Stage 4 of the Tour de France Femmes continues tonight with a hilly 126.8 kilometre stage from Troyes to Bar-Sur-Aube. Watch the action from the early time of 10:15pm (AEST) on the SBS SKODA Tour Tracker before SBS and SBS On Demand coverage begins from 10:30pm (AEST).
Full transcript from our special SBS Cycling podcast edition with Inga Thompson is below.
Christophe Mallet: "I'm here with Inga Thompson. You were one of the trailblazers of women's cycling in the 80s".
Inga Thompson: "It was really difficult because we didn't have a lot of teams and a lot of support and we weren't paid. And we would work several jobs in order to make enough money to go to the next race and to try to train while you were still racing.
When we came to the Tour de France, we had to get our own plane tickets and you got here and this was before the cell phone and before GPS, and before you just got on an airplane and you said goodbye to your mother and your father, and you saw them again in a few months, unless you had some, you know, some nickels in your pocket to call your parents to put into the payphone.
And so when we first started racing this, all we ever heard was women can't, it was a kitchen races, it was the skirt races and all the reasons why we shouldn't be racing.
I remember arguing with the president, at the time, of the UCI - they were telling us that they were probably going to start mandating if you started your menstrual cycle, they weren't going to allow you to race.
And I said, well there isn't a single woman here that's going to confess to being on her menstrual cycle? I mean, what are you going to do before the race, panty check?
So we really fought to be here, to have the equality. You have to start somewhere and I call it 'build it, and they will come'. And I know when I was young, I was always told that there was no sports for women. And in 1984, we were told that they had the very first women's Olympics ever (the 1984 cycling road race) and then they're going to have the very first women's Tour de France ever.
And I was in college on a running scholarship and I thought, this is what I want to do. I've always loved the bike. I actually was supposed to go to Australia and I was going to get a job on a cattle ranch, but instead of going to Australia and get the job on the cattle ranch, I took that money and I bought a bicycle and 3 months later I made an Olympic team.
I remember telling people that I was going to do the Tour de France and they said women can't do the Tour de France and I said 'just you watch me, I'm going to the Tour de France'. While I didn't make it - I went to the Olympics instead - two years later, I got to come to the Tour de France and when they had it here, it was spectacular.
We ran right in front of the men and so, our races might have been shorter than the men, but the man had all of this long flat area to kind of ride out, before they started the mountain passes. They started us right at the bottom of the mountain passes. And so we got to have all of the same finishes as the men. It was spectacular.
But something I'd like people to know is that that year in 1986, Maria Cannon's overall winning time was only six tenths of a mile per hour slower than Greg LeMond. Or one kilometre per hour slower than Greg LeMond.
People say well you know the women didn't ride as far, and I said 'well the men who had 200 racers in their field and we had maybe 80, and of those 80 maybe 40 of us were actually supported while being there. So I was so proud of the women that had less support than I had - they're they're really the heroes. The ones that they suffered more than I did."
LISTEN TO
(Special) Inga Thompson:"In the 80s they said women can't do the Tour de France and i said just you watch me"
SBS Sport
26/07/202207:43
CM: "How did the racing look like at that time? Was it tougher, rougher. How do you compare to today? It looks a lot more professional today but in your era it looked like it was really a battle."
IT: "You know that the speeds are probably similar, maybe they're faster now because they have a bigger peloton, but it was still tough racing.
Mark my words - it was incredibly tough, and I was one of the top riders always consistently in the top three, and I was gassed the whole time.
I just felt like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth to try to keep up. The women were tough and strong and as we've had these reunions and gotten together, we realise that we're all strong tough alpha females. It takes a personality type to be here, and it's not going to be your very gentle woman. We're all warriors - I think we've earned the name 'The Originals'."
CM: "How do you look now at this new edition of the Tour de France Femmes? It seems that there's no going back."
IT: "I don't think that there's any going back now because during my era, we didn't have the media coverage - you didn't have social media, you didn't have the cell phone, you didn't have this ability to record it easily and get it out there and they're finding that women are so good about being on social media, and promoting it.
So I don't think that this will ever stop because I think people start understanding how strong a force women are when it comes to sports. Like most people that I know, I won't say they've stepped away from men's sports but they enjoy women's sports as much as they enjoy men's sports.
And of all the women that I know and myself, I don't bother to watch the men anymore. I watch the women because there's more tactics, it's just different. Women's racing as women's tennis is different to all of the sports. We have to stop comparing it to the men and you compare us unto ourselves.
It's as beautiful to watch when you when you're watching these women out here, it just makes my heart smile to see this event started back up and and I think about the future generations of young girls that can watch it on TV - and they can dream about this being a future.
Before we had social media, before people could follow woman's racing is why women's racing struggled because little girls didn't have a dream, they didn't know that it existed or it didn't exist, and now it does. And now they have the coverage and now these little girls can dream. And I think this is just the beginning of the domino effect.
I think you're going to see it grow exponentially from here, because women sports are valuable. And this is the beginning of a new era.Inga Thompson
CM: "You look back at this year - I can see the smile on your face, is it an enjoyable time when you look back on this?
IT: "It is an enjoyable time because sports are about giving it your best and some of my best memories were the times that I just got annihilated, or you blew up and you look back and go 'well, I gave it my all and I gave it may be a little bit too much and I blew up. Well, we always have tomorrow'.
And I enjoy knowing that I could push. It was very rare that I ever blew up and so if I did, I was actually kind of like, oh good, I know that I pushed to that limit. I always worried that I didn't push myself as hard as I could have, because you try to leave it such that you have everything for the end, you just don't want to make it to the end, you want to make it to the end and you want to have your best sprint and your best effort. At the same time, you want to blow up everybody else's legs and you try to find that balance of you blow up everybody else's legs but you don't blow up your own, and that's one of the things I used to do to - attack, attack and attack."
