A very Swiss start to the Tour de France Femmes, but what next for women's cycling in Switzerland?

Tuesday marks the first full day in France for this year's Tour de France Femmes, after a very Swiss start marked the race's second-ever foreign Grand Départ in five editions.

In many ways, the part of Switzerland we were in – Lausanne, Aigle and Geneva – doesn't feel particularly different from France, as we're only just over the border, but there was a distinct Swiss flavour to the first three stages.

Aside from the Swiss flags lining the roads, the opening stage took place on Swiss National Day, meaning the arrival of the Tour coincided with a festival of celebrations in Lausanne and fireworks in the evening. We paid for everything in CHF, a currency I only ever associate with UCI fines, we saw the United Nations, we did like the locals do and swam in Lake Geneva. A lot of the experience couldn't have felt more Swiss.

The reception of the race in Switzerland felt perhaps mixed, with lots of fans out in Lausanne and Aigle, cheering loudest for Marlen Reusser, and in Geneva the finish was fairly well attended, but for the start the next day, it felt like no one even knew there was a race on, the women's Tour an afterthought to the city that does, admittedly, have bigger things like world peace to worry about.

Switzerland is a country that has put a lot into supporting women's sports – the nation hosted the women's European Championships in football last summer – and indeed women's cycling, with two WorldTour races here in the Tour de Suisse and Tour de Romandie.

But what is going on beyond that? What state of health is women's cycling in Switzerland in? Why host the Tour de France Femmes? Whilst we were here, I dug into some of those questions, speaking to the Swiss riders in the race and race director Marion Rousse to go a bit deeper into the Tour's Swiss excursion.

The Swiss contingent

Within the peloton, there was perhaps the feeling that the Swiss contingent was not quite as big as it could have been, with only two Swiss riders, Marlen Reusser (Movistar) and Noemi Rüegg (EF Education-Oatly), taking the start at home.

There are six Swiss riders in the WorldTour, and one at ProTeam level, but factors like Elise Chabbey's pregnancy and Petra Stiasny's injury after her Vuelta Femenina stage win meant that there weren't as many home riders on the start line as we may have hoped. Compare and contrast with the Rotterdam Grand Départ, when there were 32 Dutch riders in action in 2024.

However, those riders that were here arguably had enough excitement and passion to make up for their lack of numbers.

The biggest star of the pre-race media day, Reusser couldn't stop smiling the whole day, underlining repeatedly how special it was not just to be racing the Tour in Switzerland, but doing it in an edition where she was going for the overall win for the first time.

"I really saw this coming since a long time, and actually my goal was to win the Swiss Championships and stand here with a nice cross. Things didn't go as I wanted, but still, it's super nice," she beamed.

"I've already spent two days in Lausanne, and it feels like there's so much excitement already. Everyone's talking about us, you see bikes everywhere, people have knitted bikes, cycling is alive here.

"I have the feeling that Romandie is more excited about cycling than the rest of Switzerland right now, so I hope that this fever can spread to the rest of Switzerland."

For Reusser's compatriot Noemi Rüegg, it was a race against time to get to the start in Switzerland. She fractured her humerus in a crash at the Vuelta Femenina in May, and the end of the expected 12-week recovery coincided exactly with the start of the Tour de France Femmes in Lausanne.

"It's super special to have the start of the tour here in Switzerland," Rüegg said. "It's been marked in my calendar for a while now. We have really big ambitions, but I think I just want to enjoy it as well, to have family and friends alongside the road, and yeah, enjoy the Swiss crowds."

Racing at home is hardly a novelty for Swiss riders, given they have the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Suisse every year, plus the World Championships in Zurich were less than two years ago, but the Tour de France Femmes, and all the fanfare and international attention that comes with it, is clearly on another level.

Why Switzerland?

When the Tour de France Femmes announced that its first foreign Grand Départ would be in the Netherlands, it felt like the obvious choice, given that perhaps no other nation has contributed so many great stars to the women's peloton.

Whilst Switzerland doesn't have quite the rich women's cycling history of the Netherlands, it also made perfect sense as the place to hold the next Grand Départ on foreign soil. Its proximity to the French border and the Alps makes for straightforward logistics and no air transfers, it's a common stop on the men's WorldTour, and of course Aigle is the home of the UCI, who have been working to build the profile of women's cycling for the past decade.

Marion Rousse explained a bit more about the decision to come to Switzerland when she spoke to the press pre-race.

"For me, starting in Switzerland is a wonderful story," she said. "A foreign start means a lot to us. It shows that, as the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, there is a desire in other countries to share the Tour's prestige, which is what makes it the greatest race in the world and creates that special magic.

"A nice detail in this Swiss connection is that back in 2022, when Wout van Aert won at the top of the Côte de Saint-François, where we’ll be [on stage 1], the first edition of the women's Tour de France was just days away. Switzerland had already put itself forward to host the women's Grand Départ, without even knowing if it would work out. It really demonstrated their commitment to supporting women's sports. That really appealed to us.

"Plus, the route connects Lausanne, the Olympic capital, with Aigle, the home of the UCI, and Geneva, the capital of diplomacy. It’s a really coherent story that I feel reflects the values ​​of our sport perfectly. And going from the Swiss Riviera to the French Riviera [in Nice], it all came together beautifully."

The second stage, starting from Aigle, saw female riders from the World Cycling Centre and the IOC Refugee Olympic Team welcomed to the race for a ceremonial ride before the race, a special moment celebrating the inclusivity and growth of the women's sport, and another special aspect of starting here in Switzerland.

Women's cycling beyond the WorldTour

With two WorldTour races in Switzerland and now the Grand Départ, it would be easy to assume that women's cycling in Switzerland is in rude health, but the story beyond the WorldTour is a little bit more complicated.

It is true that the nation boasts some incredibly strong riders, both on the men's and women's side, and when it comes to World Championships and international events, the top riders do get good support from the Swiss federation. At the World Championships in Rwanda, they fielded five women in the elite road events, two in the U23 races, and two in the junior road race, coming away with a rainbow jersey for Reusser in the TT and third in the junior road race for Anja Grossman.

But if you look a little further down the pyramid, things maybe don't look as well-supported. Since the demise of the Roland Le Dévoluy team, there are no Swiss-registered WorldTour or ProTeams – Swiss men's outfits Pinarello-36.5 and Tudor both support female athletes off-road, but not in the road peloton – and there are just two Continental teams based in Switzerland, the UCI's World Cycling Centre team (WCC) and Nexetis.

As of 2026, there are no lower-level UCI races in Switzerland for women, only the two WorldTour races, which are officially not open to Continental teams or clubs, and the National Championships.

"I think it's getting more and more popular. I think we've, yeah, made really big steps the past few years, thanks to the women's Tour de Suisse and the Tour de Romandie, and now also with this with these two stages here, I think we can hopefully inspire a lot of young girls and boys to start cycling as well," Rüegg said about the state of women's cycling in Switzerland.

"I think we still have a long way to go. If you see that also now we are only two Swiss women in the peloton [at the Tour], so I think we can improve that definitely. But we are already on a really good way compared to a few years ago."

The WCC team is ostensibly there to create a pathway for riders from around the world, mainly outside of western Europe and nations that have little to no professional cycling scene, but several Swiss riders have also turned to the team to get their start in cycling, including Reusser.

Rüegg, meanwhile, found her way through the Akros-Renfer development club, which also kickstarted the careers of Mauro Schmid, Stefan Bissegger and Yannis Voisard, but no longer exists

The next generation seem to only have a few pathways into the WorldTour. Going via mountain biking is one avenue, as mountain biking is arguably even more popular than road racing in Switzerland, and that's worked for riders like Steffi Häberlin.

Many talented riders are also coming up through the Nexetis squad. They have the super-talented Jasmin Liechti (who also started her career with WCC before joining Nexetis in 2025) signing for Canyon-SRAM for 2027, and Ginia Caluori is on her way to Movistar. They do a great job of finding Swiss talent and showing them to the European peloton, but they are only a small outfit, and the funding only goes so far.

"I think there is still some work to do in the younger categories, like under-23 and juniors, because it's pretty hard to find a team that you can race international races with in that age," Rüegg said. "I think Nexetis do an amazing job with that team to help young riders making that step, but I think it's also financially a big challenge to have such a team running and to build on it."

Of course, the impact of an event like the Tour de France Femmes coming to Switzerland, or the expansion of the Tour de Suisse, is hard to quantify in the immediate term. The same is true for the impact and legacy of the football Euros in Switzerland – the women's national team is actually lower in the FIFA rankings right now than before the tournament, but the real impact will likely be some years down the line.

In the short-term, though, Switzerland can count themselves as a growing force in women's cycling. The contingent may be small in this year's Tour, but both riders here are more than capable of winning a stage, one is a World Champion, and though there is work to be done on development pathways, there will be at least two new talented Swiss riders in the WorldTour peloton next year. And if the Tour in Switzerland has inspired young women in the way the riders hope, there should be more on the way.

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