A potentially game-changing development for the whole of cycling was almost lost on Friday afternoon not long after Marianne Vos scored a crushing and spectacular victory in La Course, the one-day women’s race run alongside the Tour de France. The Tour organisers, Amaury Sport Organisation, Reuters reported, intend to set up a women’s stage race that will be the equivalent to its flagship event and have set up a group dedicated to developing women’s cycling.

“Women cyclists need a race which is to them what the Tour de France is to the men and we need to find a solution for that,” an ASO official said when asked for more detail by the Observer. The group will begin work in September – once French holidays are out of the way in August – and it will initially be “in a reflective state” and there will be no pre-determined schedule. “We will have to move fast and we will have to do it well,” the source added.

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This looks like a major move by the organisers, who are by far the biggest and most powerful promoters of men’s professional cycling world wide, and, if there is any surprise, it is that it took them so long to get here. In recent years ASO has pursued an openly expansionist policy, absorbing major men’s races such as the Criterium du Dauphiné and Vuelta, and taking the Tour de France “brand” to the UK, Germany, Norway and Japan. Standalone women’s bike races have played no part in that.

Finally, it seems, the penny has dropped: here is a major potential growth area worldwide which is waiting to be tapped. The success of football’s Women’s World Cup on ASO’s home turf in France this summer will have played a part in the shift of mindset, but ASO has most probably been spurred into action by rapid growth in the women’s race calendar, to the extent that one rider the Observer spoke to this weekend said her team is looking to recruit personnel to enable a double race programme.

ASO may also have looked at the success, and expansion, of one standalone race in particular, the OVO Women’s Tour in the UK, and the arrival in 2021 of a major women’s event in the calendar, the Battle of the North, over 10 days through Norway and Sweden. This year also sees a new Tour of Scotland in August. If ASO does not make a move very rapidly, there may well be no calendar space for its major event.

The development may also be a reaction to criticism of ASO’s attitude to women’s cycling. The company was impressed enough to found La Course in 2014 after an online petition calling for the resumption of a women’s Tour de France drew almost 100,000 signatures and it must have noticed the reaction to the lack of television coverage this spring of its Ardennes Classics, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Friday’s story also underlined that these events will get an hour’s coverage each next year.

Assuming that ASO’s plans do come to fruition, La Course will have played a vital part in the process. In itself it has contributed to the general uplift in the profile of women’s racing in the past five years but it has also served to demonstrate the limitations of attempting to run a women’s race immediately alongside the men’s Tour de France. A photograph circulated on social media on Friday showed the press conference after Vos’s victory: a room empty except for the British journalist who took the picture. This was partly because some writers had already interviewed the La Course winner on the finish line but it was telling nonetheless.

Accuse ASO of tokenism if you will but it cannot be denied that it has experimented with the format of La Course in an attempt to make it sit neatly with their flagship race. La Course began as a criterium up and down the Champs-Elysées from 2014-16. In 2017 it adopted a two-day format in the Alps and Marseille; 2018 was a hilly race finishing in Le Grand Bornand, while this year’s event comprised five laps of the loop near Pau used for the afternoon’s men’s time trial.

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Thirty-five years ago ASO’s predecessor, La Société du Tour de France, inaugurated a women’s version of their Tour which ran immediately before the men’s race. The event was far from being a failure but it suffered from the same issue that led to that empty Vos press conference: media bandwidth extends only so far and the fight for space alongside the biggest bike race of the year is a hard one. The company now recognises that running a race on the lines of the 1984 event is impossible. The men’s Tour de France has reached its limit in terms of expansion: bolting any more racing on is hard to do.

The constant changes in La Course’s format reflect the difficulties in trying to mirror a men’s race even for a single day. ASO does run races which have both a women’s and men’s event – the Ardennes Classics and the Tour de Yorkshire – but these are far smaller in scale than the Tour de France, while Yorkshire is in a completely new cycling market, where the local organisers have geared their race around a dual format almost from the off. This will not work for other races, the ASO source said. “Women need a specific major event, not something run with the Dauphiné or Paris-Nice or anything else.”

That a women’s Tour run alongside the men’s has now been completely ruled out will not be completely unwelcome. Asked about a women’s Tour, one senior rider who finished La Course on Friday said she was far from enamoured by the idea of spending three weeks riding a race that might be shoehorned into a tiny space alongside something much bigger, with the obvious overtones of tokenism. Better, she said, to let the women’s calendar develop its own major events with their own identity in an organic way.

ASO now wants to be part of that process, it seems; the question is what it will do and when.