Lizzie Holdern heads into the Tour de France Femmes on the back of the best season of her
(Picture: Le Col-Wahoo)Lizzie Holden is sat on a town centre bench in Andorra, nerves on tenterhooks as, 400 miles away in the small French ski resort of Megeve, Stage 10 of the Tour de France nears its conclusion with her boyfriend, Australian rider Nick Schultz, well in contention.
“I’d actually just been in a physio session,” she tells Standard Sport. “I saw he was in the breakaway before I went in, so I was just wondering what was happening. Then I came out and there was 10km to go and he was still in there! I was just sat on this bench in the middle of the town glued to my phone, people must’ve been looking at me like I was mad.”
In the end, Schultz is pipped by, literally, centimetres; done out of a maiden stage victory on his Tour debut in a photo-finish.
He has, Holden says, taken the near-miss philosophically: “You have to realise how special it is. Not many people win a stage on the Tour de France, but also not many people come second.”
Until now, not many women have had the chance to, and certainly not like this. There have been numerous attempts at launching a female equivalent of cycling’s most famous race, some as one-day events, others multi-stage afterthoughts, but all of them, to one degree or another, failures.
On Sunday, however, as the men’s peloton rolls into Paris for its ceremonial finale, the inaugural Tour de France Femmes will set out on its own Grand Depart from under the Eiffel Tower to begin an eight-stage, standalone race that has been a long time coming.
Holden was initially unsure about taking the race away from the limelight that might have come from staging the two events side by side until she considered that “if we were racing together, we’d be racing at 9am every day with no TV coverage”.
More pertinently, when the Tour was confirmed last summer, she “wasn’t at a point in cycling where it looked like a possibility”, yet now heads to the French capital as the lead rider for British team Le Col-Wahoo, in terrific form after the best season of her career so far.
“I’ve been asked what I’ve changed a lot but I don’t really know,” the 24-year-old says, though the most obvious thing is her team, having re-joined Le Col after two difficult seasons with Spanish outfit Bizkaia Durango.
“I was very out of my comfort zone there, it was a very different environment. Sometimes you find it very lonely. There were points when I didn’t want to go to races, I just wanted to stay at home. It all builds up, all the little things. I lost a bit of enjoyment for the sport last year, so my focus was really to start enjoying it again.”
It was a similar revelation that led Holden to cycling in the first place.
Despite her father, Rob, being a professional cyclist, growing up on the Isle of Man, Holden’s early sporting potential had been most evident in the swimming pool until enjoyment began to fade and a friend “told me about the Tuesday night ‘Dot Races’.” The what? “Dot Tilbury!” Holden laughs.
“She’s this local legend, really.
“She runs these Tuesday night leagues around a little circuit and you get 200 or 300 kids turning up. It’s massive.”
Even then, Holden was not a precocious star on two wheels — “I was never one of those people who won from a young age, more of a slow burner” — but it is little surprise the cycling bug stuck, given her surroundings.
The Isle of Man is a “brutally hard place to ride”, she says, but one with a deep-rooted cycling culture, with daily rides where professional superstars would mix it with amateurs and kids.
“You’d meet at the same point at quarter-past-nine,” Holden says. “You didn’t really appreciate how special it was, but you’d get people like Pete Kennaugh and Mark Cavendish rocking up. You’d just go out and ride with them for, like, four hours. Then when Cav was racing the Tour, the feeling when the whole island was watching and getting behind him was epic. You’d go back to school the next day and chat about his win, it was pretty cool.”
There were plenty of those; Cavendish is the greatest Manx cycling export, the joint-most successful rider in Tour history in terms of stage wins (34), the same as the great Eddy Merckx.
For Holden and Le Col, who are not expected to contend in the General Classification, all focus is on pushing for just one stage victory. After all, not many people can say they have won on the Tour de France — and none yet on the Tour de France Femmes.
Le Col Wahoo have purchased 10,000 GCN+ passes to hand out to fans across the UK, so that they can watch the Tour de France Femmes FREE of charge. Sign up here.
