This Monday (6 June) sees the return of the Women’s Tour, and six action-packed days of racing starting in Colchester and ending in Oxford. Here we’ve pulled together all the key spectator and broadcast information and the riders to keep your eyes on.
Watching from the roadside
With six stages taking place from Monday to Saturday, there are plenty of great opportunities to cheer on the riders from the roadside at this year’s race.
There’s plenty to love about this year’s route, including another stage finish in Bury St Edmunds on stage one, climbs aplenty in stages four and five in Wales, and the chance of a spectacular sprint finish to end the race in Oxford.
You can find full details of each stage here, and download the Race Manual here.
Watching from home
If you can’t take your rightful place on the roadside this year, you’ll be pleased to hear that for the first time the entire race will be shown live on Eurosport Player and GCN+, thanks to the support of self-catering accommodation provider cottages.com (part of Awaze).
Highlights from the day’s racing will also be shown as usual on ITV4, and you can find the broadcast times for that here. For social media followers, you can get updates on the race as it happens through @thewomenstour on Twitter.
Ones to watch
National road race champion Pfeiffer Georgi (Team DSM) will be back racing on home roads on stage three in Gloucestershire, with the 21-year-old hailing from Breadstone, a short distance south of that day’s finish in Gloucester’s historic docks.
Former British road race champion Jess Roberts (Team Coop – Hitec Products) will make her debut in the race, with stage five between Pembrey County Park and the Black Mountain taking place in Roberts’ native Carmarthenshire.
Her teammate Josie Nelson will also be featuring at this year’s edition, having finished in the top 15 of all but one stage at the 2021 Women’s Tour, before taking a sensational second place in the road race at last year’s National Road Championships.
National time trial champion Anna Henderson (Team Jumbo Visma) will also be making her debut at the Women’s Tour. Having been crowned the Queen of the Mountains at Ride London last month, Henderson will be more than ready to put on a show on home roads.
Former Alice Barnes (Canyon//SRAM Racing) is another home rider to watch out for, and we'll also be rooting for our British UCI Women's Continental teams CAMS-Basso and Le Col-Wahoo.
Internationally, former champions Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon//SRAM Racing) and Coryn Labecki (Team Jumbo – Visma) will be joined by past stage winners Lorena Wiebes (Team DSM), Christine Majerus (Team SD Worx) and Chloe Hosking (Trek – Segafredo).
Other riders include 2021 runner-up Clara Copponi (FDJ Nouvelle-Aquitaine Futuroscope) and ŠKODA Queen of the Mountains winner Elise Chabbey (Canyon//SRAM Racing), this year’s Paris-Roubaix winner Elisa Longo Borghini (Trek – Segafredo), newly-crowned UCI World Hour Record holder Ellen van Dijk (Trek - Segafredo) and another former ŠKODA Queen of the Mountains champion in Audrey Cordon Ragot (Trek - Segafredo).
For everything else you need to know, visit the event website here.
