The 2027 Santos Ladies’s Tour Down Below will run on the identical day and throughout the identical levels as the ultimate three days of racing within the males’s occasion, with the choice to double up prompted by a request to shorten the size of time that the ladies’s World Groups are required to spend in Australia firstly of every season.
The lads’s WorldTour opener is anticipated to run from January 19-24 with the three-stage Ladies’s WorldTour race then set to happen on January 22-24. The levels will begin out round 90 minutes after the lads roll out and canopy the identical distance and have the identical begin and end traces.
“The problem we got by the UCI was to ship a extra condensed program of racing and optimise the time the ladies’s groups spent in Australia,“ stated race director Stuart O’Grady in a press release.
“We noticed it as a possibility to do one thing totally different and produce each males’s and girls’s racing collectively and end off with a bumper remaining weekend of racing.“
The ladies’s race has run earlier than the lads’s occasion in earlier years, which means the groups needed to be away longer for fewer days of racing as they waited by means of the hole to the Ladies’s WorldTour ranked Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race, which this yr was held on January 31, whereas the Ladies’s Tour Down Below completed on January 19, though there have been two lower-ranked one-day UCI races between.
This prolonged keep, particularly, grew to become a problem in 2026 as attendance in any respect however one Ladies’s WorldTour occasion every season grew to become necessary, which means groups which will have chosen to overlook out earlier than got little possibility however to show up for the opening block of racing.
Whereas working males’s and girls’s occasions on the identical day is not new, the Tour Down Below – which was a forerunner in providing equal prize cash – stated will probably be the primary main occasion to reflect the levels.
“Yearly we’ve seen the extent of girls’s racing on the TDU progress and that can now prolong to having the peloton driving longer levels, so I’m wanting ahead to seeing the ambiance out on the roads for an enormous remaining weekend of the Tour,“ stated assistant race director Carlee Taylor.
“It’s additionally an ideal platform to spotlight the power of our ladies’s peloton on a degree we haven’t seen earlier than, and the truth that we’re even in a position to do that displays the expansion and development of girls’s biking.”
The early place within the season of the race and potential for top temperatures has been a consideration round course size by means of the historical past of the race however the rising degree of the sector, with all of the Ladies’s WorldTour groups current for the primary time in 2026, has already led to modifications with the 394.6km occasion this yr the longest but.
Even then the lads’s levels, excluding the prologue, had been on common 11km longer, at 142km, than the ladies’s levels final yr.
That’s simply over the typical day by day distance of 140km outlined as the utmost by the UCI for Ladies’s WorldTour stage races, with 160km being the utmost distance per stage for the ladies. There was only one stage within the males’s race in 2026 which exceeded this, the 169.8km finale.
The Tour Down Below stated that particulars of the levels might be launched in coming weeks.
