Audrey Cordon-Ragot knows better than most how precarious a career in the women’s peloton can be. Racing in the Tour de France Femmes, for Human Powered Health, the former French national champion has survived a stroke, two sponsor collapses and the prospect of retirement in the past 12 months.

While she was recovering from a stroke at the end of last summer, her racing career was on the brink, after her move to the French‑sponsored B&B Hotels team fell apart.

“The B&B project had sounded amazing,” Cordon-Ragot says. “But after all the expectation and media coverage, the reality was that there was no money to fund the team.

“I had my stroke in September and three months later I heard B&B was falling apart. I’d been lied to since probably the first day. I realised that I had to start again.”

Her experience is not unique in the women’s peloton. It takes a special kind of resilience to endure sponsor uncertainty and the hardships of training and racing, often unpaid, in the hope that one day your efforts will be rewarded. Riding for free, or even funding your career through family and friends, has long been commonplace. When the Australian Jess Allen moved to Europe in 2013 she was racing unpaid as she tried to forge a career in women’s racing. Now, a decade later, she is riding her first Tour de France, for Jayco AlUla.

Allen began her European racing career with the Vienne Futuroscope team that, in the intervening years, has morphed into the FDJ-Suez team led by Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig. The French-sponsored team’s budget has grown from €500,000 in 2016 to €3.5m in 2023.

The team manager, Stephen Delcourt, is among those who feel that sponsors investing in men’s teams should do the same in the women’s scene. “For a brand these days, to not have a women’s team, seems a catastrophe to me,” he says. “The potential for development is huge, while the men’s scene is already saturated.”

Although there is a crossover of sponsors from the men’s World Tour into the women’s World Tour, which means that personnel, equipment, and team buses can be pooled, there is often a huge disparity. The Tour de France Femmes champion Annemiek van Vleuten, of Movistar, crosses the finish line and takes refuge in a luxury air-conditioned bus, but others are not so lucky. Post-race, the lesser teams cram, like sardines, into camper vans.

“There is a big difference between the best, and the others,” says Pierre-Yves Thouault, assistant director of cycling at the Tour de France promoter, ASO. “We have to take that into account when designing the route, especially at the start of the race, with stages that aren’t too hard or too long, to ensure a certain equilibrium.”

At the heart of the problem is a huge difference in funding. “It might shock some people but there is a level of the peloton who are either unpaid, or paid very little,” says Gaël Le Bellec, the sports director of Cofidis.

Cordon-Ragot, meanwhile, who first turned professional in 2008 with Vienne Futuroscope, has just about seen it all. After the B&B Hotels team collapsed late in 2022, she moved to a new Spanish sponsor, the short-lived Team Zaaf. “I jumped at it because I basically had no choice, but the team was not built. There was nothing there.”

Her new team were woefully lacking in the basics required to race at elite level. “We’d get there without a proper truck, without a proper mechanic, without proper staff,” she says. “We looked shit, and I looked shit. I was crying, my teammates were crying.”

The gap in funding and in ability is closing, but not rapidly enough to keep up with a fast-growing calendar and increasing expectations from sponsors and the audience. “We need bigger rosters,” Cordon-Ragot says.

“To me, things are going a little bit too fast. Sponsors need more money to pay more riders. It’s all about money, but at the same time we need the Grand Tours, because they bring money into cycling.”

There are now three women’s Grand Tours: May’s Vuelta Femenina, won by Van Vleuten, July’s Italian race, the Giro Donne, also won by the Dutch rider, and the Tour de France Femmes. The prize money in all three races compares poorly to the men’s purses.

In the men’s Tour de France, admittedly three weeks long, the overall winner pockets €500,000 and stage winners pick up €11,000. In the Tour de France Femmes, the race champion earns only €50,000, while stage winners earn €4,000. The total prize pot is €250,000, which compares with €2.3m for the men.

“There is more money now in women’s cycling, but the gulf is widening,” Le Bellec says. “The richest teams are getting richer and the others are struggling to keep up.”