When you adopted the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift this 12 months, you would be forgiven for pondering that Zwift ran the entire present. The digital biking platform‘s vivid orange and pink branding was in all places, and the model’s squirrel eclipsed the lion because the race’s mascot. Stage winners have been handed an opulent model of this furry icon, whereas a life-sized model mingled with the gang, distributing caps and posing for photos with followers.
However Zwift’s influence goes far past mascots, branding and including its identify to the official race title. Since approaching board because the presenting sponsor in 2022, the corporate has been a driving drive behind the occasion’s revival. Its monetary backing and four-year assure introduced the race organisers, the A.S.O, stability and time to determine the occasion and drum up industrial curiosity for its continuation — a feat earlier renditions of a girls’s Tour de France all didn’t do.
The 2022 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift was the primary official Tour de France for girls in 33 years, and already, simply three years into its revival, it’s nearly inconceivable to think about a world the place girls don’t vie for the long-lasting Maillot Jaune.
Whereas Zwift calls itself girls’s biking’s “largest followers,” their funding isn’t purely passion-based. Its return on funding is measured in model worth, visibility and affinity. That, and lowering its personal gender hole on the platform, the place girls make up roughly 20% of its consumer base.
“We will spend our cash in loads of methods, and we determined to spend it on this. This funding is an extension of our mission to create more room within the sport, to do issues in a different way. It is clear that the ladies’s professional peloton was prepared for this publicity,” Kate Veronneau, Zwift Director of Girls’s Technique, advised Biking Weekly.
“This race has exceeded all people’s expectations and we’re thrilled with the outcomes. The visibility we get from simply the content material created, the media, the eye of this race, the viewership is phenomenal. This places our model and our values entrance and centre.”
The race has been so profitable that Zwift has prolonged its title sponsorship for one more 12 months, bringing it to 5 years.
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“Sponsoring the Tour is among the most fun issues that we do. We’re actually happy with it. There isn’t any cause to cease now,” Veronneau stated.
Biking Weekly had the unique alternative to talk with Veronneau and CEO Eric Min in regards to the firm’s involvement within the Tour, their imaginative and prescient for the long run, and the broader enterprise case for investing in girls’s biking.
Watch the Femmes
(Picture credit score: Anne-Marije Rook)
Zwift’s sponsorship of the Tour de France Femmes is a part of the corporate’s broader technique to spend money on and develop girls’s biking. It is greater than a monetary sponsorship; it is a motion, Veronneau stated.
The motion, named “Watch the Femmes”, was born from the Zwift Academy, a extremely in style expertise identification programme that scouts the most effective biking expertise worldwide utilizing the Zwift digital biking platform and locations the winner in knowledgeable workforce. It began in 2016 as a girls’s-only programme and gave Zwift an inside look into the ladies’s facet of the game and, consequently, a need to enhance it.
Zwift’s partnership with the A.S.O. started in the course of the pandemic lockdown in 2020 with a digital Tour de France. It was a stepping stone that laid the groundwork for one thing greater.
“I feel we have been the right associate to come back on board as title sponsor as a result of we’re not simply sponsors: we’re girls’s biking’s largest followers,” Veronneau stated. “We by no means wished to only put our identify on it. We actually wished to construct this motion.”
The Tour de France Femmes made its debut in 2022 with Zwift because the presenting sponsor, and it was a direct hit. Social media engagement skyrocketed, greater than 23 million viewers tuned in to observe the races reside, whereas 1000’s extra lined the roadside, and media shops worldwide supplied intensive protection. Zwift, too, benefited, experiencing an 8.9% improve in feminine subscribers within the first 12 months alone.
Three years on, Veronneau confidently describes the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift as “an absolute, clear, plain success.”
The Enterprise Case for Investing in Girls’s Biking
Zwift’s CEO Eric Min poses for a photograph with race winner Kasia Niewiadoma.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
Zwift’s funding in girls’s biking isn’t pushed by ardour alone; there’s a enterprise case to be made as properly.
“On the finish of the day, we’re a enterprise,” Veronneau stated. “[Our investment] must contribute to the underside line. And it does. It completely does.”
Zwift’s CEO Eric Min agrees, stating, “I feel it’s good enterprise. Take a look at what number of eyeballs we’re getting on a per-day foundation. The chance for us is that there is simply a lot upside on the ladies’s facet in comparison with the boys’s facet – a lot headroom when it comes to progress, funding, viewership, and girls’s participation. That is the plain place to speculate should you’re a client model.”
The achieve comes primarily within the type of visibility, model consciousness and model affinity.
“I actually suppose that this sponsorship is the rationale why we by no means dipped after COVID. We went from exponential progress to progress. It’s the visibility of this sponsorship and Paris-Roubaix Femmes avec Zwift as properly,” Veronneau stated.
“The entire Watch the Femmes marketing campaign places us within the highlight and I feel that should you have been already on Zwift, you stayed on Zwift since you felt good about how we have been investing our cash. And should you did not learn about Zwift and now you do.
“As girls’s biking grows, that progress is mirrored in our progress.”
One among Zwift’s goals was to lower its personal gender hole. Earlier than 2022, girls made up solely 9% of its consumer base. Right now, that quantity sits round 22%.
“All indicators level to it being a really constructive factor for the enterprise and, in fact, an extremely constructive factor for the game. And people go hand in hand,” Veronneau stated.
The industrial success of the Tour de France Femmes is essential in guaranteeing the occasion’s continuation and demonstrating to the A.S.O. {that a} girls’s race is a worthwhile funding. Traditionally, the organisation hasn’t been the largest advocate of ladies’s biking, arguing that public curiosity and industrial viability have been missing.
“With A.S.O, to be completely frank, it must work of their portfolio, as they run the best profile races,” admitted Veronneau. “Seeing the influence, seeing the followers and the viewership numbers, I feel that we have efficiently satisfied them that girls’s biking is a reputable, thrilling alternative. That is what followers need. It not solely makes them look good, but it surely achieves their enterprise aims.”
The Future
Stage winner Justine Ghekiere
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
As is true for girls’s biking usually, the historical past of a girls’s Tour de France has been marred by inconsistency, with promising races vanishing after just some seasons. Nonetheless, Veronneau is satisfied that the Tour de France Femmes is right here to remain.
“The Tour will not go away. No one will let that occur. That is too huge. Truthfully, it is too profitable,” stated Veronneau. “I’ve seen such fantastic developments and evolution of their content material and in the best way that A.S.O is speaking in regards to the race. You possibly can positively really feel it. A.S.O. believes on this.”
That doesn’t imply the work is completed, nevertheless. Veronneau stated she’ll be pushing for extra intensive broadcasting, investments from different manufacturers and a much bigger worth purse.
“Now that we’ve got confirmed that the race is profitable and that it’s a precious entity, that should get again to the riders,” Veronneau acknowledged. “I firmly consider in that.”
Presently, the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift prize purse, set by the A.S.O, is €250,000, with €50,000 for the winner. In distinction, the boys’s Tour de France prize purse in 2024 was €2.5 million, with €500,000 for the winner. In fact, the ladies race for fewer days than the boys; nonetheless, these numbers equate to €31,250 per stage vs. €119,047 per stage.
Trying forward, the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift would be the longest but, with 9 phases unfold over one week and two weekends. That also pales compared to the boys’s 21 phases. Nonetheless, few are calling for a three-week race and in line with race director Marion Rousse, sluggish progress is important to the occasion’s survival.
“We actually don’t wish to broaden too rapidly,” Rousse advised Biking Weekly. “I would like the race to nonetheless exist in 100 years’ time, and never shut down in a number of years. Now we have to take it little by little.”
Veronneau and Min agreed that so long as the race exists, Zwift needs to be a part of it ultimately.
“You’re going to see way more Zwift,” Min promised, hinting at potential developments corresponding to a L’Étape du Tour cyclosportive on the Tour de France Femmes in future years.
“Getting extra individuals on bikes, that’s our final aim – indoor or open air.”
