve days in the coming years is unlikely to determine the future of women’s cycling. Building a calendar in which far more races are attractive, commercially valuable and sustainable might. So too will creating stronger pathways into the professional peloton.

A bigger Tour can be part of that future. But it should not be the whole strategy.