Kathryn Bertine: ‘I’ll celebrate the Women’s Tour but also keep fighting’

Kathryn Bertine is experiencing “all the happy feels”. She is watching the opening stage of the Tour de France Femmes on the Champs-Élysées. She notes how the route pays homage to La Course, the one-day race that ran from 2014 to 2021 and was the precursor to the revived eight-stage event. Bertine rode the inaugural edition in 2014. “I’m joyful and emotional,” she says, the soft babble of the British commentary team Ant McCrossan and Hannah Walker in the background. “I know what it’s like to race with those exact cobbles under your tyres.”

But the moment is bittersweet. “More sweet than bitter,” she says. Bertine is happy to celebrate the new eight-day race while at the same time staying faithful to the original goal of a 21-day Tour on parity with the men’s race. “I’ll celebrate and continue to push for change, but there’s a long way to go,” she says.

Bertine was part of Le Tour Entier, a pressure group she formed in 2013 with fellow cyclists Marianne Vos and Emma Pooley, and triathlete Chrissie Wellington, dedicated to achieving a women’s Tour de France. She says they were thrilled when ASO – the organisation that runs the Tour de France – implemented La Course so quickly, taking just 10 months to get that first race up and running. But then the pace of change stalled.

“One day was OK for the first year, but the original plan was that ASO would add an additional three to five stages every year,” says Bertine. “We not only showed them how to achieve parity but did the bulk of the work in creating La Course.” If they had followed the original plan, she points out, a full three-week tour would have been in place by now. Instead, says Bertine, they had eight days of racing in the last nine years.

But today is not the day