After last summer’s trial run, the #WatchTheFemmes campaign is back. This time it’s bigger and bolder, with an all-women team of artists transforming the route’s crudest scrawls into playful adverts for the women’s race, which runs until this Sunday.
Not many illustrators can say their sketchbook doodles have been broadcast to billions on live TV. Fewer still can say those doodles were painted over penises to get there. But that’s exactly where London-based illustrator Erin Aniker has found herself this summer.
What might not surprise you is that every year, rather depressingly, hundreds of penises are graffitied onto the women’s Tour de France route. So many that organisers employ a dedicated crew, the Eraser Men, to paint over them before the peloton and the world’s TV cameras roll through. Rather than simply scrubbing them out, a clever campaign covers them with something far better: bold, playful artworks urging the men’s race’s enormous audience to tune in to the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift instead.
We covered the trial run of #WatchTheFemmes last summer, when the idea was tested on a single stage. This year, it’s officially launched and properly scaled up: the artist team has doubled to four – Erin alongside French illustrator Cécile Dormeau, Jo Hicks, and Mathilde Jacquemet – with more designs, and the Eraser Men themselves now equipped with the stencils across the route. The clean-up crew has become the distribution network. Balls become eyeballs. Crude scrawl becomes an advert for the women’s peloton, painted onto the very road it races over.
It was no leisurely paint job, either. “We often only had minutes to transform the penis graffiti before the cyclists and TV cameras got there,” Erin tells Creative Boom, “so we had to be very quick.”
For Erin, the whole thing has been a bit of a pinch-me moment. “It was really surreal and fun to see my sketches travel from doodles in my own sketchbooks in East London to be transformed into huge painted designs on the tarmac of the famous Tour de France route, broadcast to billions around the world on live TV,” she says. “And all for a cause that is close to my heart, too, with women’s sports – drawing our eyes onto the champion women cyclists currently racing on the Tour de France Femmes.”
That cause is the point. The men’s Tour de France reaches a global TV audience of more than 3.5 billion; the women’s race, around 23 million. By hijacking the men’s route and its viewership, the campaign turns an annual nuisance into free airtime for the women racing right now.
The campaign was produced with Global Street Art and AMVBBDO agency, and backed by Škoda, which began life in 1895 as a bicycle manufacturer and remains the main partner of the women’s race.
The Tour de France Femmes races until Sunday 9 August. As Erin puts it: “Make sure to #WatchTheFemmes!”
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