In search of a decent croissant: A press officer’s tales from the Tour de France Femmes

There's been plenty of buzz around the Tour de France Femmes and for good reason. I'm not going to sit and explain why history has been made, or why little girls can now dream of riding the Tour the same way little boys can – there's plenty of that already out there. Instead, here are some ramblings from my time at the Tour de France Femmes with Le Col – Wahoo.

The role in question

My role of press officer/social media manager/writer/anything else the team needs relating to media sounds overwhelming, but I quite like the variety. One minute I’m doing my best Malcolm Tucker impersonation while the riders have interviews making sure they're not standing in front of any dodgy signs, and the next I’m chasing them around trying desperately to record their hilarity on camera.

Of course, with such a varied role comes some stressors. The pressure isn’t really on until after the race, once the action has happened and I’ve pestered the poor girls for ‘just one more quote’. Often the work doesn't end until late at night, organising the content, posting it and praying the hotel Wi-Fi provides more than 1KB of upload speed. That's not to say that I'm just pissing about on my phone for the rest of the day mind, contrary to what half the bloody paddock seems to think. There's a race to watch and all the fun of the pre-race shenanigans to deal with.

In the first stage, we quickly realised that my team accreditation wasn't enough to get me into the areas I needed to be to do my job, aka the media zone and the start/finish. After being refused into the podium of the Champs-Élysées, awkwardly holding the quickly melting post-race meals for Maike and Gladys after they were awarded the white jersey and the combativity prize respectively, the team contacted ASO to ask for a new pass – this never came. However, I did discover that using one of the soigneur armbands (or just latching onto Caro the soigneur) and looking a bit more purposeful worked wonders in getting into places – lesson number one learned.

Cock a doodle pastry

Early mornings are a prerequisite and something that I personally struggle with. I found the best way to tackle this change of schedule was to knacker myself on an early morning run so that I’m awake for the rest of the day, but tired enough at night to sleep. The staff often run together, but I’ll admit I quite like running alone as it’s my personal time – when you're in a cycling bubble there isn't much time to have to yourself.

Once I'm done avoiding social contact early on, breakfast is served to the staff. We tried to eat together as often as we could, with reasonable success. One of the main parts of the Tour I was looking forward to was the allure of a proper pastry. Not just a re-heated crappy supermarket croissant, but a freshly made, size-of-your-face one. It was not until we visited the Alsace that I got my wish. I told Fabian, a Frenchman who works at Fausto (the cycling agency that got me the gig – thanks Tom!), about the mystical pain au chocolat with icing on top and his face gave away utter disappointment. “Non, non, they do it weird in the east!” That may be the case, Fabian but I ate four of them in one day and I’m afraid they were the best I had on the trip.

Eating at the Tour was overall a success. The hotel meals offered more than pasta, beef and a sauce, the only issue I had with it was the timings. At home, I generally eat around 6PM. I like to have my tea in my belly a good few hours before I go to bed, but the Tour throws that schedule out the window. The soigneurs and the mechanics are still going strong washing the bikes, fixing any niggles, cooking the food for tomorrow, and organising for the next day well into the evening, meaning we didn't eat while 9PM most evenings, once as late as 10:30. I quickly learned that rationing snacks throughout the afternoon and evening would be the only way I'd be able to survive without being an absolute ratbag after 7PM with no food.

Everyone’s a bidon thrower

During the day, every day might be slightly different. I’ve come to understand a lot of teams struggle for the numbers required to feed at all the opportunities they want to during the race, which means either staff outside of soigneur duties get roped in, or friends and family are invited to hand out bidons on the course.

Most days I travelled with the team’s General Manager Tom Varney to a feed stop and then onto the finish. On other days depending on the race route, I went in the camper straight to the finish. The benefit of this being you get a little bit of downtime before the end, and you can make sure you're actually at the finish to make sure the riders get to the podium or talk to journalists.

As you’ll understand, your schedule belongs to everyone else when you’re at a race. While the photographers did a fantastic job of uploading their daily imagery before I had to send the message every tog knows and hates, “When will they be ready?” The hotel transfers, my newfound car sickness, the access to Wi-Fi and my own hanger (hunger anger) largely dictated when I’d be ready to use them. We decided a daily race report focusing on the story of the day rather than factually laying out what happened and then a gallery would be the best way to capture the audience’s attention at the tour. I have to say writing these reports was by far my favourite part of the role, even if asking the riders to tell me the same thing they’d told me three days in a row was not the highlight of either of our days.

Spot the Caro

I don't envy them in that sense. I've never seen a media circus like it at a women's race, albeit I've only worked at two of them before this, but the number of times they got asked the same question, I did wonder if a press conference, or even asking me to answer for them might speed things up a bit -

“How are the legs? What are your plans for the day?" "Fucking awful mate did you not see the size of that mountain they made us climb yesterday?" Perhaps this attitude, along with my lack of talent and ability to train consistently is why I'm on the other side of the microphone.

Another highlight was the pre-stage chat with DS and former racer, Nicolas (Nico) Marche. After a brief awkward encounter on day one when in my best French I said je t'aime, not j'aime les chiens, I think he got more comfortable with the idea of having someone pissing about on their phone all day in the team. Similarly to the Women's Tour where we'd have the DS Julia tell us the plan for the day, Nico gave his fanbase an update and looked ahead to 'another day in beautiful France'. If I wasn't also infatuated with the country by the end of the race, I think I might have flung my phone at him for his overt love of everything French.

The team has a wonderful mix of cultures, languages, and personalities. It might be small, but somehow everyone seems to fit and everyone is very accommodating of each other. I am quite shy and introverted, but having Caro, a Brazilian/Portuguese/Italian soigneur as my roommate meant calm and quiet were no longer on the agenda.

Cooking with Caro

Sharing a room with a soigneur is fascinating and in particular, Caro – you might not be aware of quite how much work goes into their role, but after a week I have nothing but respect for people in this job. She awakes early, refusing to come running with me every day because “Rebecca, I do 30,000 steps in a day I don’t need to run, I need my energy”.

She wasn't wrong, either, even if she thinks her step count was somewhat overestimated, I think I saw her sit down maybe once every 12 hours. She cooks, rice, pasta cake (yes, pasta CAKE), and chicken, all in a rice cooker in a cramped hotel room at 6am. There's nothing quite like waking to the smell of cooking chicken 6 feet from your nose when your stomach is telling you to eat anything but that.

She prepares everything the riders eat outside of the hotel, from recovery shakes to the millions of bidons, to the post-race meals which to be honest, deserve an Instagram account of their own. As I stared at my fifth ham and cheese baguette of the week I was ever so slightly envious of the ‘Caro flurry’ the riders were tucking into.

Once the stage is over and everyone has been ferried to the hotel, the soigneurs begin the massages. As Caro's roommate, I was lucky enough to find myself in the inner circle as the riders regaled their day, spilt their souls and winced as she found a tight spot while I typed away on my laptop in the corner. At first, it can feel quite awkward, particularly if you're not that close to the riders, but they surprised me with their openness, even allowing a journalist in the room and pictures to be taken as they lay on the table.

Battery Voltas

On most days everything went swimmingly. It was a well-oiled machine. I was fortunate enough to spend a day in the team car with Nico and our gruff Belgian mechanic, Yves. This was for the gravel stage, stage four. In the Champagne region, the race travelled over some nasty little hills with the added fear of puncturing at any second.

To be in the convoy I was surprised to learn you don’t need to take any advanced driving lessons or a course. Nico has of course been doing it for a while now, so it was second nature to him, flying down hairpin gravel roads and weaving through the mass of cars and riders to give assistance. I like to think I'm a decent passenger as my partner has a long history in motorsport, but even on this day, I had one small moment where I desperately regretted not having a will in place.

There were a few sketchy moments like not being able to see absolutely anything except the occasional brake lights of the EF team car in front, and riders appearing from nowhere out of a cloud of dust, but Nico's driving skill kept us out of trouble. I even went as far as comparing him to Valterri Bottas, (only because of the media frenzy around his appearance at the race), and he said "It's a good thing for Valterri I'm not in Formula 1." I actually hear there's a seat going at Alpine next year, perhaps we could send Otmar his CV.

Gravel chaos

RV

The only day things felt a little bit tiring was the day the camper decided to try and shit itself. On stage two, Jo, the camper driver and soigneur announced it felt like it had lost power, and had begun making a hissing noise when he stepped on the accelerator. After a quick look under the bonnet to make it look like I had a fucking clue, I decided it was a vacuum leak. I'm not a mechanic, but I own a 1992 Peugeot, of which it frequently decided keeping a tight seal on any hoses is not something it likes to do, so unfortunately, I am quite familiar with vacuum leaks. Alongside this, the camper had started emitting black smoke from the exhaust, with someone posting on Twitter that we really were 'colouring the road'.

Riding to the hotel in the camper at the end of the day, the low point was hitting 20kph on the motorway, watching the minutes add to the ETA. We ended up missing the tea service but Tom got us all pizzas so, in a way, it worked out okay. A meeting was held, and in Ferrari F1 fashion we had several plans to get us through the next day. Tom and Jo would take the camper to a garage in the morning, and a hire camper could be used if the damage was too immense to be fixed quickly. The soigneurs removed the necessities from the camper ready to put in the rental if need be. By 10AM the next day, the camper was fixed and ready to roll once more.

La Super Planches des Belles Filles

Bastard mountain

On the final day, the race finished atop La Super Planche des Belles Filles. A bastard of a climb, which was preceded by a couple more bigguns. For the rest of the Tour, I'd felt a slight twinge of envy towards the riders, as I desperately missed my bike, but for this stage, I was glad to be on two legs rather than two wheels.

The rented Renault Kadjar had been a loyal servant the entire week until we began to summit bastard mountain. The petrol range had held steady at about 160km as we hit the climb. More than enough for most days, let alone a short trip up a hill. As we carried on, with the inclines reaching 20% in places, the range dropped to about 50km. Reaching the car parking 1km from the top, the car suggested it was out of juice.

Tom furiously texted some comrades to see if we could have a bit of petrol to get us to the next petrol station, but to no avail. The camper was parked at the bottom of the climb, but we weren't entirely certain there would be fuel there for us. The race finished, and the soigneurs carrying their finish line bags rolled one by one down the steep grassy incline back to the cars – even Caro slipped at one point and tried to grab my arm for support. I say tried.

Tom Varney is generally a very laid-back man. He's calm under pressure and I haven't seen him lose his shit, even after a week of spending time with me and my 'terrible music choices'. But on this occasion, as we began to roll the Kadjar down the very narrow lane to the bottom of the hill, all we could think about was if we ran out of petrol now, we'd be holding up the ENTIRE race convoy behind us. Not a good look.

Various electronic assists began to shut off, and panic began to set in, particularly when we missed the location of the camper and drove half a mile in the wrong direction. Thankfully, the camper had plenty of fuel for the Kadjar to drink, and a potentially lengthy delay was avoided. Onto the post-race celebrations.

Bob Djungels wearing SS22 Leclerc

My biggest regret about the Tour de France Femmes wasn't my inability to soak up the atmosphere. It was not that I didn't take as many pictures as I'd liked or that I didn't spend more time exploring the beautiful regions the race visited. My biggest regret is that I didn't try a pizza from a vending machine.

Inside the bubble of the team, you sacrifice a lot of independence. In a foreign country, where I apparently can't be trusted to not blurt out I love you to strangers, it's probably for the best. But I did miss the opportunity to look for souvenirs and try out the local delicacies from places that weren't the airport.

My boyfriend only asked for one thing this trip, a box of Crunch cereal. Instead, I gave him a Leclerc polka dot t-shirt and cap that I got thrown at me from the promotion caravan. He didn't complain though, I think he's just happy I'm back to be there to tell him which bin needs to go out.

Hopefully, Le Col – Wahoo will let me loose with the team again on another race or two next year. They have built something really genuine. It's not a performance factory trying to pump out success after success. Instead, they seem to really care about rider wellbeing and celebrate the little wins while also acknowledging the low points. It is bike racing, after all.

The Tour de France Femmes was quite – to use an overused word – epic. I still don't think the enormity of it has hit me, no matter how often my mum says, "Think about where you've just been." The thing that has hit me is the banality of normal life. Returning to my house in Yorkshire, where the weather is terminally crap and the bike riding is just painfully slow, I am greeted by a billion emails I have neglected over the last two weeks. The fridge is empty after not leaving a detailed enough list for my boyfriend to go to the shop with. So while I won't miss the random old people running after me shouting, "BIDONS?!" at a feed zone, I am already missing beautiful France and its incredible attitude towards bike racing.