And a Florentine to order so many men on the Tour

Francesca Mannori, before the start of the second stage.

Above Gouvenou, Thierry, above Prudhomme, Christian, in the Tour de France Mannori rules, Francesca, from Florence.

She is an international cycling commissioner, she is the first woman to chair the Tour jury, the college in charge of enforcing the regulations, capable of stopping the race if it deems it necessary, of expelling, of sanctioning.

to punish those who do not comply, be it Gouvenou, the director of the race, be it Prudhomme, the organizer, be it the Swiss Stefan Küng, who slaps the Portuguese Ruben Guerreiro in the middle of the bridge.

At his orders, given by radio from the red car that opens the caravan at the tail of the peloton, 16 more marshals, national and international, on motorcycles or by car or waiting at the finish line, all men.

And she decides on Saturday, with her own criteria and regulations, if she sets up a

[stopping the teams' cars so that the rider who has dropped off does not take advantage of his slipstream to return to the peloton] to Rigo Urán, who has fallen and not doing the same job to the leader Lampaert, fallen on the bridge, and returns fast between cars.

"It's a very important thing, to be the first woman in a very masculine territory, but I prefer to be happier because it's a personal achievement, because I've gotten to where I wanted to be professionally," says Mannori, 49, who, acknowledging the obvious, that the world of cycling is not only almost exclusively male but also excessively sexist, it did not get to know the times when one of the missions of the stewards in the races was to ensure that there were no women, the temptation, the devil , neither in the cars of the directors nor accredited in any position of the race that was not that of beautiful officials of the podium or cheerleaders.

Times in which the wives of cyclists, their girlfriends too, stole accreditations, sneaked into hotels secretly... "No, no, says Mannori",

who works in Florence in a legal office.

“When I started, in 1993, that time had passed.

I went to the races with my grandfather, who was a cycling journalist, and one day, when I was 20 years old, someone asked me why I didn't take the course.

I started with the regional, then the national and in 2010 I achieved the international”.

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If the Tour is the first three-week race that she presides over, and no woman has yet presided over the Vuelta and the Giro, Mannori reaches the top with the experience of being chief curator already in the Swiss Tour and in the Emirates, races in which she has verified that nobody looked at her as an exotic element.

“I don't like to be seen as a curiosity, as an anecdote.

If the UCI has appointed me, I know it is because it is important for the development of women's cycling to impose egalitarian policies in men's cycling, although, curiously, in races," says Mannori, who prefers to be called commissioner, and not commissioner.

“I have never felt discriminated against.

All my colleagues have always treated me with respect, and the cyclists.

In fact, everyone congratulated me and was happy when the UCI announced that I would be the president of the Tour”.

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