Cat Ferguson will not make her Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift debut this August after being diagnosed with two fractures in her ankle, her Movistar team has confirmed.

The 20-year-old crashed on the opening stage of the Giro d'Italia Women at the end of May, and has since been recovering at home.

Ferguson previously told Cycling Weekly that she was on the long list for this year's Tour, which begins in Lausanne on 1 August. She will now need "several weeks" to heal from her injuries, Movistar wrote in a statement, ruling her out of the race and this week's British Road Championships.

"Following the fall [Ferguson] suffered in the first stage of the Giro d'Italia Women, she was initially subjected to various tests to assess a possible traumatic brain injury (TBI) and multiple contusions," the team wrote.

"Upon her return home and during the three weeks that followed, despite showing progressive recovery, Cat's clinical progress was not as expected. For this reason, the diagnostic studies were expanded, which have ultimately revealed the existence of two fractures in the ankle.

"Cat will need several weeks of recovery to ensure proper consolidation of the fractured bones and adequate healing of the injuries. As a result, she will not be able to compete in the upcoming National Championships or in the Tour de France."

Ferguson herself posted an update on her Instagram stories saying she was "heartbroken" to miss the summer races.

She added that she she will now spend a minimum of three more weeks on crutches.

Ferguson enjoyed a promising start to the 2026 season. She opened the year with victory in the Spanish one-day Trofeo Llucmajor, before going on to win a stage of the Setmana Valenciana, and finish fourth at Omloop Nieuwsblad, her best-ever result in a cobbled Classic.

The rest of her Classics campaign, she told Cycling Weekly in April, brought "real disappointments"; she abandoned Paris-Roubaix after suffering from food poisoning, and “wanted a bit more” than her 21st place at In Flanders Fields-In Wevelgem.

Ferguson then returned to winning ways at the Navarra Classic in May, where she scored her third victory of the season. That was her last race before she withdrew from the Giro on stage one.

It is unknown when Ferguson will be available for team selection again. Last season, she earned her first WorldTour victory at the Tour of Britain Women, which starts on 19 August this year.

The organisers of the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift UK Grands Départs in 2027 are looking for 9,000 volunteers to help run the events.

Applications have opened today to become a ‘JOY Maker’, the official name given to the volunteers, who will be tasked with “bringing the joy of cycling to fans and communities throughout the six stages”, according to an official release.

Anyone aged 16 or over on 1 April 2027 can apply, and has until the deadline of 1 September 2026 to do so.

The men’s and women’s Tours de France will visit 10 host towns and cities across the UK in 2027. The men’s race will start in Edinburgh on 2 July, with a finish on stage one in Carlisle. It will then go from Keswick to Liverpool on stage two, and Welshpool to Cardiff on stage three.

The women’s race will open on 30 July in Leeds. Manchester will host the finish of stage one, as well as the start of stage two, which will run across the Peak District to Sheffield. Stage three will be held entirely in London, and will bring the race’s first-ever team time trial.

Volunteers can apply to help at specific stages, and will work in three role categories: race delivery, spectator support, and event operations. No prior experience of volunteering is required.

“This is a truly unique volunteering offer and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to feel the buzz of being a part of a history-making event, while meeting new people and celebrating your local community,” said Tracy Power, who works for JOY, the UK Grand Départ’s social impact programme.

“Whether you have volunteered before, are a regular on a bike or are completely new to volunteering and the world of cycling, everyone is welcome as a JOY Maker. We can't wait to have you join the team, help us celebrate the joy of cycling and showcase your communities through the Grand Départs.”

Applications are open now until 1 September 2026 and can be made through the UK Grand Départ website. Team leader interviews will take place this autumn, with role offers expected to be made in December. Training will then follow in early 2027.

“There won’t be a metre of flat.” This is how Marion Rousse, director of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, described stage two of next year’s race, from Manchester to Sheffield, at the announcement on Monday. “This will be a battle. This second stage will be hard fought with some spectacular climbs.”

Judging by what we know so far about day two of the British Grand Départ next summer, this might not be hyperbole. The 154.4km stage will have around 2,750m of climbing in it, including ascents of Winnats Pass (1.4km at 12.3%) and Snake Pass (5.4km at 4.6%), before a finish in Sheffield similar to stage two of the men’s race in 2014, with the Côte d’Oughtibridge (1.5km at 9.1%) and the Côte de Jenkin Road (0.8km at 10.8%) on the menu.

Only the Mont Ventoux stage of this summer’s Tour de France Femmes has more climbing than the planned stage two for next summer, and just the two final Alpine stages of last year’s race were hillier, too. The Giro d’Italia Women next month has just two stages with more climbing, and To put it into context further, this weekend’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the hilliest of the Monuments raced by women, has just under 2,700m of climbing over 156km. On stage two of next year’s Tour, the best riders in the world will ride the equivalent of a climber’s Classic, with seven stages still ahead of them.

Sandwiched between a likely opening day bunch sprint and stage three’s time trial, British fans couldn’t ask for much more excitement, or a variety of different stages, over the Tour’s English odyssey. There is a chance that whoever leaves Yorkshire with the yellow jersey could win the whole thing, as happened with Vincenzo Nibali in the men’s race in 2014.

Opening stages of the race have not been like this in the race’s short history, with only stage two of the 2023 edition offering anything vaguely similar – Liane Lippert won, on what turned out not to be a GC day.

There is no guarantee that the race will be set alight in the Peak District, anything 15 months out is really just idle speculation, but stage two certainly has must-watch written all over it, or “be attentive and reactive” if you are one of the select few hoping to win the race overall next summer.

It is important to remember that despite all our pre-race analysis it is up to the riders to decide how to race it. These climbs might seem hellish to us on the profile, or in reality, but these professional riders could decide to roll up them, without getting too out of breath. I’ve cycled up Snake Pass, and it wasn’t terrible – traffic aside – but then I was going about a third of the speed the peloton will ride it at, and they might find it not terrible too.

It can’t be denied, however, that on paper, this looks like a brutal day on the bike, a point of difference for the 2027 race. It won’t be in the organisers’ interests for the race to be blown apart too early, so it will be interesting to see what is in store for the peloton on the other side of the channel. If someone does want to surge forward into history, though, they will have the terrain to do it on.

This piece is part of The Leadout, the offering of newsletters from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

If you want to get in touch with Adam, email adam.becket@futurenet.com.

The third stage of the 2027 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will be a “landmark” team time trial in central London, the race organisers unveiled on Monday.

The 18km stage will mark the first team time trial ever at the race, which held its first edition in 2022.

The course, which will be revealed in full in October, will pass by the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye and Tower Bridge, with a finish in front of Buckingham Palace on The Mall – the same road a stage of the men’s race finished on in 2014, when the Tour last visited the UK.

Both the men’s and women’s races will start in the UK next summer as part of an unprecedented double Grand Départ, with both events taking place in the same country outside of France for the first time.

Addressing the media at an event in London Bridge on Monday, Tour de France Femmes race director Marion Rousse described the inclusion of the team time trial as a “significant and historic moment”.

“We made this choice for a number of reasons,” Rousse said. “One is because it’s a huge honour for us to come to a capital city such as London, and it’s a huge moment in the history of the race. What we wanted to do was create something that would allow us to spend the whole day in the city, and allow us to visit and revisit the same landmarks.”

“The reason that we're able to have the time trial here is that London has been on board and wanted to facilitate this with us. Actually, it's easier to organise a team time trial on roads in a busy city than it is for the whole peloton to arrive in one go. It's a huge opportunity."

Team time trials are rare in cycling, and even rarer in women’s cycling, seen mostly in recent years at the UCI World Championships and Vuelta Femenina. The men's Tour will begin with a team time trial in Barcelona this July.

British riders Flora Perkins (Fenix-Premier Tech) and Cat Ferguson (Movistar), who were both present at the media event in London, said they have only previously ridden one team time trial.

“I didn't make it off the start ramp because I got a puncture,” said Ferguson. “It’s really important, as women, that we get to do another team time trial. I don’t know how many there have been across the Grand Tours and races we’ve done, but not that many. To do it in the Tour de France is, of course, the best place to showcase that.”

Perkins, too, echoed the same sentiment. “I think it’s a really tangible way for the public to see this is a team sport,” she said. “Time trialing in the UK is really historic. We’ve always had time trials. I think people maybe don’t realise that time trialing is a really authentic way that grassroots cycling and racing has been.”

‘The hardest stage in a Grand Départ that we’ve ever seen’

Rousse and the Tour de France Femmes organisers ASO also provided more details about the first two stages of the UK Grand Départ, which were first unveiled in January.

Stage one will be a “very short and very dynamic” 85.7km from Leeds to Manchester, taking in the climbs of the Côte de Kirkheaton (1.7km at 7.5%), Côte de Meltham (3.2km at 8.2%) and Côte de Delph (2.1km at 6.3%) for 1,390m elevation.

Stage two from Manchester to Sheffield will be, in Rousse’s words, “the hardest stage in a Grand Départ we’ve ever seen” with 2,750m elevation over 154km. It will count seven climbs, including the iconic Snake Pass (5.4km at 4.6%) and Winnats Pass (1.4km at 12.3%).

“There won’t be a metre of flat,” Rousse said. “This will be a battle. This second stage will be hard fought with some spectacular climbs.”

The men’s race will start in Edinburgh on 2 July 2027, with stage finishes in Carlisle, Liverpool and Cardiff before transferring to France.

Demi Vollering is to target both the Giro d’Italia Women and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in 2026 this season, it was revealed on Thursday.

The Dutch FDJ United-SUEZ rider, winner of the Tour in 2023, and runner-up in the past two editions, announced her different run-in to the French Grand Tour this summer.

Vollering will begin her season at Omloop Nieuwsblad on Saturday, before racing the Classics, before heading to the Giro at the start of May. The 29-year-old will then race the Tour de Suisse before the Tour in August. It means no Vuelta España Femenina, where she has won the last two editions, for the first time since 2021.

Vollering has raced the Giro just twice before, in 2019, when she finished 13th overall while racing for Parkhotel Valkenburg, and in 2021 when she finished third, riding for SD Worx. Just one woman has ever completed the Giro-Tour double, Annemiek van Vleuten, in 2022.

“We need to be in good form,” Vollering said of the Tour. “Fresh physically and mentally, and we need to be there at the start line with the thought that we can do it - and I really believe that we can do it.”

The addition of the time trial to the parcours has bolstered the confidence of the French team, with both Elise Chabbey and Vollering excited by the prospect of training for the discipline.

“The course suits us really well, we have the TT and it’s also a harder course,” Chabbey said. “We did a recon from Nice and it’s hard until the end, so we need to be perfect in every detail - and together.”

This year, the change in schedule for the Giro, moving from May to July, has allowed a longer training window before the Tour, meaning Vollering will be on the start line for both.

“The main difference is that my summer is a little different," Vollering explained. "There’s not a whole Spanish block in there and also one more altitude before the Giro, so I have more structured big training blocks to prepare myself for other races.”

This year, she has already won two stages of the Setmana Ciclista Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana.

In the lead-up to the Tour last year, Vollering had 29 race days on her schedule. This year, her calendar is purposefully thinner, and tailored to prioritise focussed training blocks before her biggest races.

Vollering's next appearance will be at Omloop this weekend, a race she is yet to win, although she has finished on the podium twice.

“Omloop - it’s a very nice race and I'm always looking forward to seeing how I am and how my form is at the moment," she said.

“It would be great to have it on my palmarès but if not, I'm sure it will happen somewhere in the future.”

The 2026 season is well underway, with two Women's WorldTour races already completed, the Tour Down Under and the UAE Tour.

As the racing switches to Europe, it's time to look at the teams, the key riders, and the races to watch across an engrossing season. Everything is building up to a fifth Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in August, but there is so much more before then.

Here is our team-by-team guide to the Women's WorldTour, and the moments of the season to anticipate.

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 5 February 2026. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Teams

AG Insurance-Soudal
Belgium
2025 WorldTour wins: 5
Team leaders: Kim Le Court and Sarah Gigante
Team boss: Jurgen Foré
Raison d’être: Providing a solid platform for Le Court and Gigante to fly from

This was a winter of continuity for AG Insurance-Soudal, with two riders leaving and only one, Letizia Borghesi, joining. It means 2026 looks very similar to 2025, but with the hindsight of what happened last season, we can expect them to deliver more regularly.

Kim Le Court was far from an unknown, having won a stage of the Giro d’Italia Women in 2024, but last year was her breakout, with wins at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour of Britain Women and, the biggest, the Tour de France Femmes. Her teammate Sarah Gigante finished on the podium at the Giro and sixth at the Tour.

This pair will continue to lead the team, alongside Urška Žigart and Justine Ghekiere, both of whom have big results in them.

Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto
Germany
2025 WorldTour wins: 2
Team leader: Kasia Niewiadoma Phinney
Team boss: Ronny Lauke
Raison d’etre: Challenge again for the top step of the Tour de France Femmes

It was always going to be a big ask for Kasia Niewiadoma to defend her Tour de France Femmes title in 2025, especially with the return of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot at Visma-Lease a Bike and renewed hunger of Demi Vollering at FDJ-SUEZ, so to hold on to the final podium place in the end felt like a job well done. Never one to settle, the Polish rider and her team will be hoping to win back the yellow jersey this summer, but also pick up a few more victories along the way.

Although Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto won 15 times last season – their highest tally since 2019, and a marked improvement from six in 2024 – only two of those victories came on the WorldTour: one thanks to Chloé Dygert at the Tour Down Under, and the other signed by Zoe Bäckstedt at the Simac Ladies Tour.

The team will no doubt call on the two time trial sensations again in 2026. Already, Dygert has come out with fighting talk. “I’m sick of losing,” she said ahead of January’s Tour Down Under, “so this year, I’m really focusing on making sure it doesn’t happen much.” Unfortunately for the American, she left Australia with 12 stitches in her leg, and is now eyeing a period of recovery before the Classics.

There have been no new signings at Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto over the winter, and only two outgoings: Tour stage winner Ricarda Bauernfiend has found a new home at Lidl-Trek, while former British champion Alice Towers has moved to EF Education-Oatly. The effervescent Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig and budding climber Neve Bradbury remain among the most exciting riders in the team. Italian sprinter Chiara Consonni will be there for the flatter days.

EF Education-Oatly
USA
2025 WorldTour wins: 2
Team leader: Noemi Rüegg and Cédrine Kerbaol
Team boss: Esra Tromp
Raison d’être: Keeping the good vibes going at a young team full of talent

New to the Women’s WorldTour, EF Education-Oatly had the perfect start to their season, by winning the Tour Down Under for the second year in a row through Noemi Rüegg.

However, those were the team’s last WorldTour victories in 2025, so it is a low bar to clear for this season. In Rüegg and Cédrine Kerbaol they have two riders who were often at the front of races last year. The team stand out in pink, and also because they have the rainbow jersey, through Magdeleine Vallieres.

Kristen Faulkner, Olympic champion, will want more than her one win last year, while there has been an injection of youth to keep the American squad ticking over. No more Alison Jackson.

FDJ United-Suez
France
2025 WorldTour wins: 11
Team leader: Demi Vollering
Team boss: Stephen Delcourt
Raison d’être: To win the Tour de France Femmes and remain the world's top-ranked team

When the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift was first announced, team manager Stephen Delcourt dreamed of winning it, building the team with that ambition in the front of his mind. Only six years ago the team was one of the also-ran squads, but since Évita Muzic won the closing stage of the 2020 Giro Rosa, their first WorldTour win, they’ve been on the rise. Last season they brought in defending Tour champion Demi Vollering hoping the yellow jersey ambition might be realised but, while she came close, second place was all the team could manage.

FDJ dominated the first half of last season. Vollering quickly repaid Delcourt's faith, blossoming into a fine leader, starting the year with victory in the four-day Comunitat Velenciana, then winning Strade Bianche, the Vuelta Femenina, Itzulia Women and the Volta Catalunya. They were far from a one-woman band; fellow new recruit Elise Chabbey and Ally Wollaston contributed multiple victories, helping the French team to top spot in the UCI rankings.

That said, they have fewer riders this year, but have recruited well, with German champion Frazinska Koch the pick of the new additions. A hugely versatile Classics rider and domestique, she will contribute widely, while Eva van Agt is a proven helper and Sofia Bertizzolo has been a target for the team for years now. It will be interesting to see how Scotswoman Lauren Dickson fares in only her third year in the sport. The signs are promising: she finished 17th on GC at the recent Tour Down Under, helping Wollaston to two stage wins and brilliant team performance.

Fenix-Premier Tech
Belgium
2025 WorldTour wins: 1
Team leader: Puck Pieterse
Team boss: Philip Roodhooft
Raison d'être: Big Classics victories

Fenix-Premier Tech are among the minority of Women's WorldTour teams to have more riders this year than last, starting 2026 with 19 of the permitted 22 riders. An interesting mix of cyclo-cross and Classics riders, they have never been prolific winners. Last season they took only five, though three of those were national championships.

When they do win, they win big, with stages in the Tour de France Femmes on the team palmarès. The hugely talented and versatile Puck Pieterse is always among the action, finishing in the top 10 in every one of last year's spring Classics and winning La Flèche Wallonne. Charlotte Kool joined the squad mid-season last year and should she regain her mojo will provide genuine winning potential in the sprints.

Lidl-Trek
Germany
2025 WorldTour wins: 5
Team leader: Elisa Balsamo and Niamh Fisher-Black
Team boss: Luca Guercilena
Raison d’être: Getting the big signings to deliver

There’s a lot of talent stockpiled at Lidl-Trek, and getting it to fire is the main goal of the team for 2026. Ellen van Dijk and Lizzie Deignan retiring could have unbalanced another team, but this one was prepared for this eventuality already, making the big changes ahead of 2025. As it is, the German squad’s signings this winter have largely been dealing with domestique reorganisation, and providing some experience to a developing roster.

Last season saw success through the year, although perhaps not quite at the level that was expected, with fewer WorldTour wins than 2024. However, there were stage victories at the Vuelta España Femenina and the Giro d’Italia Women, with Anna Henderson’s result in the latter perhaps spurring her on to more consistent success, and Elisa Balsamo won the Trofeo Alfredo Binda.

Niamh Fisher-Black and Riejanne Markus, both signed as general classification options, performed impressively at stage races, with Fisher-Black fifth at the Tour de France Femmes and sixth at the Vuelta. This year, they will aim to cement their places in the top five at WorldTour stage events, especially the Grand Tours. Fisher-Black has a lot of promise, and is still only 25, so one feels that there is a breakout performance still to come.

In the Classics, Balsamo has the abilities to overcome almost anyone, therefore just needs the race to fall in her favour, while she will be ably backed up by Clara Copponi, Emma Norsgaard, Shirin van Anrooij and Henderson, which has the makings of a pretty good collection of leaders for the chaos of one-day racing. The team still has four 20-year-olds, too, including Isabella Holmgren, who finished eight at last year’s Giro, so there is a lot of hope for the future.

Movistar
Spain
2025 WorldTour wins: 10
Team leader: Marlen Reusser
Team boss: Sebastián Unzué
Raison d’etre: Win regularly and develop young talent

Only four teams won more races than Movistar in 2025 – SD Worx-Protime, UAE Team ADQ, FDJ-SUEZ and Visma-Lease a Bike – putting the Spanish squad just outside of the realm of the super-teams. Of Movistar’s 10 victories at WorldTour level, seven came courtesy of the world time trial champion Marlen Reusser. And that doesn’t account for the Swiss rider’s status as one of the peloton’s best GC contenders; she finished runner-up at both the Vuelta Femenina and the Giro last year.

Movistar will also look to British prodigy Cat Ferguson for wins in 2026, one of a handful of talented teenagers in the squad. The youngest is Spaniard Paula Ostiz, the junior world and European road champion, who turned pro this year.

Picnic PostNL
Netherlands
2025 WorldTour wins: 1
Team leader: Pfeiffer Georgi
Team boss: Iwan Spekenbrink
Raison d’etre: A team in transition, with a host of young riders on board

Nine riders left Picnic PostNL over the winter, and eight came in, underlining how in transition this team is. Some of those who left will be missed badly: Charlotte Kool, Francesca Barale, Franzi Koch, Megan Jastrab and Nienke Vinke. It leaves a young, callow squad, which will hope to outperform low expectations.

They hit the ground running at the Tour Down Under, with two podiums and 12th place overall for Josie Nelson, but the Classics will be the place where the squad can really show their mettle. Pfeiffer Georgi had a quiet 2025, as she worked her way back from the concussion she suffered at the Tour de France Femmes a couple of years ago, and will be looking to show that she is still a contender.

SD Worx-Protime
Netherlands
2025 WorldTour wins: 27
Team leaders: Lotte Kopecky, Anna van der Breggen and Lorena Wiebes
Team boss: Erwin Janssen
Raison d’être: Retaking their number one ranking after a slight dip

This year represents a new challenge for the previously all-conquering SD Worx-Protime. Instead of coming into the season as the number one team, the one everyone wanted to beat, they are now number two, chasing FDJ United-SUEZ, and their former charge Vollering.

That’s not to say 2025 was a fallow year for the Dutch squad, with 48 wins across the year, including 25 wins for Lorena Wiebes, who appears unbeatable in sprints. Wiebes won through the year, from the UAE Tour onwards, taking two stage wins at both the Giro d’Italia Women and the Tour de France Femmes. Meanwhile, Lotte Kopecky won the Tour of Flanders, again, and Anna van der Breggen and Mischa Bredewold showed themselves in flashes.

However, Kopecky did have an off-year, due to knee and lower-back issues, and her tilt at Tour GC failed to materialise. Also, in the absence of Vollering, they only won one general classification title. This might be a continued trend, with a group of developing riders not quite there yet, although Van der Breggen did finish third at last year’s Vuelta España Femenina.

Expect Wiebes to keep winning, wherever she races, and Kopecky to go all in for the Classics, from Omloop Nieuwsblad onwards. Ultimately, SD Worx want to be the team that everyone watches in the peloton again, and be back to the space where they can bend races to their will. They do not have the same number of dominant riders as before, but they do have the right pieces for the right races. New signing Nienke Vinke could be the future for GC challenges, and Bredewold can continue to do her very good Vollering impression in hillier one-day races.

UAE Team ADQ
UAE
2025 WorldTour wins: 7
Team leader: Elisa Longo Borghini
Team boss: Yana Seel
Raison d'être: Defence of Elisa Longo Borghini's Giro title and a Tour de France Femmes podium finish

Building year on year, UAE Team ADQ are now among the most dangerous teams in the peloton. The addition of Elisa Longo Borghini last year has proved pivotal. Though they've only existed in their current form since 2022, the team dates all the way back to Nicole Cooke's Mcipollini-Giordana team of 2011. Last year's crop of 28 wins represented their most successful season, the winning shared among a remarkable 13 of their 19-woman roster.

2025 Tour de France Femmes revelation Maeva Squiban, along with Karlijn Swinkels, have already opened the team's account, winning in Mallorca last week. While they're one of the few teams to have increased the size of their roster, we can expect Longo Borghini to be most influential again.

Visma-Lease a Bike
Netherlands
2025 WorldTour wins: 7
Team leader: Pauline Ferrand-Prévot and Marianne Vos
Team boss: Rutger Tijssen
Raison d'être: Another Tour de France title for Pauline Ferrand Prévot and big Classics wins for Marianne Vos

Even without Pauline Ferrand-Prévot's Tour de France Femmes victory, Visma-Lease a Bike had a great 2025, winning more races than in any of their four previous seasons while relying less on their big names. Martina Fidanza stepped up with three wins, and Ninke Veenhoven bagged two. The future lies with two young riders: the hugely talented Brit Imogen Wolff, who began winning before her 19th birthday, and Marion Bunel, who is already among the best climbers in the bunch aged only 21.

Ferrand-Prévot has a freakish ability to successfully target races, so another Tour de France win is possible. Meanwhile, Marianne Vos always bags at least one big win a year. Add in Canadian all-rounder Sarah Van Dam and Dutch rouleur Daniek Hengeveld and Visma have a recipe for success.

Uno-X Mobility, Liv AlUla Jayco and Human Powered Health

Uno-X Mobility won just one WorldTour race last year, a stage of the Vuelta a Burgos Feminas through Mie Bjørndal Ottestad, who won four more races for the team. This year, they are likely to continue their aggressive underdog strategy, which has brought them success in the past. In Katrine Aalerud, they have an experienced GC leader.

2025 ended well for Liv AlUla Jayco, who won two stages at the Tour of Chongming Island; they also won stage two of the Tour de France Femmes through Mavi García. This year, they will hope that they can return to the front of races more often, through Letizia Paternoster and Ruby Roseman-Gannon, among others.

Human Powered Health will aim to be more than just the 14th WorldTour team, with a ProTour or WorldTour victory surely among their plans. In Thalita de Jong and Kathrin Schweinberger, they have experienced riders who could surprise.

Races

Spring Classics

From Omloop Het Nieuwsblad (28 Feb) until Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes (26 April), the women's Spring Classics season follows an almost identical rhythm to that of the men's, with female 'siblings' having been introduced for nearly all of the original major men's races. The inauguration of Milan-San Remo Donne (21 March) last season – won by Lorena Wiebes – leaves E3 Saxo Classic as the only men's WorldTour race with no equivalent. Omloop and Opening Weekend is followed in March by Italy's Strade Bianche, San Remo, and a pair of new names: In Flanders Fields. From Middelkerke to Wevelgem (formerly the more succinct Gent-Wevelgem) and the Tour of Bruges (formerly Brugge-De Panne).

There is also the Trofeo Alfredo Binda (15 March), one of the oldest Classics on the women's calendar with more than 50 years of history.

As with the men, the women's Classics tends to centre around the Tour of Flanders (5 April) and Paris-Roubaix (12 April), but some of the stronger climbers will target the hilly Ardennes races – Amstel Gold (19 April), Flèche Wallonne (22 April) and Liège.

Vuelta España Femenina by carrefour.es – 3-10 May

With the women's season rejigged to free the Giro d'Italia Women from its annual clash with the men's Tour de France, there is now a decent gap between the three Grand Tours, opening up the possibility of seeing all of the world's best riders in all three. The season is packed, though, especially in May when the Vuelta is the first of three Spanish WorldTour stage races, and with teams having such small rosters it's more likely teams will need to be very choosy when selecting their squads.

In its short history as a stage race, the Vuelta Femenina has always attracted the pick of the stage racing bunch, and that is unlikely to change this season. Not many riders have confirmed their programmes beyond the Classics and the Tour de France Femmes so far, but last year's runner-up Marlen Reusser is down to ride, and don't be surprised defending champion Demi Vollering here either.

Tour de France Femmes – 1-9 August

The 2026 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift begins slowly with two flattish stages, before the temperature gradually rises. A series of hilly stages are punctuated by an individual time trial, before the pièce de resistance, Mont Ventoux. After Planche des Belles Filles, the Tourmalet, Alpe d’Huez and the Madeleine comes the Giant of Provence. The bald mountain will surely hint at the direction of the fifth yellow jersey, but there is still a hectic stage around Nice to come, like a turbo-charged final day of Paris-Nice. Four ascents of the Col d’Eze will sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Demi Vollering will be itching to take back the crown she lost in 2024, and prove that she really is the best rider in the world; FDJ United-SUEZ will also demand better from their star signing. However, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has proved that she will go to huge lengths to win, and will have the French public on her side. It should be a clash for the ages. From Switzerland to the Mediterranean, the action will not stop.

The story of how the UK landed the 2027 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift Grands Départs begins more than two decades ago with a text. Still today, Christian Prudhomme remembers reading it. “I’d just arrived at [Tour organiser] ASO at the time,” the men’s race director says, “and it was about golf.”

The year was 2004. The text came from a Leicestershire man named Paul Bush, and flashed up on the phone of the then ASO president, Patrice Clerc. Bush had just started a new role as an events director in Scotland. Twenty-two years on, Prudhomme is recounting the story in the basement room of Leeds City Museum, on the day of the UK Tour stages reveal for 2027. Bush is sitting three seats to his left, smiling.

Prudhomme leans over the table and twists his body to face Bush. “At the end of the text message, you said, ‘And the Tour de France…’,” he says, bending his voice quizzically at the end. “And thank you so much, because without you, it would have been impossible.”

That text was the first seed Bush planted to achieve his “bucket list” dream: hosting the biggest bike race in the world. He didn’t know it at the time, but he would have to fight for more than 20 years to make it a reality, watching as the race visited countries like Belgium, Spain and Italy – he even saw it come to the UK twice, but under other people’s leadership. Through it all, Bush never gave up hope of his own chance.

On the day of the unveiling in Leeds, Bush is dressed in a navy suit, with a striped tie, gold buttons in his jacket sleeves, and a Tour de France pin in his lapel. He looks like a bank manager, or a high-end car salesman. Neither job appears on his CV, which is impressively long – an A-list of sporting and cultural events.

“I was head of all major events in Scotland for 20 years,” Bush tells Cycling Weekly, “working for the Scottish Government and VisitScotland. We hosted many events, as you know: the Ryder Cup, the Commonwealth Games, MTV Music Awards, the Solheim Cup. The Tour de France was always on my bucket list as something that would be good to bring to Scotland.”

Bush’s first attempt to make that happen came in 2014, a decade on from the text. He met three times with Prudhomme in the build-up to that year’s edition, but talks stalled as it became clear, logistically, that the transfer from Scotland to France would be too long. The UCI didn’t allow an extra rest day after a foreign Grand Départ at the time. ASO instead accepted another UK bid for three stages from Leeds to London. “We were disappointed,” Bush says, “but we thought Yorkshire did such a wonderful job.”

In the meantime, Bush grew his CV larger. He worked on football, athletics and gymnastics events. He even organised the World Orienteering Championships in Inverness in 2015. What about cycling? Has he ever planned a bike race? Oh yes. Remember the 2023 ‘Super Worlds’ in Glasgow, the largest-ever UCI World Championships that included 13 disciplines and awarded over 200 rainbow jerseys? Bush was one of the masterminds behind that.

And still, the Tour de France has always been in his sights. Bush knew it would be an immensely competitive event to win – “they probably get 70-80 bids for the Tour de France, and 30-40 for the women now,” he says – but that did not deter him.

“We regrouped after 2014, and then in 2015, 2016, we reengaged with Christian and the team,” he says. This time, Bush’s plans were even bigger. “We thought that if we had a UK bid, it would be stronger than a Scottish-only bid, with the travel and logistics of trying to get from Scotland back to France.

“Christian has always challenged us to dream, so we decided, well, why not do the men’s and women’s together?”

Bush estimates that, over the last five years, he has been to Paris around 20 times to meet with Prudhomme and ASO. The result of those discussions is a history-making double Grand Départ; next summer, the men’s Tour will open in Edinburgh, stretching the length of the UK to Cardiff via Liverpool. The women’s race will then begin a month later in Leeds, with stage finishes in Manchester and Sheffield, before mimicking the 2014 Grand Départ with a London finale.

“We took that proposal to Christian a couple of years ago, and his immediate response was ‘magnifique!’,” Bush smiles. Of course, bringing the plan together in reality has come with its challenges.

“This is the most complex event I’ve ever worked on,” Bush says, matter of fact, as if the comparisons aren’t even close. It’s not that it’s a “hard sell” to the host cities, he explains, it’s that the financial ask is big; the budget he and his team are working to is around £65 million across both races – more than twice the cost of the UK’s last Grand Départ in 2014. That money comes mostly from the Scottish, Welsh and UK governments, but it also requires buy-in from a spread of local stakeholders.

“My thanks to all the partners, the cities, the regions, the mayors, the combined authorities,” Bush says. “These are tough times financially and economically, not only for the nation, but locally and regionally. They’ve all seized that opportunity, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It will probably never come back in my lifetime.”

It’s for that reason that Bush is set on savouring the occasion. He’s most looking forward to seeing how the different local communities react when the Tour’s cavalcade comes to town next July. “I did a couple of stages last year with Christian in France, and I couldn’t believe the crowds,” he says. “In Toulouse, I said, ‘Look at all these people smiling.’ And he said, ‘Every day we bring joy to communities across France.’ That was a great statement, and it’s true. We will do the same in 2027.”

So much has happened since 2004 that Bush doesn’t recall sending that first text. He doesn’t doubt it happened, though. Now, not only is he bringing the Tour to the UK, he’s the managing director of the whole project, one he refers to as “the grandest of Grands Départs”.

“For me, if you look at world sporting achievements, winning the Tour de France sits at the pinnacle. Bringing the pinnacle event in the world back to the UK, and at the time back to Scotland, is a dream come true,” he says.

It feels fitting that, as route reveal in Leeds comes to a close, Prudhomme dedicates his last words to Bush. “Thank you so much for the bid. Thank you for your resilience, Paul. Thank you for waiting so long,” he says. “You and I haven’t changed at all in 20 years.”

In was in a small town, just north of Leeds, when it first dawned on me. I was in the car, driving the route of stage one with our photographer Andy Jones when we came to a small rise in the road and had to stop. There were people at the side of the road, people walking up and down the road, people everywhere.

Leeds city centre had been packed for the roll out, but that was to be expected. The wide dual carriageway (A61, Scott Hall road) that took the riders north out of Leeds for their neutralised jaunt to Harewood House to meet the Royals was also busy with spectators. But here, in this little village, we got our first taste of what was to come.

“I think we’re going to see something special today.” I said to Andy as I took pictures through the windscreen. I tried to send them back to the office but the little mobile coverage there was, was clearly being taken up by everybody else who had descended onto the roads of Yorkshire that day.

Stage one of the 2014 Tour de France blew everyone’s expectations clean out of the water and set a new benchmark for Grand Departs. The two stages in London and Kent in 2007 (before the UCI changed it’s rules to allow a Grand Tour to have three days out of the country followed by an early rest day) had been a success, but Yorkshire was on another level.

ASO were clearly taken aback, as were the riders themselves, who spent most of the day ducking out of the way of mobile phones held out for a photo, and trying not to ride into spectators who were spilling onto the road.

On the day, the peloton came to the decision not to race. Jens Voigt was left out in front to get the KOM Points as the bunch, sensing the danger, played it safe. A tough parcours was essentially nullified, and the race was decided in a sprint finish in Harrogate, won by a dominant Marcel Kittel after Mark Cavendish crashed out and broke his collarbone.

Afterwards, rather than berate the crowds, riders said in interviews that maybe it was them who would have to adapt how they rode. Clearly amazed by the crowds, and clearly not wanting to complain about such a reception.

The Yorkshire team, led by Gary Verity, had pulled off a masterstroke. Two years on from the London Olympics, they proved the appetite for major sporting events was still there. While no Olympic events had spread that far north in 2012, sportspeople from Yorkshire famously won medal after medal for Team GB, and at one point, Yorkshire was sitting top five in the medal table.

2014 was Yorkshire’s moment in the spotlight, and they made the most of it. Yellow spray-painted bikes were everywhere, from shop windows to front gardens. Villages competed against each other to decorate and theme their high streets, while businesses and schools all went Tour mad in the build-up. The result was those two stages in Yorkshire setting a new standard for Tour de France Grands Départs.

Since then, foreign hosts have followed suit. The Netherlands in 2015, Germany in 2017, Denmark in 2022, then Spain, and Italy. Foreign Grands Départs have consistently raised the bar and almost become the norm. By the time the yellow jersey lands back in the UK it will be the fifth Grand Depart in six years.

Comparisons to 2014 will be unavoidable, but the 2027 bid has already set a new benchmark by becoming the first foreign Grand Depart to host both the men’s and the women’s race in the same year. Something that Sport England or exchequer funding will have insisted upon.

So already there’s more to look forward to. More towns to get involved and more opportunities for people to come out and cheer on the greatest sporting event in the world. So find an old bike, spray paint it yellow and start making plans to get out and see as much of it as you can.

As he sat down to address the media in Leeds on Thursday, Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme used a phrase he’d perhaps never said before. “Ee bah gum,” he said with a smile, rousing a chuckle from the local Yorkshire reporters. The moment signalled Prudhomme was in a playful mood. He knew, after all, that what he was about to announce would please people.

And not just the locals. Oh no. The 2027 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will not be contained within these county walls. Across six days next summer, they’ll span the length of Great Britain, visiting Scotland, England and Wales, stopping in big cities like Edinburgh, Manchester and London, but also smaller towns like Welshpool in north Wales, and the Lake District’s Keswick, where barely 5,000 people live.

Prudhomme, “emotional” to be back in Leeds after the success of the 2014 Grand Départ, let his excitement run free. He had already been out to drive stretches of the men’s route, which he described in a string of gushing synonyms: “beautiful landscape”, “outstanding scenery”, “stunning backdrop”. He then distilled it all into one adjective. “All three stages will be gorgeous,” he said, and pointed to a photographer in the front row. “Just for you, they’ll be gorgeous.”

Women’s race director Marion Rousse echoed the same when her turn came to speak. She remembered being “glued to the sofa” in 2014, struck by the “fervour” of the British fans at the roadside. Her race will start on the same Yorkshire roads next year. “It’s an absolute honour that the women will now experience the same thing,” she said.

When the event organisers first announced the UK’s successful Tour bid last year, they promised “the grandest of Grands Départs”. The plans they shared on Thursday further cemented that. Scenery? Tick. Masses of fans? Guaranteed. And the routes? Will the racing be any good? Prudhomme and Rousse are sure of it. And they have good reason to be.

The men’s race will open with a stage nailed on for the sprinters (cough, Matthew Brennan yellow jersey, cough), through the Scottish borders and into Cumbria. The TV cameras will then marvel in the beauty of stage two, when the peloton will skirt Windermere and Morecambe Bay, before arriving at Liverpool’s docks. That day will stretch 223km – 14km more than the route’s longest stage last year – a distance that will repeat itself on stage three in the tricky Welsh hills.

Do not underestimate stage three; it counts eight categorised climbs, six of which come in the last 80km, and a total elevation nearing 3,000m. With a transfer day to follow, it’s a stage for the most daring breakaway thrill-seekers. Perhaps even early GC blows.

Rousse confirmed more thorough details are still to come about the three women’s stages, which will start in Leeds on 30 July. What we do know, though, is that stage one will close with an expected sprint near the velodrome in Manchester; the riders will need to find early climbing legs over the ‘Côte de Snake Pass’ in the Peak District to Sheffield on day two; and stage three has London calling. It’s similar, though not exactly, to the men’s Grand Départ in 2014. If it ain’t broke…

A lot will be said about the legacy of these Grands Départs, as was the case 12 years ago. 2027 will mark the first time both races start in the same place outside France, and a big budget has been drawn up for the occasion; Cycling Weekly understands it to be around £65 million, paid for mostly by the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments. It’s a lot of money, but it falls in the shadow of the £150 million the governments expect the race to bring to the economy.

The lasting memory, of course, will concern much more than numbers on balance sheets. Around five million Brits lined the roadside in 2014. Next summer’s Grands Départs will count twice as many stages – twice as many opportunities to watch, applaud and cheer – stretching further and wider, carrying their inspiration through more than 10 counties. Road bikes will, hopefully, top every child’s birthday list.

A sign of the scale of the route announcement came in Leeds’s Millennium Square on Thursday evening. There, yellow beams lit up the Civic Hall, onto which a highlight reel began to play. Lizzie Deignan's voiceover told of the century-old history of the Tour, its champions through the ages, and the places in the UK that will experience its magic in 2027. People in suits glanced up on their walks home from work, and stopped to watch. At the end, a ripple of applause filled the air.

The display finished with two 15-metre-tall Tour de France logos shining from the building. The date below them – 2027 – may feel far away, but it will come sooner than you think.

“Somebody asked me this morning, ‘Why the UK?’,” Prudhomme told the press. “It’s because we found in the UK a passion for cycling, and a love for the Tour.” He then looked to next summer, and as if telling a fact rather than a belief, said: “It will be unforgettable.”

The organisers of the UK’s Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift Grands Départs in 2027 have said securing free-to-air television coverage of the stages is “important” and negotiations are “a work in progress”.

The UK will host six stages of the Tour next year, split equally across the men’s and women’s events, it was announced on Thursday.

Both races currently sit behind a paywall in the UK, after TNT Sports owner Warner Bros. Discovery signed an exclusive broadcasting deal last year that ended 40 years of free-to-air coverage. A TNT Sports subscription costs £30.99 a month.

Speaking during a press conference in Leeds on Thursday, the managing director of the UK Grand Départ, Paul Bush, said he and his fellow organisers “have a commitment to work with Christian [Prudhomme, Tour de France race director] and the ASO team to look at how we can bring the six stages in the UK to free-to-air coverage, and that is currently ongoing.”

Cycling Weekly then questioned Bush further on the matter. “It’s still a work in progress,” he said. “I would hope that in the next six months we can reach some sort of conclusion on that. I think it’s important, Christian knows it’s important, but obviously contractual situations with current rights holders need to be negotiated carefully and sympathetically.

“As Jon [Dutton, British Cycling CEO] said, this is a moment for the nation. It’s bigger than a sporting event, and I think that deserves to have that platform.”

Race director Prudhomme previously voiced his optimism about free-to-air coverage of the two UK Grands Départs when he first announced them last March.

“There will be discussions, of course,” Prudhomme said last year. “But I do hope – and I do believe – that the stages will be live and free-to-air in 2027 in the UK. There will be discussions and we’re optimistic.”

The men’s Tour will start in Edinburgh in 2027, with an opening day finish in Carlisle on 2 July. Stage two will then begin in Keswick in the Lake District, finishing in Liverpool, before an all-Welsh third stage between Welshpool and Cardiff.

The women’s race will open on 30 July in Leeds. Stage one will cross the Pennines to Manchester, where stage three will also start, before finishing in Sheffield. The third stage, still to be revealed, will start and finish in London.

“It would’ve been a good route for Lizzie [Deignan],” says Marion Rousse, sitting in the basement room of Leeds City Museum, where she has just announced the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will start in Yorkshire in 2027.

Three seats to the race director's right, Deignan begins to laugh. “Well, yeah,” the Brit says. “But they did it too late.”

Although Deignan, now retired and pregnant with her third child, will not be on the start line of the race, she's still "incredibly proud and grateful" that it's coming to the UK.

“I’m now a mother," she told the media, including Cycling Weekly. “I will have two daughters by the time the race rolls around, and to be able to experience the magic of the Tour de France with them, but to see ponytails coming out the back of the helmets, is going to be brilliant.”

It's a half-an-hour drive from the former world champion's birthplace of Otley to the Tour de France Femmes 2027 Grand Départ in Leeds. She'll make the trip as a fan next summer, as she did when the men’s Tour came to town in 2014.

“I was one of the best riders in the world,” Deignan said, “but incredibly jealous of my male colleagues and the opportunities they had to race at home in the Tour de France, and it makes me incredibly proud and grateful that now the women of the UK will have the chance to race here.”

From Leeds, the women's peloton will head across the Pennines to Manchester for an expected sprint finish on day one. They will then climb Snake Pass, through the Peak District, to Sheffield the following day, before a still-to-be-revealed third stage in London, and a transfer to France.

Addressing the media, Rousse spoke of the “fervour” of the British fans. She watched them on her TV, she recalled, when the men’s race started in Leeds in 2014, and expects them to turn up in overwhelming numbers again in July next year.

“I will be jealous,” said Deignan, asked how she'll feel to be absent from the peloton. “I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But I’m on the other side now, and I will get to appreciate the magic as a fan, which I’ve never got to be able to do before, so I’m looking forward to that.

“I just think it’s going to be such a moment for the community to come together. British fans are brilliant. There’s no downside to this. It’s all positive. I’m really excited just to be here in July and to feel it all.”

The UK will host six Tour de France stages next year, split equally between the men’s and women’s races, it was announced on Thursday.

On 2 July, the men will leave Edinburgh, via stage finishes in Carlisle, Liverpool and Cardiff. The race’s travelling circus will then return at the end of the month, 30 July, to welcome the women in Leeds.

“The amount of children that come up to me and say, ‘I was watching you in London 2012. I remember you winning that medal’,” Deignan said. “The amount of people that talk to me about their memories of me winning races is incredible, and it can be so impactful to people. You can’t be what you can’t see, so it’s great that little girls and boys both get to see the potential of what they could possibly be.”

Later on Thursday evening, Deignan’s voice rang out from a loudspeaker in Leeds’s Millenium Square, where a lights display beamed onto the city hall. It included a five-minute video, with archive reels from both the men’s and women’s races, and the names of the UK’s host towns and cities for 2027. At the end, both races’ logos shone side by side. A crowd of around 150 people in suits rippled in applause.

Come 30 July 2027, the same spot will count tens of thousands of people – adults and children, dressed in yellow and polka dots. The countdown is on. “We’re ready,” Deignan’s voice filled the square. “Are you?”

The 2027 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will be hosted by 10 towns and cities across Great Britain during their historic Grands Départs next year, it was revealed on Thursday.

The men's race was last year announced to be starting in Edinburgh before heading south, while it was confirmed this week that the women's race will start in Leeds before two more stages in England. It will be the first time both Tours have started in the same foreign country.

Starting on Friday 2 July, the 2027 Tour de France will have stages from Edinburgh to Carlisle, Keswick to Liverpool and Welshpool to Cardiff, before the race returns to its home country. It will pass through the Lake District, Peak District and Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) on its way south.

The 2027 Tour de France Femmes will begin in Leeds on Friday 30 July with a stage to Manchester, before stage two heads back across the Pennines to Sheffield, before a "showpiece stage" in London on day three. It will pass through the Peak District en route.

It will be the first time that the Tour has come to Britain since 2014 when the Grand Départ took place in Yorkshire, and the third time that the race has begun in the UK, with London hosting in 2007. The 1994 Tour also visited England, for two stages mid-race and in 1974 Plymouth welcomed the race. The women's race has never crossed the channel.

The Friday starts hint at an early rest day for both races for a transfer back to France.

"The UK has always welcomed the Tour with passion and pride, and the route details we are revealing today reflect the beauty and diversity of Britain’s terrain," Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France, said. "Bringing both Grand Départs here is a testament to the strength of our partnership with British Cycling and the enthusiasm of the UK."

His Tour de France Femmes counterpart, Marion Rousse, added: "The United Kingdom has played an important role in the history of women’s cycling, with champions such as Lizzie Deignan. Starting the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in Leeds is a strong choice, closely linked to this heritage and to the enthusiasm of a public that knows and loves the Tour.

"These stages clearly reflect the race’s ambition: to continue growing women’s cycling and to inspire future generations."

"The UK has hosted unforgettable Grand Départs before, but 2027 will be bigger than anything we’ve seen – with both the men’s and women’s pelotons starting here together for the historic very first time," Paul Bush, the managing director of Grand Départ GB, added. "This will be a 'moment for the Nation' and is a once in a generation opportunity to inspire more people to experience the joy and freedom of cycling."

Alongside the route announcement, Joy, a social impact programme aiming to "tackle inactivity and improve mental wellbeing, support communities to thrive, and to make Britain more productive and prosperous" was announced. British Cycling will also look to recruit more than 7,000 volunteers to help deliver the evets.

"This is a once‑in‑a‑generation chance to build a healthier, more active and more connected nation," BC's chief executive, Jon Dutton, said. "It shows the power of major events when they’re done right, and British Cycling is proud to help deliver a legacy that will be felt long after the peloton has left UK shores."

Tour de France 2027 Grand Départ details

After rolling out of Edinburgh, the 2027 Tour de France will head south-west to Carlisle on the English border after spending most of the day in Scotland. There will be one categorised climb, the 'Côte de Melrose' in the Eildon Hills, and will pass through Midlothian, the Scottish Borders, Dumfries & Galloway and then Cumbria.

Stage two begins in Keswick in the Lake District National Park, and will pass through Thirlmere, Grasmere, Rydal Water and Windermere. The peloton will then skirt the Morecambe Bay coastline, before heading to the Lancashire fells via Lancaster and what the organisers are calling the 'Côte de Jubilee Tower', 3.8km at 6.1%. There will be four more categorised climbs on the edge of the Pennines – the Côte de Trough of Bowland, Côte de Waddington Fell, Côte de Belmont and the Côte de Parbold – before the stage finishes on The Strand in the centre of Liverpool.

The final day in Britain for the Tour begins in the Welsh border town of Welshpool with a tough stage across Wales to Cardiff. There will be eight categorised climbs on the Sunday, including six in the final 80km through the Bannau Brycheiniog. The eight are: Côte d'Epynt, 3.7km at 7.9%, Côte de Bannau Brycheiniog, 6.6km at 3.5%, Côte de Rhigos, 4.6 km at 5.8%, Côte de Penhys, 1.3 km at 10.1%, Côte de Maerdy, 1.5 km at 8.7%, Côte de Gelligaer, 1.4km at 4.9%, Côte de Hengoed, 700m at 11% and the Côte de Caerffili, 2km at 8.1%. There will be over 3,000m of climbing on this day.

Tour de France Femmes 2027 Grand Départ details

Less is confirmed about the Tour de France Femmes' Grand Départ. Stage one will cross the Pennines east to west before finishing in Manchester, before stage two heads east across the same range of hills from Manchester to Leeds.

Stage two will feature the famous climbs of the Peak District, including the 'Côte de Snake Pass', 6.1km at 5.7%, which could be tough enough to split the race.

The final day of the women's race will take place in London, but more details about this are promised in the spring.

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot knew the question was coming. “Voilà, finally,” she said once it was asked. It wasn’t about her Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift victory, nor was it about her dream Paris-Roubaix Femmes debut, or plans for the coming season. The question she was expecting was about her weight loss, a topic that has followed her since last summer’s Tour.

Ferrand-Prévot was criticised during the race, which she ended up winning by almost four minutes, for appearing thinner. Speaking in her winner’s press conference last August, she said she had received “quite a lot of complaints” online, some telling her that she was “not a good example for young people”. Still, she stressed, it was her choice to make. Male riders have long cut weight for Grand Tours, after all.

On Tuesday, Ferrand-Prévot was asked once again to revisit the topic. As reported by DirectVelo, she said she was surprised by how prominent the weight debate grew after the Tour.

“Once I realised what was happening, I was mostly upset for my parents,” she said. “I wondered if they were reading all this. But for me, there was no problem, nothing to create a big controversy about, because I simply felt I had done my job as I should have to give myself the best possible chance.”

The Visma-Lease a Bike rider won the final two Alpine stages of the Tour, sealing the overall ahead of Demi Vollering (FDJ-SUEZ). It came as the pinnacle of her comeback season on the road, after she won gold on her mountain bike at the Olympics in 2024.

“What I didn’t understand is that people explained that I won the Tour solely because I lost weight like that,” she said. “But the reality is that, behind it all, there was an enormous amount of preparation, dozens of very difficult, specific training sessions… That’s the main reason for that Tour victory.

“It’s not just a question of weight loss, but also of sacrifices. Every girl would weigh 30kg if it were that easy.”

In an interview with Tages-Anzeiger after the Tour, Movistar rider Marlen Reusser said the “new standard” Ferrand-Prévot had set around weight “puts pressure” on the rest of the peloton.

Asked about the criticism she received, Ferrand-Prévot said on Tuesday: “If I started reading everything on social media, it wouldn’t work… You have to filter it. My family and my team are there for me – they are the people to listen to and trust, the ones to value.”

The Frenchwoman also confirmed she plans to prepare similarly for her yellow jersey defence next summer. “It’s actually something I’ve been used to doing for my major goals for about ten years now,” she said.

“I know what I'm doing. We're in a professional sport, we're surrounded by doctors and nutritionists, there's no reason not to do things to the best of our ability. I want to arrive at the 2026 Tour de France as the best Pauline I can be, once again, to try and win the Tour de France for the second time. I've always given my all in my preparations, and I'm not going to change now.”

A former road, cyclo-cross and mountain bike world champion, Ferrand-Prévot has set herself ambitious goals for her second season back on the road. “My goal is to fight for the very top in every race I start,” she said. “Last season I was very good on several occasions, but I still want to work on my consistency.

“That will be a challenge, but it’s one I’m happy to take on. I finished on the podium many times in 2025, but secretly I want to win more.”

Her current programme will see her race Strade Bianche, the Tour of Flanders, La Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Vuelta Femenina before the Tour. She is not expected to defend her Paris-Roubaix title.

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is Cycling Weekly's international rider of 2025. This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 4th December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Everyone knew that Pauline Ferrand-Prévot – a world champion in four different disciplines – was an exceptional bike rider. As such, very few doubted that her return to the road scene in 2025 after a six-year hiatus would be a success. But no-one could have foreseen the comprehensive glory that the French superstar enjoyed this year.

It was meant to be a season of finding her legs in the road peloton once again, and working towards achieving her ultimate ambition of winning the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. An end date of 2027 was put on that target. Yet the Visma-Lease a Bike rider, 33, made a barnstorming return, reminding everyone of her unique talent as soon as the spring got underway.

Podium finishes at Strade Bianche and the Tour of Flanders were perhaps to be expected – after all, short, punchy climbs were what she excelled on during her mountain bike years – but a 58-second victory at Paris-Roubaix Femmes, a flat brute of a race devoid of any significant climbing challenges, was not.

Even more unexpected was winning the Tour on debut, especially in so crushing a manner. Ferrand-Prévot triumphed on the Col de la Madeleine by a huge 1:45 margin, making sure of her victory the following day at Châtel to win the race overall by 3:42.

It was an exhibition, and it’s why Ferrand-Prévot is deservedly Cycling Weekly’s international rider of the year. “I can’t say I really like racing, but I like winning,” she recently said. “If I want to race, it’s because I want to win.”

Project PFP

Project PFP began in the winter of 2023, eight months out from her big career goal of mountain bike gold at her home Olympics in Paris in 2024. It was a goal she accomplished, rather expectedly, and shortly afterwards it was announced she would be joining Visma. The news followed a year of talks, first with the Dutch team’s now-departed sports director Merijn Zeeman, and then with the manager of Visma’s women’s team, Rutger Tijssen.

The latter man, speaking to CW about his role in the negotiations, says: “You never know if something is going to be a success. When a process starts you need to get to know the athlete and learn how to work together. Straight away I could see that Pauline was really, really good at rising to the occasion. She knows when the heat is on and she knows what to do – she doesn’t choke on that pressure.”

Those aforementioned spring performances came about as a result of Ferrand-Prévot’s being laser-focused on the demands of Classics racing – and they also indicated to Tijssen that even better was to come at the Tour later in the year.

“Pauline could win Roubaix because she trained like a Classics rider: fewer long endurance rides, and more powerful, intense sessions,” he says. “It was during Strade and Roubaix that I started to believe that she could be successful during the Tour de France, but we didn’t have any information on how she would do across nine days of racing.”

Nor did Visma know how Ferrand-Prévot would fare on a 20k climb like the Madeleine – women’s racing has rarely ascended such long HC climbs. But Ferrand-Prévot came up with a plan to better her chances. “We wanted to add some more race days to her calendar, but she wanted to fully commit herself towards the Tour de France,” Tijssen explains. It’s why she abandoned the Vuelta a España Femenina after four stages.

“She was doing the Vuelta in Classics shape, and we needed to transform her into a GC rider,” he continues. “We both believe that everything is trainable, and if you put your mind to it, anything is achievable.”

Tour training

Ferrand-Prévot decamped to the Alps, along with her parents, for a summer of training and recons, forgoing extra racing days. “She said no to competing at both the Tour de Suisse and Volta a Catalunya because she prefers the structured life of training. Travelling and racing interferes with that,” says Tijssen. While her main competitors like Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma rode various races to prepare for the Tour, it was Ferrand-Prévot’s approach that eventually paid off.

In describing how it did so, the Visma man mixes his baking metaphors deliciously. “The cherry on the cake was the Madeleine, because everything she did there was trained and planned for: the aerodynamics, her power and cadence on the flat roads, and being patient when Sarah Gigante attacked. Everything was talked about beforehand.”

Ferrand-Prévot has already declared her intention to defend her Tour glory in 2026, while also setting her sights on Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. On the evidence of 2025, she’ll have little trouble excelling across those very different races.

“Once she has a goal, that focus and discipline comes naturally to her,” Tijssen says. “What she did this year should not really happen, but she showed that the impossible is possible.”

Britain’s brightest talent Cat Ferguson is eyeing a Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift debut next year at the age of 20, having taken three wins in her first full year as a WorldTour professional.

The Movistar rider, who already counts five world titles across three disciplines on her palmarès, enjoyed an up-and-down 2025 season, with periods of good form interspersed by periods of overtraining and fatigue.

“I think the combination of my first altitude camps, not knowing my limits, having so much time to ride my bike, and the excitement of being a first year pro meant that I put myself into a hole,” she told CW. “I thought I could handle whatever and do a lot of training if I just fuelled more but that’s not the case and I went a bit too crazy.”

As she puts it, Ferguson “resurrected it a bit towards the end of the year” and won in her final race – a mountainous one-day race in southern Spain, an impressive result for a rider who has previously excelled on shorter, steeper climbs and flatter finishes. “That win proved to me that I can be more versatile than I previously thought, and that’s the rider I’d love to be,” she said.

Now, having already spent one winter training camp with Movistar preparing for the 2026 season, the Yorkshirewoman has set her sights on the biggest race of all. To get selected, though, she has to catch the eye of her team during June’s Giro d’Italia Women.

“Apart from Marlen [Reusser] and Liane [Lippert], everyone is a reserve. I’ll do the Giro before and however I do there will decide if I go to the Tour or not.

“The Giro is a big goal for me, and I hope I can improve to show that I’m good enough to go to the Tour as well because if so then that would become my main goal of the season.

“I’ve got to prove that I am one of the riders deserving of a place throughout the season, and show the team that I’m in good shape and that I can be an asset to them.”

Before the summer of stage racing, Ferguson’s first goals of the season will be the Classics. She opened her campaign last year with third place at Trofeo Alfredo Binda.

“I didn’t expect to make it around Binda so to finish third was a surprise,” she said. “I definitely came away from the spring thinking that the Italian races – including Milan-San Remo – suited me more than I thought they did beforehand.

“I’m hoping this year with a good winter’s training behind me I can go to the Classics more prepared than last year. They’re definitely the hardest races in terms of positioning, and they were incredibly difficult for me last year because they were the first races of the year.

“But I definitely think my positioning improved throughout the season, so if I go to the Classics with better physical ability and a bit of luck – because that’s a big part of the Classics – then hopefully I can do well. The Classics are super exciting and the real pinnacle of cycling.”

Ferguson’s best run of form in 2025 came during her home race, June’s Tour of Britain Women. She won one stage and the points classification as she finished second overall.

That said, she spoke of the season not “being great physically in terms of progression” due to the aforementioned fatigue.

“I definitely made the biggest improvements mentally, with all the experience and knowledge that I gained being bigger than I ever thought,” she said. “But I still have way, way more to learn and I’ll continue making mistakes. But the ones I’ve already made I 100% won’t do again.”

After a dominant junior career, Ferguson turned pro with Movistar in the autumn of 2024, and won two pro races for the Spanish team in just seven race days before the season’s end. She is rated by many as the natural heir to her idol, Lizzie Deignan.

“I’m really enjoying it – it’s just incredible,” Ferguson said of life as a pro. “I even just appreciate living in a different country [Spain] and having a two-year rental contract. I find it incredible I get to live here for another year, to get to do this as long as I make it.

“People ask what my long term career goal is, and honestly a big goal of mine is just to keep doing cycling. I want to do it as long as my body lets me. It’s another reason to take everything slowly so that I can have a long career as it’s my dream job.”

Two-time road world champion Lotte Kopecky has already ruled out a tilt at next summer’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and instead hopes to target “as many Classics as possible”.

The SD Worx-Protime rider, who finished second at the Tour in 2023, returned to the race this July and placed 45th, in a season marred by knee and lower back pain.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly two days ahead of this year’s Tour, Kopecky relinquished her yellow jersey dream and said she was “just trying to get the GC out of my head”. The Belgian has now come to the same decision for next year’s race, still more than nine months out.

“I can already say that I'm not thinking about a Tour de France classification in 2026. I think I should mainly do what I love most,” Kopecky told Sporza at the Belgian Track Championships, where she won the omnium title.

“I do have a plan in mind. I'm thinking about the European Track Championships in early February. After that, I want to ride as many Classics as possible, and preferably win them."

Already a Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix winner, Kopecky skipped her usual opening Classics this year – Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Strade Bianche – due to a persistent knee injury over the winter.

She returned to racing in late March, and went on to win a third Tour of Flanders, one of three victories this season, alongside the Belgian Time Trial Championships and a stage of the Tour Féminin International de l’Ardèche. She later withdrew from the French race after suffering a fractured vertebrae in a crash.

“I'm someone who does a lot by feeling. But last season I started working with a dietician and that was a big burden for me,” she said of her performances this year.

“Now the numbers came in and you expect huge changes. But they didn't happen. It was already too much mentally during the preparation.”

Kopecky’s appearance at last weekend's Belgian Track Championships came two months after her crash at the Tour de l’Ardèche. She chose to skip her UCI Road World Championships defence in September, and the UCI Track World Championships last month, which she said was “the best decision to give myself a rest and immediately think about next season”.

Casting her mind ahead to 2026, she said: “It's still a long way off, but I’m already looking forward to it.

“I hope to be back there in the spring. I'm really looking forward to what's to come, that's the most important thing.”

The GC contenders will be “drooling” at the inclusion of Mont Ventoux in next year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, Zwift director Kate Veronneau has said, adding that the climb will play a “massive” role in raising the profile of the race.

The full route for the 2026 edition was unveiled in Paris on Thursday, detailing a Swiss start, Nice finish, and a marquee ascent of Mont Ventoux on stage seven. The iconic mountain has featured 18 times in the men’s Tour de France, but is relatively unknown to the women’s peloton, who have only raced it twice, and never at the Tour.

Veronneau was at the route announcement ceremony on Thursday and thinks the nine-day parcours is “spectacular”.

“Honestly, I think it’s going to really showcase the depth of the peloton. It’s got moments for everyone,” Zwift’s director of women’s strategy told Cycling Weekly.

Asked how important Ventoux might be for increasing the race’s visibility, Veronneau said: “Oh, massive… I don’t think there’s a better pick for next year. I used to work in bike tours, bringing people to the men’s Tour, so I know all the climbs really well, and it doesn’t get more quintessential than Ventoux.

“When you think of the Tour, those images are immediately conjured, and for the women to go up that, and for where we know their strengths are at right now, and the epic battles that we’ve had on the Tourmalet, Alpe d’Huez, the Madeleine, Ventoux is next, and it’s going to be fireworks. I already see peak French audiences – we’re going to smash this year’s record for live audiences on France Télévisions.”

This year’s Tour de France Femmes finale, won by Visma-Lease a Bike’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, brought a peak audience of 7.7 million on the host broadcast.

Having acted as a title sponsor of the event since its rebirth in 2022, indoor training brand Zwift announced on Thursday that it has renewed its partnership for at least another four years, citing a long-term commitment to growing women’s cycling.

“After this year’s record-shattering Tour, and one that just delighted audiences around the world, this was our time to double down and say we’re in it for the long haul,” Veronneau said. “This has been an incredibly rewarding partnership on all levels, and has exceeded so many expectations that we can’t imagine Zwift without it.”

In the past three years, Zwift has seen a 5% increase in its volume of new female subscribers, up from 18% in 2022 to 23%. This uptick, Veronneau says, comes as a “direct relationship” from sponsoring the Tour de France Femmes.

“We got it in the first place to grow the sport, to grow Zwift,” she said. “It’s an extension of our commitment and puts our values first, but at the end of the day, it’s got to be good business as well... It's fabulous to see that the race is inspiring more women to ride, and more women to come to Zwift.”

Veronneau would not be drawn on how much the sponsorship deal is worth, or specific subscriber numbers, but said the partnership with the race has been “very significant” for company.

“Our job is to just get as many eyeballs on the race as possible,” said Veronneau, who dedicates most of her job to Zwift’s ‘Watch the Femmes’ campaign.

After four editions, there remains a frustration among fans at the lack of television parity between the women’s and men’s races. The latter is shown with coverage from kilometre zero, while the starts of the women's stages have often not been broadcast.

“It does seem disparate, right?” Veronneau said, but added that she can “kind of argue it both ways”.

“At the end of the day, yes, I would like to see full coverage, but I think it’s more important that we deliver great sport to audiences that shows the value of the action,” she said. “If you have two hours of incredibly exciting racing, that might be better in some ways than dragging it out for five hours.”

That exciting racing, she's sure, will be guaranteed on Mont Ventoux next summer. “It's so otherworldly,” Veronneau said. “There’s just something about it that’s kind of magical.”

The nine-day 2026 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will take place from 1-9 August.

The 2026 L'Étape du Tour de France and L'Étape du Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will climb some of the Tour's most iconic mountains, it was announced this week.

On the same day as the routes for the 2026 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes were published, the race's organisers, ASO, also revealed the routes of its two iconic closed-road sportives.

L'Étape du Tour de France will copy the route of stage 20 of the men's race on Sunday 19 July 2026, finishing atop Alpe d'Huez, while L'Étape du Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will happen on Thursday 6 August 2026, heading up Mont Ventoux, aping stage seven of the women's race.

Both are open to men and women to ride, with L'Étape du Tour de France dating from 1993, while the Tour de France Femmes version started this year. The format is similar for both, with the Queen stage of the professional race being used for amateurs; anyone can sign up, but there are caps on numbers. You can already buy your place on the L'Étape du TDFF, while the Tour's version opens on 3 November for registration.

L'Étape du Tour is 170km with 5,400m of elevation gain, so not for the faint of heart. It takes in the Col de la Croix de Fer (24km at 5.2%), the Col du Télégraphe (11.9km at 7.1%) , and the Col du Galibier (17.7km at 6.9%) before climbing to Alpe d'Huez via the Col de Sarenne (12.8km at 7.3%). It is similar to the route of La Marmotte, another popular French sportive. According to the organisers: "It is a demanding challenge that requires intense training to cross the finish line within the allotted time."

Meanwhile, L'Étape du Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is 120km from Vaison-la-Romaine to Mont Ventoux with 3,000m of elevation gain; only the final 70km is the same as the pro women, but that is enough, with it taking in Ventoux from Bédoin itself (15.7km at 8.8%). The official website says the route will "take in the roads of the Baronnies, the vineyards of the Rhône Valley and the Dentelles de Montmirail".

The Tour de France Femmes will continue to be the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift until at least 2029, as Zwift's naming deal was extended.

Announced on Thursday, as the route for the 2026 Tour was released, American fitness tech company Zwift will continue to be the naming partner of the race for another four years, after an agreement with ASO, the race's organisers.

"This is much more than a sponsorship for Zwift, it’s a part of our identity, underpinned by our mission to make more people, more active, more often." Eric Min, Zwift CEO and co-founder of Zwift, said in a press release. "Growing women’s participation in cycling is a critical mission. We truly believe that to be successful, the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is essential.

"The first four years of this partnership have been incredible. The excitement is tangible and the impact is clear. I can’t wait to see what we can achieve over the next four years and beyond."

Zwift joined the Tour de France Femmes from the first edition in 2022, with the deal now lasting for at least eight years in total.

"The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift continues to break records and exceed even our own expectations." Marion Rousse, the director of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, added. "It’s a pleasure to work alongside a partner that helps amplify the race and women’s professional cycling in the way that Zwift does. We’ve achieved a lot already and I’m excited that we can continue this journey together."

According to Zwift and the Tour de France Femmes, 2.7 million viewers watched each stage on average in France alone, with coverage accounting for a 31.6% audience share. The final stage, which saw Pauline Ferrand-Prévot crowned as the first French winner of the race, saw a peak audience of 7.7 million. Zwift also said that 23% of new subscribers are women - up from 2022, when women made up 18% of new subscribers.

"The Tour de France has always been the most famous race in cycling and it has been fantastic to have it added to the calendar for the women’s peloton," Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, a former TDFF winner for Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto. "Winning the iconic yellow jersey has been the highlight of my career and it is so exciting that the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will continue to be the biggest race on the calendar and show off the excitement of women’s cycling to people around the world."

After seven years of colouring the peloton in iconic pink jerseys, Rapha is leaving the WorldTour and its partnership with EF Pro Cycling.

“Lighter, faster, and brighter than ever before,” the British apparel brand joined the team in 2019 with the aim “to bring new excitement to professional racing”. 2019 was a moment of change, when Rapha began designing kits that turned its legacy on its head. The British brand went from solid, top-level kit to fun for EF.

“We’re going to be seen from outer space,” Lawson Craddock said after seeing the team's now-iconic bright pink kit design.

While the pink stayed for regular season kits, the team switched things up every year for the Giro d'Italia in order to not clash with the maglia rosa, and also had a statement jersey for the Tour de France too. Rapha went to lengths to accommodate some things, from duck helmets to kaleidoscopes.

The Giro d’Italia 2020 team presentation turned runway for the launch of Rapha’s first special kit with EF. They’d brought British skate brand, Palace, onto the project in an attempt to create “a team kit quite unlike any other seen in the peloton so far.”

With clashing patterns and colours that bled into one another against a geometric background, the kit caused quite the hubbub - the team even had to pay out 4,500 CHF for wearing “non-compliant clothing during podium obligations” and not registering the new design within the 60-day rule. The unorthodox kit extended to helmets, eyewear and bicycles, too, with their riders time trialling while wearing a helmet painted as a duck.

After 2020’s madness, the team’s kit was, in 2021, decidedly more muted - though no less bold. In blocks of colour, overlaid with geometric shapes, the ‘Euphoria’ kit was designed to celebrate the international riders coming together to compete for a common goal.

“From Italy to the world, look out for a splash of colour at the first Grand Tour of 2021,” read Rapha’s press release.

The Giro also showcased another of Rapha’s latest designs - the TT Aerosuit, which they claimed saved 12.4 watts at 55 km/h relative to the previous team’s suits.

2022 marked not only a new kit for the team, but a new name, too, as EF Education-Nippo transitioned to EF Education-EasyPost, and the women's team, Tibco-SVB, joined the EF Education stable.

The kit for the men's and women's Giri was muted, in a break from the bold design EF were known for. The pink was replaced by a deep blue, with coloured circles splattering the jersey.

"The new design, executed through creative coding and image/pattern manipulation, is a modern interpretation of the Argyle pattern that has been a staple part of EF’s visual language for years," Rapha said.

2022 was also a big year for the Tour de France, as the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift had its first edition. To mark the occasion, EF produced this fun kit with Palace again, which was also worn in the men's Tour. Accompanied by specially designed Cannondales, POC helmets and Crocs for off-bike wear, the kit made quite the splash at the races.

The panelled design of the 2023 kit calls back to the Mondrian-inspired La Vie Claire kit from 1984. It too was iconic in its simplicity, but the kit from Rapha was unprecedented, too.

72% of the kit was made from excess material. The jersey itself was composed of several different pieces of material, all individually coloured, with sponsor's logos printed over the top. The spin-off collection of fan-kit sold after the race was made entirely from excess material, but the pro kit, bound by rules forbidding discrepancies in team kit, was unable to be made entirely from excess material.

If the 2020 Palace kit was the most out-there kits of all time, then perhaps this 2024 kit marked EF Education's most understated year yet. With a black jersey ribboned in the hot-pink of EF Education, Rapha claimed that the kit celebrated "the nation that is home to these beautiful, brutal races."

But emblazoned on the jersey in pink and yellow were snippets of Italian: Vai (go), In Bocca al Lupo (good luck) and - these need no translation - PIZZA! PASTA! SCALA! FASTA!

There was to be one final Giro special kit, 2025's 'white diamonds' effort. It had a white base with a diamond pattern and all-pink logos. According to Rapha, the look was “created for EF Pro Cycling to shine brighter and fly faster at the world’s most beautiful grand tour". It wasn't as loud as some previous designs, but it was pretty.

Rapha - thank you for the good times, your designs will be missed.

The hierarchy of necessary race bikes is in constant flux. We’re told that what we need is a dedicated aero bike and another for the hills, only to be then redirected towards an aerodynamically enhanced all-rounder.

Then 2025 happens and the sharp-as-a-knife aero machine makes a surprise comeback, to the point that Tadej Pogacar leaves his featherweight climber on the roof of the team car, for the entire Tour de France, even the most hilly stages.

So where does this leave the climbing bike? Well, if you’re to believe Cervelo, the answer is, alive and well.

See, there was a counterbalance to Pog’s victory. At the Tour de France Femmes Pauline Ferrand-Prevot’s winning bike of choice was the new R5, a bike so light it looks like it needs to be tethered down, yet seemingly stiff enough to win at the sport’s highest level.

So how did Cervelo manage it, and in doing so, make the climbing bike relevant once more?

Every gram counts, in bike marketing at least

The headline accompanying the release of the new R5 is the claimed weight of 5.97kg. While Ferrand-Prevot’s bike was required to meet UCI weight regulations, the new model can be ridden by the rest of us in a sub-6kg guise that takes advantage of a frame and fork that weighs under 950 grams in a size 56. Just 650g for the frame alone.

This makes it approximately 100 grams lighter than the previous model, while the inclusion of updated components helps reduce the bike’s total weight by a claimed 326 grams.

There’s scant information in the press release about just how Cervelo’s engineers reduced the weight of the frame and forks but we do know from speaking to Cervelo’s Engineering Manager, Scott Roy that it’s been achieved via a combination of lighter carbon layup, revised tube shapes and some tweaking of the fixings. Certainly it looks svelte, cutting an elegant figure that its aero sibling the S5 could only dream of achieving.

One nice detail we did notice when we saw the bike in Lille, is Cervelo’s take on the now commonplace UDH hanger. It’s sleeker-looking, and nicely machined with a lower profile, saving a few more grams no doubt.

What we are told however is that the geometry has been altered to match the S5, albeit with a slightly lower bottom bracket height to help accommodate the R5’s 29mm tyre clearance. That means a size 56 has a stack and reach of 567.7mm and 391.1mm respectively.

Cervelo are more forthcoming when it comes to the component parts that contribute significantly to the new R5’s weight loss. The inclusion of the all-new HB18 cockpit is said to have resulted in a 150 gram drop, while adding some aero advantages, to the tune of two watts, according to Cervelo. The UCI-legal bar/stem combo comes in 15 different size combinations, and you get fitted via an authorised Cervelo dealer at no extra cost when buying an R5.

The R5 also gets its own wheelset, in the shape of the brand new Reserve 34/37 SL. Claimed to help drop another 60 grams from the R5’s total weight, they benefit from a revamped carbon layup that is lighter while still retaining the strength and stiffness of the outgoing hoops. The hubs are either DT Swiss 180 or 240 depending on the model.

That attention seeking 5.97kg bike gets the 180s and also benefits from the lightest groupset currently available, Sram’s Red AXS, although Cervelo are claiming the same total weight for the Dura-Ace Di2-equipped version too.

The two bikes below them in the range, come with the DT Swiss 240 hubs, and are offered in Force AXS and Ultergra Di2 builds. There’s also the option to buy the R5 as a frameset too, which includes the HB18 cockpit and the SP33 seatpost.

Weights for the other bikes mentioned were not available to us. But by our rough estimates, you add another 400g by opting for the Force groupset. The 240 hubset adds another 60g, over the 180's, so even the Force and Ultegra versions are likely to be well under the UCI weight limit of 6.8kg too.

So is the climbing bike here to stay?

So is the climbing bike back in favour with racing’s elite? The jury probably remains out, given that the men’s Visma|Lease A Bike team didn’t use the R5 during this year’s TdF.

Ferrand-Prevot’s success demonstrates that riders on smaller frames will still prioritise comfort over outright aero performance, while the men for now at least it seems, will continue to favour the stiffer aero bikes, even when the road points up.

For the rest of us though, where comfort absolutely should be one of our most important performance parameters, a featherweight race bike remains both desirable and practical. Indeed it can be argued that a bike light enough to balance on one finger and that’s designed to fly up the climbs a la Pantani, Contador or whoever your favourite climber was, is the reason that many turned to the road in the first place.

If the R5 is going to satiate those desires however, it will do so at quite the price. The Red AXS and Dura-Ace Di2 models retail at $14,250 / £11,500 and $14,000 / £11,00 respectively. The Force AXS and Ultegra Di2 models are $9,950 / £8,500, while the frameset option will set you back $6,500 / £5,000.

“What do you mean you raced the Tour de France?”

Almost every woman who raced the Tour between 1984 and 1989 has long been familiar with this question, it seems.

“If you then speak to somebody and say, oh by the way, we rode it in the eighties. What do you mean you rode it in the eighties? Yeah, there was a women’s Tour de France. Well, I didn't know that.” Mandy Jones has been part of this exchange enough times to rattle it off on command for the Breakaway Femmes cameras, director Eleanor Sharpe behind the lens.

“It was just such a huge part of their lives, and they just really weren’t able to talk about it,” Sharpe says.

“It was almost like they’d been in a war together. I don't know why they couldn't talk about it, but they didn't. They all felt that way. They just didn't feel like they had the permission to tell their story.”

Breakaway Femmes: the Forgotten Tour de France opens at the Champs-Élysées, a peloton of women captured in the technicolour wobble of 80s television. The riders are pedalling through Paris at the start of the 1984 Tour de France Féminin, the first of its kind since Britain’s Millie Robinson took victory in 1955 (this, the original French women’s Tour lasted only a summer).

For six years, the Tour de France Féminin followed the route of the men’s, riding two hours ahead. They raced on the same mountains and cobblestones as the hommes, and attracted the same throng of spectators, but were forced to operate without the same sponsorships, or salaries to cycle - many weren’t even given a second jersey to compete in. All on top of a perpetual resentment that underscored - and ultimately ended - the women’s race. Now, Breakaway Femmes is retelling the story of the women who pioneered the sport, who battled to get to the start line, and raced as hard as their male counterparts when they got there, only to then be erased from the sport they fought so passionately to be part of.

“I’ve watched the Tour de France for years…but it really surprised me that I hadn’t heard of [the women’s Tour], and when I talked to other people about it, no one else had heard about it either,” the film’s director, Eleanor Sharpe admitted.

The news had eventually come from Trish Liggett, the wife of commentator Phil Liggett, about whom Sharpe was making a documentary.

“We were interviewing Trish, and during her interview she just casually mentioned that she’d been the general manager of the Great Britain women’s Tour de France team in the 80s.”

Trish, it transpired, held the keys not only to this kernel of a story, but to much of the film’s eventual content, too. She had recorded hours of Tour de France coverage on VHS tapes tucked under her bed, including 30 second packages updating viewers on the progress of the women’s race.

“They were buried amongst the men’s footage, so all the shots were really fast, and that impacted the way we edited the films. We didn’t have any really love shots where we could just kind of sit and linger, so everything became quite montage style.”

And that wasn’t the only hurdle Sharpe faced when building the story of the Breakaway Femmes.

“It was actually quite difficult to track down the women,” she told me.

The riders were not only dotted around the world, but many had taken new surnames, and - not typically as chronically online as younger generations - operated with a near-untraceable digital footprint.

“But generally once I found one woman in a country, she tended to know the other women.”

Finding the winner of the first ever Tour de France Feminin, America’s Marianne Martin, meant discovering Patty Peoples, Inga Thompson and Betsy King. The formidable Dutch team were soon found, too, along with Sue Gornall and Clare Greenwood from Trish Liggett’s British team, Greenwood equipped with a flash of orange-peach in her grey hair.

“Finding the Chinese women was really difficult, too."

In 1985, Chinese riders were welcomed to the French race. However, soon into the race, it became clear that the athletes - skilled in track and field, not cycling - were struggling. Battling language and culture barriers whilst competing in a sport nearly completely new to them, two of the team dropped out with altitude sickness, leaving Li Wang and her remaining teammates to complete the remaining stages. Wang finished 8th overall.

"We had the race booklets that some of the riders had hung onto, and it had the names of the Chinese riders in them, but we had no idea whether they were spelled correctly, because even with the European riders, the race booklets tended to misspell and mangle all their names. Anyway, we found this Chinese company that facilitates film shoots for international crews in China, and they were able to track down these women, which was amazing.”

“I really thought it was important to include the Chinese riders. I mean, partly because it's just such an interesting story with them coming over from a communist country, but also I was quite aware that I was telling the story of feminism, but it was a particular version of feminism. It was a white, fairly affluent, middle class feminism. So I was kind of quite consciously aware of that. I knew that if we could find these women, their story would be quite different, them coming from quite different backgrounds and different motivations.”

The other voice core to the story of women’s cycling in the late twentieth century was three time Tour de France Féminin champion, the infamously tough-tempered Jeannie Longo, of France.

“The women [interviewed] are lovely, but that only gets you so far,” Sharpe says.

“You really do need a couple of characters for the rough edges, definitely. And Jeannie Longo was this ball of rough edges. But she’s also an incredibly important rider. And it would have been a completely different film if we hadn't been able to get her in the film.”

Forget Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar, Jeannie Longo’s rivalry with Italy's ”Flying Mum”, Maria Canins, brought an explosive energy to the women’s peloton. Canins won in 1985 and 86, with Longo podiuming in second both years. Frustrated with the repeated close-shaves, the Frenchwoman made her discontent loudly known. A commentator recounts Longo punching a Dutch rider post-race ("a wonderful upper cut"); one rider described her as "ruthless and single-minded", with Greenwood rounding off the shared sentiment: “If I never see her again, I’ll be quite happy.”

“I really strongly felt that I wanted to allow the women to be themselves," Sharpe says, on her decision to air many of the riders' uncomfortable relationship with Longo.

"I didn’t want to whitewash them at all, and make them seem like a sisterhood, and often the temptation is there to say, ‘Dear God, you can't show women behaving badly because that reflects badly on all female kind.’

“I just wanted to allow the women to be messy. If they weren't perfect, that's fine. They should be imperfect, because God knows, the men are imperfect.

“It's nice seeing these women in their mid 60s and early 70s still incredibly competitive and passionate. A lot of this stuff happened 40 years ago, and they're still pretty fired up about it, which was exciting to see.”

But, in 1989 the women’s race came to an abrupt end. A brewing storm of dwindling media coverage, logistical issues that had routinely resulted in the support cars catching the tail of the women’s race, and rising costs combined to end the race, the aspirations of the riders - and generations after them - to ride in the Tour snatched away after only five years.

“What struck me when I spoke to all of them was how grateful they all were that I was taking an interest,” Sharpe remembers.

“When I reached out to them, it was the first time, I think, in 30 plus years, that they'd really gotten the chance to talk. And it was like opening a floodplain, all they wanted to do was talk. I felt like I should be the one who was feeling grateful, you know, having the privilege to talk to them.

"When we started making this film, the Tour de France Femmes hadn't come back, so when I initially contacted them, they were still very much in the wilderness and no one was interested, and they didn't know that all the race would ever come back.”

In 2022 the women’s Tour returned. For many entering the sport in the years after, it can seem unfathomable that there was ever a time without it. But the echoes are there: Tour de France Femmes (Ayesha McGowan, the ex-pro who this year rode the Tour de France route before the men, has taken to calling the men’s race the Tour de France Hommes) sponsors tagging their name on the end of the race title in the way the men’s does not. A shorter, week-long race compared to the men’s three, and one tenth of the prize money given to the men.

But what shines through in the joyful, sometimes beguiling, but constantly inspiring ninety minutes spent with the women of the Tour de France, is the passion they all shared for cycling. Remembering them, it is clear, is part of how we move our sport forward.

“I challenge anyone who tries to make me invisible," says Canadian rider and 1984 stage 8 winner, Kelly-Ann Way.

"Because I'm part of a big group of women that changed the face of women’s cycling. And nobody can take that away.” Canadian stage winner, Kelly-Ann Way.

Breakaway Femmes comes to select British cinemas from September, to find out where to watch, click here.

Ten days after the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift concluded, the weight debate shows no sign of fading. Winner Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (visma - Lease a Bike) shed a reported 4kg in preparation for the punishing climbs, a decision that has dominated conversations in the peloton and beyond.

As she makes her celebratory tour to sponsors and media outlets across France, fellow riders are sounding the alarm, using social media and interviews to question the broader implications of her much-discussed weight loss.

“Ferrand-Prévot has set a new standard. When riders are so successful with this, it puts pressure on all of us,” Swiss cyclist Marlen Reusser tells Tages-Anzeiger.

Reusser had been a favourite for this year's Tour but ended up watching the race unfold from home while recovering from food poisoning.

She says she found herself both impressed and concerned by Ferrand-Prévot’s approach, and even wondered if she would need to lose weight for future editions.

In cycling, power-to-weight ratio is an inescapable metric. In the fight against gravity, every extra kilogram costs precious watts. Riders strive to optimise their bodies and equipment alike for the demands of the terrain. Over the decades, that focus has driven many athletes, men and women alike, into disordered eating, and the sport continues to struggle a balance between health and performance.

Reusser comes at this from a unique perspective. She's both a fierce competitor and a physician. She recognises that Ferrand-Prévot's weight loss was part of a calculated and supervised strategy tailored specifically to the Tour, and that the Française now plans to return to her normal weight.

But what does this do to the body, Reusser ponders. "Is it perhaps not so harmful if the deficiency is not a permanent condition?” she asks. “To what extent is it optimisation, and when does it become pathological?”

She notes that research in this area is limited. Most women in the pro peloton already fall below the standard body fat percentages but that being below the norm doesn’t necessarily mean harmful levels. However, Reusser like many of her peers, is quick to point out the that long-term undernutrition has serious consequences for women.

She references RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport), a prevalent condition that arises when athletes don’t consume enough calories to meet the demands of training and daily life. The resulting energy deficit can disrupt multiple bodily systems, affecting reproductive and bone health, metabolism and mental well-being.

Reusser worries that Ferrand-Prévot’s approach to race optimisation may have gone too far, sending the wrong message to young riders entering the sport, especially those that do not have access to a nutritionist and professional supervision. Critique is warranted, she says.

“My young teammate asked me: ‘Did you see? Ferrand-Prévot measures her body fat and then decides whether she’s allowed to have breakfast’,” she says, fearing that years of educational work around malnutrition and anorexia are at risk of being undone.

In the past, Reusser campaigned for a body fat limit to be adopted by cycling's governing bodies but it went nowhere.

When it comes to herself and her future Grand Tour aspirations, Reusser says she intends to stay true to herself, and maintain the balance of health and on-the-bike success.

Reusser is only the latest in a slew of female professional cyclists to come forward.

Dutch rider Demi Vollering (FDJ-Suez), this year's runner-up in the Tour, pushed back hard against the weight-centric narrative: "The biggest priority is to be healthy...I can show girls that you don't have to be super, super skinny, and that you can just believe that if you have the power and that you train hard, that you can make it," she stated. "I make, and will continue to make, every decision in my career by putting my health first."

French pro Cédrine Kerbaol (EF Education), who has a background in nutrition, also warned that cycling is in a “dangerous moment,” noting that decreasing weight in the name of performance can damage menstrual health and bone density.

Leaning out in preparation of a race is a common practice in a variety of elite sports for both men and women athletes, yet Ferrand-Prévot’s weight loss has drawn disproportionate scrutiny. But many, like Reusser, argue the discrepancy is necessary.

American Kristen Faulkner (EF Education), for example, has spoken candidly about female health concerns in racing, highlighting that underfueling affects women differently than the male peloton. “If a man doesn’t fuel properly, he bonks, but if a woman doesn’t fuel properly, she could lose her period.”

The ongoing debate has prompted the women’s riders’ union, The Cyclists’ Alliance (TCA), to call for mandatory yearly RED-S and bone mineral screenings to safeguard athlete health. The organisation also plans to launch a campaign of education and awareness for health and wellbeing.

"The current system is not set up to protect female health, so I believe it’s our duty to continue educating and advocating for better standards that allow women to perform with well-fuelled, strong, and happy bodies," TCA president Grace Brown said in a statement this week.

The women's riders' union The Cyclists' Alliance (TCA) has weighed in on the health debate after the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, calling for mandatory yearly RED-S screening.

In the wake of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot's historic victory at the French Grand Tour earlier this month, there was media coverage about her weight loss, with other riders also speaking out about their wellbeing and relationship with eating disorders.

Second-placed Demi Vollering posted on Instagram: "I make, and will continue to make, every decision in my career by putting my health first," while eighth-placed Cérdrine Kerbaol said that cycling was in a "dangerous moment" when it came to issues of low weight.

Kerbaol's fellow EF Education-Oatly rider Kim Cadzow posted on Instagram: "I truly believe that our sport is riddled with eating disorders. Advice is given to athletes from all areas of the sport, but would you let your accountant give you surgery advice… probably not. So go to a registered dietitian."

"Somewhere, an organisation has to take action and rule against these issues," she continued. "In the end, we are all replaceable—and the next power-to-weight prodigy comes along and replaces you for two years… until they fall off the cliff, in this never-ending cycle."

The organisation representing the women's peloton, the TCA, has called on cycling's governing body, the UCI, to reconsider their proposals to screen yearly for RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) and bone mineral testing. The TCA is also launching a campaign of education and awareness for health and wellbeing this autumn.

"We are constantly working towards making professional cycling a sustainable and fulfilling career for women," TCA president Grace Brown said in a statement this week. "Rider health and wellbeing are vital for career longevity.

"The current system is not set up to protect female health, so I believe it’s our duty to continue educating and advocating for better standards that allow women to perform with well-fuelled, strong, and happy bodies."

The TCA statement read: "We today invite the UCI to reconsider our proposal, and we offer our support and expertise. While we appreciate that this may require some work to ensure appropriate implementation, we believe that it is more than worth the effort to introduce some form of protocol for both female and male cyclists racing professionally under the UCI."

Pro riders, especially female athletes, are at risk of RED-S, which can occur with or without disordered eating or intentional underfueling. It is the under-consumption of calories combined with frequent intense exercise, creating an energy deficiency in the body.

Forty years on, Clare Greenwood is ready to share the real reason she attacked on the Champs Élysées. "I'd had a bidon that had lasted me the whole three weeks," she says. "I decided: Right, I'm going to act like one of the guys - I'm going to finish my drink, then toss it to the crowd". On one of the most iconic roads in cycling, with 'Great Britain' emblazoned over her heart, Greenwood did just that. But the move backfired. "It hit a lamppost and ricocheted back into the peloton at the height of everybody's head". She heard a shouted complaint from behind and thought, "Oh hell, I'm in trouble now". Her only means of escape, she figured, was to attack. "Needless to say, it only lasted a few seconds"

The race was the 1984 Tour de France Féminin, the first women's Tour held alongside the men's. Only five editions took place, followed by a decades-long haitus. The women rode truncated stages ahead of the men before being bundled into cars by gendarmerie to clear the finish area.

They were the first women to join what Greenwood calls "the Champs Élysées elite": the few women who have ridden the Tour de France. Another member is Liz Hepple, an Australian Olympian and former professional road cyclist. Before she arrived in France for the 1986 Féminin, she had never descended a switchback, yet she came fifth in the GC. In 1988, having honed her descending to match her climbing power, she came third - the first Australian to podium at the Tour de France

"I remember the craziness of the spectators," Hepple says. "You couldn't hear anything because the screaming and shouting were so loud". Greenwood, meanwhile, relied on fans for information: they would run alongside calling out where her rivals were. Supporters also assisted with fuelling on long climbs, offering bread, water and even wine. While she passed on the wine, Greenwood took the water: "That's the only way I made it to the top".

The basic food back then - "to this day, I cannot face a plain Danone yoghurt," Greenwood says - reflected the era's rudimentary sports nutrition. Greenwood tells the story of buying a litre of brandy at duty-free with her room-mate, which they mixed with flat Coke in their bidons, having heard it combatted dehydration.

"Everyone assumes we must have been pissed. We probably were, but we had a lot of fun". Rider support was likewise basic: Hepple was given one summer jersey for the entire race, and there was just one team mechanic.

When Greenwood arrived back in England after the 1984 race, she went to a branch of WHSmiths and "almost dropped dead" to see herself on the cover of Cycling magazine in her Great Britain jersey. Years later, she found a copy on eBay advertised for just a pound.

Tour de France Femmes Trailblazers

Here's a quiz question: Who was the first Brit to bring home a jersey in the Tour? Those who know their history might say Philippa York, who under her previous name of Robert Millar won the 1984 men's mountain classification. But they would be wrong.

Even discounting 1955-won by Brit Millie Robinson - in 1984 Louise Garbett won the maillot blanc for best young rider. Because the women's race finished earlier in the day than the men's, Garbett was the first person to win a Tour de France jersey for Great Britain.

The history of the women's Tour, culminating in its current iteration as the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, is long, complex and filled with both triumph and frustration. French women have raced bikes since the 19th century, when they would use pseudonyms to escape disapproval.

By the 1930s, newspapers advertised criterium races with 'hommes' and 'femmes' categories. In the late 1940s, more than 15 years after the first men's Tour, L'Intransigeant ran a story about a women's cycle group planning their own Tour de France in stages of "50 to 60 kilometres per day". ("How long would that take?" the writer asked.)

The first proper attempt at a 'Tour Féminin Cycliste' was in 1955. It was five days long and a mere 372km, with a white jersey for its leader rather than the traditional maillot jaune. Owing to insufficient coverage, the race lasted only one edition. Two years later, when UCI member states voted against introducing a women's World Championship, L'Équipe crowed that "common sense" had triumphed.

Inequalities were a continued feature of women's bike racing into the 1980s and the Tour de France Féminin. In her book Pedal Power, Anna Hughes tells the story of its first winner, US rider Marianne Martin, who crossed the finish line "to ecstatic cheers," took her place on the podium alongside men's winner Laurent Fignon, and was awarded prize money less than a hundredth of his.

But there was also support. An upcoming film about the Féminin, Breakaway Femmes, includes a memorable clip from the 1980s of then-racer and eventual FDJ-Groupama team boss Marc Madiot telling French road race champion Jeannie Longo that he finds her "ugly". He also said he would watch women's cycling "the day they put on jerseys that are a little prettier, shorts a little prettier and shoes a little prettier".

Greenwood recalls riding the Tour shortly after Madiot's comments aired and spotting a homemade banner on a corner that read: "Marc Madiot is ...". The final word was unfamiliar to her - and even a French-speaking Canadian team-mate didn't recognise it. But the French riders were giggling. "We said, 'What is it? We don't understand.' Well, you can imagine. They started acting it out," Greenwood says. The moment was funny, but also meaningful: "It showed the French were on our side".

The last Tour de France Féminin was in 1989; the organisers said it was too expensive to continue. Other equivalents were attempted, including a 'Tour Cycliste Féminin,' which became the 'Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale' after the company that owned the rights to the men's Tour de France contested the name. "It was very frustrating," Hepple says. "It felt like it had gone backwards".

Kathryn Bertine is an ex-pro and activist who took up the fight for a women's Tour de France in 2009. She compiled a 22-page dossier which she sent to race organisers the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), outlining what she saw as not only a chance to do the right thing, but also an enormous commercial opportunity.

She got no reply. She formed an activist group, Le Tour Entier, with fellow pro cyclists Marianne Vos and Emma Pooley and the triathlete Chrissie Wellington. They secured a petition of almost 100,000 signatures - but also faced pushback from people who didn't believe women were capable of racing a Grand Tour, a response Bertine found "dumbfounding"

It took five years of campaigning to initiate La Course, a one-day race which debuted in 2014 on the Champs Élysées. Her sense of achievement standing on the start line is, Bertine says, one of her "all-time podium of memories". But she wasn't done.

The event was overshadowed by weeks of men's racing, and riders such as Annemiek van Vleuten criticised the stages for being too easy. Others reported facilities issues; Lizzie Deignan said she couldn't find a women's toilet. The ASO, for their part, said it would be "impossible" to stage a full race alongside the men's.

But the campaign had velocity. In 2019, CW reported on the InternationElles, a group of women riding each stage of the Tour the day before the men to call attention to the lack of a women's edition. Finally, in June 2021, the ASO announced the Tour de France Femmes: "a new women's race" of eight stages with the same "codes, values and symbols" as the Tour de France, including a yellow jersey sponsored by LCL and a Queen of the Mountains jersey sponsored by E.Leclerc-just like the men's.

The first race, in 2022, started on the Champs Élysées the day the men's Tour finished there, encouraging spectators to watch both. Just as importantly, it was broadcast in 190 countries. After seeing coverage of previous races looking "like they'd been filmed with a phone," Hepple was thrilled to be able to watch the high-quality footage

Bertine stresses her excitement while also calling for the Femmes to be a bigger, longer race - matching the appetite she sees for women's racing. She also wants equal prize money - Bertine has calculated that the Femmes riders earn 29% of their male counterparts' pay per day raced.

She believes there is more money to be made in general - she even approached the ASO, asking them to hire her in a role in which she would market the Tour to sponsors. "They said, 'we don't have that position.' I said, 'I know'".

It is also important for Bertine that the history of the race is more widely known. She runs an organisation for young professional riders called Homestretch, in which she encounters many women who are unaware of La Course, let alone the Féminin. For Hepple, young women taking the women's Tour for granted is a hopeful sign: "I think that's fantastic. This younger generation of girls will expect to get the same as the men".

Last month, sponsor Zwift released a report on the impact of the Tour de France Femmes. Their survey found 85% of respondents now consider professional cycling "a viable profession for women to aspire to".

Veterans return

Greenwood speaks quietly when she tells the story of what it was like, those 40 years ago, when the bunch spotted the Eiffel Tower after three weeks on the road. "There was this moment where we all froze in time". She isn't sure if a three-week women's race will happen again: "I really don't know". Bertine points out that if the Femmes were to add a stage a year, they would reach parity with the men's Tour in 2040.

Yet fan appetite is strong and growing across women's sports. Last month, 15 million people tuned in to watch the Lionesses win the Euros for England. On the final stage of this year's Femmes, crowds lined the switchbacks of the Portes du Soleil ringing bells borrowed from the local cows for Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who had grown up wishing she was a boy so she could win the Tour de France.

Her dream realised, she is France's first Tour winner since Jeannie Longo in 1989. Standing on a concrete barrier in the last 500m of the Col du Corbier, I watched the world-famous names flash by on riders' backs: Vollering, van der Breggen and Vos, cheered on by fans packing the roadside. But even more indicative of the Femmes' popularity was the atmosphere in local bars the day before, where men screamed 'allez' at the television as Ferrand-Prévot rode her way into yellow, alongside a peak audience of 5.4 million.

Last summer, Bertine joined a trip to watch the Tour de France Femmes with some of the 1980s racers who feature in Breakaway Femmes. The day of the 2024 time trial stands out in her memory because 'the originals and the friends,' as they called themselves, rode to the start pen before the race. As the older women wandered around, teams warmed up on rollers ready for the race ahead. Most of them were unaware, Bertine says, that the first generation of the women's Tour were watching them

1955: Sports journalist Jean Leulliot creates the first Tour equivalent for women riders, with a peloton of 41. It lasts one edition.

1984: Marianne Martin of the United States wins the first Tour de France Féminin over 18 stages.

1989: Jeannie Longo wins her third Tour de France Féminin in the final year of the race.

1990: A Tour de la C.E.E. féminin is launched. It lasts until 1993 with races of between nine and 12 stages.

1992: Journalist Pierre Boué launches the Tour Cycliste Féminin. Jeannie Longo podiums in three editions.

1998: The organisers of the men's Tour dispute the name. The race is renamed the Grand Boucle Féminine Internationale.

2009: The last Grand Boucle, won by Emma Pooley.

2014: La Course debuts as a one-stage race. Riders such as Annemiek van Vleuten argue for harder, more ambitious stages.

2022: The first edition of the Tour de France Femmes debuts with a field of 132 riders. Van Vleuten wins the general classification.

2025: 154 riders line up for the Tour de France Femmes. The winner's prize money is €50,000, a tenth of the men's equivalent.

‘Watch the Femmes!’ goes the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift slogan. It’s everywhere, on hats, on musettes, on advertising hoardings. And people do; in fact, this year, more people than ever watched the Tour, on the roadside and at home. It’s happening. In just four editions, the race has changed so much from La Course, an event tacked onto the men’s equivalent to something in its own right. People no longer need to be told to watch the Femmes – they already are.

France TV, the host broadcaster, published figures this week showing that they had an average audience of 2.7 million viewers per stage, an increase of more than 500,000 each day last year, which meant a 31.6% TV audience share. The final stage, won by Pauline Ferrand-Prévot in Châtel had an average audience of 4.4 million, peaking at 7.7 million. People are watching the femmes.

The roadsides looked similarly packed with fans, with the Grand Départ in Brittany and the final two Alpine stages particularly popular, with bars emptied and attention switched on for the best riders in the world. These fans don’t need to be told to watch women’s racing; they already are, and they are loving it. They aren’t even there for the publicity caravan as much as they would be for the men’s race, given its reduced size. There’s less free stuff to attract the crowds, so the racing does it instead.

It helps, with all this, that France has its first winner of the Tour de France Femmes after four editions, Ferrand-Prévot, already an icon after her road, cyclo-cross and mountain biking exploits, adding yet another trophy to her cabinet. A second Demi Vollering win would not have had the same impact.

Ferrand-Prévot is not isolated though, French women’s cycling is close to a boom moment, with Maëva Squiban winning two stage wins this year, and the young Breton joining Ferrand-Prévot, Juliette Labous, Cédrine Kerbaol and Évita Muzic as French stars of the peloton. The Netherlands might still be on top, but France is up there as a powerful cycling country, much more so with its female stars than its men.

I was watching the Femmes last week, when I could, given it is behind a paywall on TNT Sports in the UK, and also when I was allowed to, given the lack of full and complete coverage of the race. The men’s Tour can be watched – subscription and adverts permitting – from kilometre 0 to the very end, but the Femmes cannot, meaning that much of the action is not shown to the TV viewer. It’s the same story with the highlights.

The result is, as much as we want to watch the Femmes, it’s not always available, and difficult. I want to be able to watch every minute of action, even if not a lot is happening, it’s part of the beauty of Grand Tour racing. Perhaps this is in the plan for the future, as the race continues to grow, it’s just a shame it isn’t here now.

Things happen early in races, breaks are created, attacks are put in, like Anna van der Breggen’s on stage nine this year, and incidents happen. Not seeing them means you can’t understand the whole picture of the race, something which feels all the more crucial in the nascent world of the Tour de France Femmes.

This always seems to be the story for women’s racing, which is electric and enthralling, that it gets treated as an afterthought when it comes to TV broadcasting and the schedules, the same is true of many of the Classics and other races, but the Tour should be at the forefront of doing something different.

I know, from next year, the men’s Tour will be just as behind a paywall in the UK. I’m still heartbroken about this, but I’m also annoyed that I really wanted to watch the Femmes this year, and couldn’t see all of it.

We don’t need to be told to watch the Femmes now, we already are. Just give us the tools to do so.

This piece is part of The Leadout, the offering of newsletters from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

If you want to get in touch with Adam, email adam.becket@futurenet.com, or comment below.

Cycling has a long, complicated relationship with weight. In a sport where every watt matters, and climbing is often king, power-to-weight ratio is an inescapable metric. In the fight against gravity, every extra kilogram costs precious watts. Just like the equipment used, riders strive to optimise their bodies for the demands of the terrain. Over the decades, that obsession has driven many athletes, men and women alike, into disordered eating, and the sport still struggles to draw the line between what’s healthy and what yields the best performance.

Fortunately, the culture is evolving. Today’s top riders fuel smarter, train more holistically, and place greater value on mental and physical well-being. But elite sport is rarely healthy, and body scrutiny is hard to escape. And when it comes to who gets scrutinised most, the burden is still far from equal, as this past week in France made painfully clear.

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is one of the greatest athletes the sport of cycling has ever seen. Still just 33 years old, the Française holds 12 UCI Elite World Championship titles (15 if you include team events) across road, cyclocross, gravel and mountain bike disciplines. She’s also the reigning Olympic cross-country mountain bike champion. And as of yesterday, the winner of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

Yet much of this past week’s discourse wasn’t about her performance, but rather, her weight.

After her spring campaign, in which she notably won Paris-Roubaix, Ferrand-Prévot largely disappeared from the races, pouring herself into her Tour de France preparation.

This race carried a lot of significance for her. As a young child growing up in France, Ferrand-Prévot had wished she were a boy so she could race the Tour de France. For most of her life, the race didn’t exist for women. It wasn’t until 2022, three years after she quit road racing, that a revived women’s Tour de France emerged. After winning nearly everything there was to win in the dirt, Ferrand-Prévot returned to the pavement with one clear goal: to win the Tour de France Femmes within 2-3 years. The 2025 edition was supposed to be merely a “test run” yet she trained as if it were her only shot.

Like her male teammates Jonas Vingegaard, Sepp Kuss and the like, Ferrand-Prévot used every resource the Visma - Lease a Bike team made available to her. Altitude camps, performance labs, precise nutrition and guidance from sports scientists, coaches and nutritionists. She even bought a home in Andorra for easier access to big climbs.

She and her team left no stone unturned to tune her body for the Tour’s brutal mountain stages and the infamous Col de la Madeleine specifically. And yes, that meant losing weight. Four kilograms to be exact.

“For this race I knew I had to climb for one-and-a-half hours over the Col de la Madeleine and I tried to make the most of it,” she told the press. “You need to adapt to the terrain you have.” She added that she’d carried more weight in spring because she needed “power on the flats.”

When she remerged in the peloton on July 26 for the opening stage of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, she looked leaner, and yes, skinnier, than ever. Fans, competitors and media were quick to take note. In turn, Ferrand-Prévot addressed the questions and concerns with frankness.

“It’s my job to be the best as possible,” Ferrand-Prévot said. “We know this is an endurance sport, and to climb you need to have a [high] watts per kilogram. I made the choice. I worked hard for it.”

She was also quick to note that this peak-performance physique was temporary.

“I don’t want to stay like this,” she said. “But we also had a good plan with the team’s nutritionist and everything is in control. I didn’t do anything extreme and I still had power left after nine days of racing.”

Whether her approach was commendable or not is up for debate. But it certainly wasn’t anything unusual. Vingegaard undergoes similar altitude camps, closely managed lean-outs, and rigorous performance targeting. Tadej Pogačar, too, has spoken about managing weight through training and the off-season. Yet during their three weeks of racing in July, neither man faced even half the public scrutiny Ferrand-Prévot received this week.

Her weight loss was splashed across newspaper pages, debated on TV panels, criticised on social media. “She’s too skinny.” “This isn’t healthy.” “A bad example for young girls.” Some even accused her of promoting disordered eating, despite the fact that her preparation was medically supervised. All this body commentary cast a shadow over a golden performance.

Sure, male cyclists’ bodies are scrutinised too, but less often and differently. Society tends to treat male performance optimisation as purely athletic. A female athlete’s weight, by contrast, becomes a matter of public concern, moral judgment, even policing.

So what did Ferrand-Prévot do that was so different from any other elite athlete tuning their body for peak performance? She did it as a woman. That gendered lens, the comments, the coded concern, the casual critique, tells us more about us than it does about her. It's a glaring double standard.

Yes, we should always scrutinise our sport and ensure athlete well-being comes first. We must emphasise also that the questionable measures taken at the top level are highly event- and rider-specific and done in a controlled environment; it's not something for amateurs to emulate. And that’s precisely why Ferrand‑Prévot’s transparency should be commended, not condemned. There are real concerns about athlete well-being in endurance sport, and undoubtedly, cycling has long had a weight obsession, but that weight is not hers alone to carry.

This week, the world should be talking about Ferrand‑Prévot’s tactical brilliance on the Col de la Madeleine, her searing solo into Châtel, and her historic victory. Let’s not diminish it by reducing her to her weight.

If we’re going to question Ferrand‑Prévot, we must question every man in the mountains the same way. Until then, let her be legendary.

'Don't call it a comeback', as the saying goes – and never could it be more apt than in the case of last year's queen of the peloton, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot.

The writing was on the wall – or at least in the French rider's wheel marks. Fat, knobbly wheel marks dusted with the desiccated soil of an untouchable Olympic mountain bike victory. She had never gone away – she was just a little out of sight for a while.

Only six races in to her return to the pro road peloton last year she astounded onlookers with a dominant solo victory in one of the hardest events on the calendar – Paris-Roubaix Femmes.

And now, anyone who thought she might have simply got lucky with one good ride, was silenced emphatically by the Frenchwoman on the final two mountainous days of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, after she took a brace of solo stage wins – the latter wearing yellow to seal the overall victory.

Let's find out a little more about the woman who ended 36 years of French hurt at the Tour.

1. Success was on the cards from an early age for Ferrand-Prévot, who won four national titles across road and MTB when she was still a youth rider.

2. Her first sport had been figure skating, with her parents initially reluctant to let her take up cycling. But she persuaded them to let her join a club in her home town of Reims – after which there was no looking back.

3. In 2015 she achieved a historic triple World Championships haul – road, cyclo-cross and mountain bike.

4. Of those three, her mountain biking feats make up the biggest part of her palmarès. She has 14 MTB world titles spanning, cross-country, marathon, short track and team relay.

5. A veteran of four Olympic Games, Ferrand-Prévot has competed both on and off-road over the years but medalled only once, winning MTB XCO gold at last year's Paris Games.

6. At the other end of the Olympic spectrum, she almost gave up bike racing after Rio 2016, having quit the MTB race and finishing well down in the road race after an injury-hit season.

7. Instead, she bought herself a bulldog pup that she christened Rio, who lifted her spirits and helped her to continue.

8. She has spent the last five seasons concentrating on the mountain bike – to great effect – but returned to the road this season. To equally great – if not greater – effect, as we saw in France.

9. In 2023/24 she rode with the Ineos Grenadiers team, who supported her in her attempt to win at the Olympics. However she left because the team's lack of plans to field a women's road team did not fit with her desire to return to road racing.

10. Ferrand-Prévot is in a relationship with men's WorldTour pro Dylan Van Baarle. Like 'PFP' he is a former Paris-Roubaix winner (2022) and rides for the Visma-Lease a Bike team.

11. She was yellow-carded after Milan San Remo this year for irregular sprinting.

12. A strong family background in cycling meant it was almost predestined that 'PFP', as she is known, would take to two wheels. Her father ran a bike shop and her mother a cycling school.

13. On top of that, her uncle, Ludovic Dubau, is a former mountain biking champion, winning the French national championship in 1994.

14. Her younger sister Axelle is also a successful bike racer. A veteran of many of the major Classics races and more, she has more recently taken to gravel racing, and placed second at this year's Traka event and taking podium places in the Gravel World Series events.

15. She is an outspoken advocate for women's competition and explained that when she was very young she told her mum that she wanted to be a boy so that she could ride the Tour de France. Times have changed.

16. She has no problem mixing up disciplines, saying that they can complement each other and adding: "I don't like monotony".

17. As well as a base in Monaco, Ferrand-Prévot has a place in Andorra, which she says is perfect for training for big, mountainous races. The Tour de France Femmes, for example…

18. On top of all her scientific success, she has a "scientific" degree, and has also completed further studies in physiotherapy.

19. The first pro road team she joined was Dutch team Rabobank-Liv, where she found herself under the wing of her cycling hero Marianne Vos – who is once again a team-mate this year at Visma-Lease a Bike.

20. She has a tattoo that reads 'Life is a joke' (in English) on the back of her neck. It's a reminder, she says, not to take anything too seriously.

21. She has been criticised on social media for finding what she describes as the "limit" when it comes to weight loss in preparation for the Tour de France Femmes. But she said: “I don’t want to stay like this because I know it’s not 100% healthy, but we also had a good plan with the nutritionist in the team and everything is in control."

With the last answer in her runner-up press conference, Demi Vollering had the final say on the war of words that has played out behind the scenes of this year's Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, saying she’s noticed a “stigma" around her that she's "a little bit of a drama queen".

Tension first flared at the race when Vollering’s FDJ-SUEZ team boss Stephen Delcourt complained of a lack of respect in the peloton, after the Dutchwoman was brought down in a pile-up on stage three.

Delcourt’s comments were then dubbed “ridiculous” by Visma-Lease a Bike sports director Jos van Emden, who in turn accused Vollering of believing she’s in a “gilded cage”.

“[Delcourt]’s just been influenced by Demi – by her dramatic behaviour,” Van Emden told De Telegraaf. “Demi really thinks she's in a gilded cage. Yes, she's the best cyclist. But that doesn't mean everyone should make way for her.”

Asked how she responded to Van Emden's remarks during her closing press conference in Châtel, Vollering said: “I’m being hunted for this, I think a little bit. Especially in the Netherlands, I have the feeling I have this stigma around me that I’m a little bit of a drama queen. But in the end, I think, if you ask my teammates, they will always say different.

“I think it’s also someone who doesn’t know me who says something like this. I cannot blame [Van Emden], because he doesn’t know me, so he can say that from the outside.”

For the second edition in a row, Vollering finished runner-up at the Tour de France Femmes, having won the race in 2023. Last year, she missed out by four seconds to Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto). In this year’s edition, she came in at almost four minutes behind the runaway winner, Visma-Lease a Bike’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot.

“Everything went really well as a team, so I'm really proud of that, and at this moment, that makes me very happy,” Vollering said.

The Dutchwoman added that she will now go “back to the drawing board” in her pursuit of returning to the top step. “This Tour de France was maybe a bit more for the pure, pure climbers,” she said. “But you don't know what's next year, so never say never.”

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot won an emotional Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift stage nine on Sunday to seal an historic overall victory.

The Visma–Lease a Bike rider powered home in a sensational win to become the first French winner of the men’s or women’s Tours since Jeannie Longo in 1989.

The 33-year-old rode solo to the finish in Châtel ahead of 2023 champion Demi Vollering (FDJ–Suez) and defending champion Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney who rounded out the podium

Ferrand-Prévot resets the nation’s long wait for a victor at their home race and did so in sensational fashion with a second stage win in the Alps.

Vollering and Niewiadoma-Phinney moved onto the GC podium after a difficult day on the bike saw Sarah Gigante (AG Insurance–Soudal) dropped, ending her hopes of a podium place.

But it was day all about Ferrand-Prévot who earned the opportunity to carve her name into history after Saturday’s race flipped the GC on its head.

After a nightmare day for former yellow jersey holder Kim Le Court (AG Insurance–Soudal) as she suffered a major crash on Stage 8, she lost her grasp on the yellow jersey and moved into eleventh overall, leaving Ferrand-Prévot with the nation's hopes on her shoulders.

On the ninth stage of the ever-growing event, the riders faced 124km of a different style of mountain stage, with a massive 11.6km climb at the mid point in the race, before another technical ascent and a final battle to Châtel on the French-Swiss border.

How it happened

From the outset, it was a sensational battle in the finale, as Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime) went out hard in her bid for the green jersey, entering the day with a 30-point lead over Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease a Bike) and 25 points on offer in Morillon.

Wiebes' effort was short-lived, but it was a rapid start to racing. A steep 7km descent broke up the field as SD Worx-Protime’s Anna van der Breggen and Femke Gerritse shot off, creating a 15-second gap from the peloton, and were quickly joined by Lucinda Brand (Lidl-Trek) and world champion teammate Lotte Kopecky.

With 100km to go and at the base of the climb, the peloton had reeled in the leading quartet, but the intact peloton barely lasted a kilometre as Van der Breggen went off with her third attack of the day.

She dropped the group with Ferrand-Prévot and quickly built up around a half a minute gap over the field, with the white and green jersey riders around a minute behind that.

The Dutch rider’s dominance continued through to the summit of the climb, building her advantage to around 55 seconds ahead of the yellow jersey group, and clinching 10 points in the Queen of the Mountains classification.

With 73km remaining, the fractured peloton reformed 90 seconds behind Van der Breggen, with the group containing Wiebes managing to bridge with the yellow jersey group.

It was in the nick of time, too, as Wiebes worked her way to the front for the intermediate sprint to add another 20 points to her green jersey tally, with Van der Breggen claiming the full points now over 2 minutes ahead.

Van der Breggen entered the foot of the monster Col de Joux Plane with an advantage of 100 seconds, but it was a fierce 11.6km ascent at 8.5% ahead and a charging peloton behind.

GC podium contenders Cedrine Kerbaol (EF Education-Oatly) and Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto) suffered under the pace and went down on a sharp corner at the base of the Joux Plane, putting them under pressure to come back after losing over 30 seconds on the pack.

From there, the yellow jersey group split, with the difficulty of the climb evident. An attack from Gigante splintered the chasing group, with Ferrand-Prévot, Vollering, Niewiadoma-Phinney, and Niamh Fisher-Black (Lidl–Trek) stuck on the Aussie’s back wheel in a bid to catch Van der Breggen.

Injections in pace by Vollering and Ferrand-Prévot kept the splinter group in touch, and by the summit, they were only 48 seconds in arrears.

But after a monstrous climb up the Joux Plane, a technically challenging descent followed, which saw GC contender Gigante be distanced after struggling with the pace.

With less than 50km to go, the chasing yellow jersey group continued their hunt for Van der Breggen, reining her in to under 40 seconds.

At the base of the third climb, the chasers edged closer, with only 15 seconds between them at the front of the race. But as they drew closer, Gigante was dropped even further, sitting at over 2 minutes behind and her podium hopes firmly at risk.

It was not long before the six-rider yellow jersey group, including Niewiadoma-Phinney, Vollering, Juliette Labous (FDJ–Suez), Fisher-Black, and Dominika Wlodarczyk (UAE Team ADQ) bridged the gap to Van der Breggen, who, after a long day on her own, was unable to respond, quickly dropping to over a minute behind.

The group were now invigorated at the front of the race, with the knowledge of a potential stage win on the cards, and more importantly, the opportunity of a podium after Gigante was dropped and Kerbaol sat at almost five minutes in arrears following her crash earlier in the race.

At the summit, Vollering claimed the maximum 10 points, ahead of a winding and difficult descent which allowed the six riders to put further time into Gigante, who at 15km to go was three minutes behind.

It was a nervy build-up in the final moments of the race, but the hammer finally dropped with 7km to go as Vollering launched a fierce attack, and Labous was the first to crack.

Despite Vollering’s bold move, the remaining five dug deep and reeled her back in. But when no one expected it, Ferrand-Prévot went all out in an iconic way, as the French woman opened the gap to 12 seconds over the next 2 kilometres and with a nation willing her on.

The maillot de jaune rode up the valley climb, without a meaningful response from the Vollering-led group, who trailed by over 20 seconds with less than a kilometre remaining.

Ferrand-Prévot rode solo to victory ahead of Vollering and Niewiadoma-Phinney to take the emotional win on Stage 9, welcomed with the raucous cheers of a nation full of pride.

Tour de France Femmes stage nine: Praz-Sur-Arly > Châtel (124.1KM)

1. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike, in 3:38:23
2. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-SUEZ +20s
3. Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto +23s
4. Niamh Fisher-Black (NZl) Lidl-Trek +23s
5. Dominika Włodarczyk (Pol) UAE Team ADQ +33s Yara Kastelijn (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, at same time
6. Juliette Labous (Fra) FDJ-SUEZ +1:49
7. Sarah Gigante (Aus) AG Insurance-Soudal +3:53
8. Cédrine Kerbaol (Fra) EF Education-Oatly +9:22
9. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck +9:23
10. Nadia Gontova (Can) Winspace Orange Seal +9:42

Tour de France Femmes general classification after stage 9

1. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike, in 29:54:24
2. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-SUEZ, + 3:42
3. Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto, +4:09
4. Dominika Włodarczyk (Pol) UAE Team ADQ +5:45
5. Niamh Fisher-Black (NZl) Lidl-Trek +6:25
6. Sarah Gigante (Aus) AG Insurance-Soudal +6:40
7. Juliette Labous (Fra) FDJ-SUEZ +9:13
8. Cédrine Kerbaol (Fra) EF Education-Oatly, +13:43
9. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, +13:59
10. Evita Muzic (Fra) FDJ-SUEZ, +15:50

Alison Avoine is crying inconsolably. Sitting on the ground, her face in her hands, the Frenchwoman's soigneur at St Michel - Preference Home - Auber93 tries to comfort her. Fans walk past, filtering away from the barriers by the finish line. They stop to look at the commotion, but the sight is distressing – they dare not stare too long. There are whispers, concerns. What has gone wrong? Why is that poor rider sobbing?

More than half an hour had passed since the end of stage five of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift when Avoine crossed the line. She had finished alongside her team-mate, Elyne Roussel, 131st and 132nd on the day – second last and last. Both made the time cut by a handful of minutes.

“I think it was the worst day of my career,” Avoine now recalls. “I don’t even have any words for what happened. My body took a real hit [in a crash on stage four], so it was almost impossible to pedal and follow the infernal rhythm that the Tour’s been raced at since the first day.

“It’s incredible, magical, to be here, but it’s really tough.”

Writing on Instagram, her team-mate Roussel spoke of a similar struggle. The 19-year-old, too, had crashed – twice – on a previous stage. “It’s been 48 hours of pure hell,” she wrote. “But we’re still here.”

For many riders at the Tour de France Femmes, stage wins and high GC placings are, for the moment at least, an impossible dream. Their goal is more straightforward: make it through the nine days, avoid the time cuts, and finish the race.

To do so, they have to keep up with the speed of the pack, led by the best riders in the world. It’s a challenge they relish, one they were all looking forward to, but as the racing grows more intense, the mountains climb higher, and the aches of earlier crashes linger on their bodies, each day can feel like an endless battle.

For Avoine and her St Michel team, this Tour has “not gone exactly as we imagined”. The squad went into the final weekend with just four of seven riders remaining, The rest were forced to abandon.

“This year, as a small team, it’s become really difficult to survive on the Tour de France,” Avoine tells Cycling Weekly. “The level has gone up. This is my third Tour de France, and the two previous ones weren’t raced like this – it's full gas from kilometre zero, and it never lets up.”

Like other riders on the peloton’s smaller teams, Avoine is not solely a cyclist – she also works as a neuropsychiatrist.

Clémence Latimier, a debutant this year with Arkéa-B&B Hôtels, only turned pro three months ago. “It’s really difficult,” the 21-year-old says. “Everyone’s riding hard every day, and there’s a lot of tension in the peloton, but it’s amazing to be here after so little time as a pro.”

Until May this year, Latimier was a club cyclist, racing against amateurs in her native France. The level at the Tour, she says, is "incomparable" to what she's used to, but she's not letting it hold her back. After crashing early on the opening stage, she went on to win the combativity prize on day three. Now, she hopes to get to the end. "I just want to have fun each day," she says.

For ProTeam riders like Avoine and Latimier, the UCI has set a minimum annual salary of €20,000. Those at the top end of the sport – the yellow jersey contenders, Grand Tour winners and former world champions – earn hundreds of thousands more.

The budget difference between the WorldTour squads and those in the lower tier is also stark. Winspace Orange Seal, another ProTeam like St Michel, operates on a purse of around €1 million a year, reveals the team’s manager, Jean-Christophe Barbotin. How does that compare to the average WorldTour squad? “They have about four times more,” he estimates, but there's no hint of jealousy.

“I think the good thing about having a small budget is that there’s no pressure, for me or my riders,” Barbotin continues. Though they're unlikely to win stages, those on his team can race care-free, he says, and with no fear of taking on the bigger names.

“I have never heard a rider say they didn’t want to start a race because another rider earns 10 times more than her,” Barbotin says. “Never. They have a great mentality – they love their sport, they love their jobs.”

Within Winspace's squad at this year's Tour is Kiara Lylyk, a 21-year-old from Canada. Riding her race debut, Lylyk found herself trailing the general classification earlier in the week as the lanterne rouge – the last rider in the standings – and marked her status by wearing a red ribbon in her hair. “I was pretty happy to have that,” she laughs. She was less pleased about the circumstances that landed her there.

“On day two, I was feeling awful,” Lylyk says. “I think I had some kind of bug. I was dropped 30km into the race, and I rode the entire stage by myself. With 5km to go, my DS was like, ‘If you make it in 13 minutes, you can start the next day.’ After that day, I’ve just been grateful to be here every day.”

Now, like Avoine, the Canadian’s aim is to just finish the nine days. “Honestly, coming into the race, I didn’t think that would have to be the goal, but now it definitely is,” she says. “Seeing the level here is just nothing like I’ve experienced before. Hopefully in future years I can be at the pointy end. Finishing would be a big accomplishment.”

The tally of abandons sits at 26 with one stage to go in the race. The latest to withdraw was Uno-X's Susanne Andersen, the fifth rider to finish outside the time limit. Her team will begin Sunday's final stage with just two names on the start list.

As for Avoine, her teary day from hell is behind her, and she's still in the race. Following the brutality of stage five, the Frenchwoman wrote on Instagram that she would “fight against myself, and against the passing of time – abandoning will never be an option”.

Sadly, it’s that fate that befell her team-mate and close friend Roussel on day seven. Two days after she finished last, this time on the road to Chambéry, the teenager succumbed to the injuries of her earlier crashes, and waved her white flag.

“She was almost crying on her bike,” Avoine says. “She got into the car that was behind me for the rest of the stage, and I told her through the radio that I was really proud of her. She’s young, she’s only 19, this won’t be her last Tour

As for what remains of Avoine's own race, the Frenchwoman is determined to make it to the end. “I’m going to try and finish for her [Roussel],” she said. There could be tears of joy when she does.

“The next Bernard Hinault will certainly be a woman,” declared race director Marion Rousse before the start of this Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. Now, with one stage to go, and after 40 years of waiting for the home crowds, the champion-elect is chosen. Step forward Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, France’s first female yellow jersey in the modern era.

It was on the Col de la Madeleine, stage eight’s summit finish, that the Visma-Lease a Bike rider took flight. First, she latched on to an attack from Sarah Gigante (AG Insurance-Soudal), before dropping the Australian, and then tagging and passing the breakaway. Her winning margin gives her a 2:37 cushion over Gigante at the top of the GC – 3:18 to Vollering in third – a lead the crowds on the climb knew will likely be unassailable.

As Ferrand-Prévot collected her yellow jersey, hundreds of fans stood banked on a grass verge in front of the podium to cheer. “Pauline! Pauline! Pauline!” they chanted. Thousands had made a near 20km trek to the top of the Madeleine, and now they were witnessing history. A tear in her eye, their hero smiled and waved back. She then returned behind the screens and, shielded from the folie, collapsed into the arms of Rousse. The embrace brought both women to tears.

“It’s a little girl’s dream that’s come true today,” Ferrand-Prévot said afterwards. “It’s hard to find the words.”

The plan had long been to overhaul the race on the Madeleine. In the months before the Tour, the Frenchwoman visited the mountain twice, learning the inclines and bends, every kink in the tarmac, so she’d be ready for stage eight’s finale. She'd treat it like a mountain bike race, she decided, an intense, hour-or-so effort, teetering on blowing up. On the day, everything played out “pretty perfect”.

“We put Marion Bunel in the first breakaway so she could eventually help me on the final climb. From there until the Madeleine, the girls protected me really well. I got to the foot of the Madeleine and I felt good. I felt that the pace was high, but I wasn’t full gas,” Ferrand-Prévot recounted.

“Then, when Sarah attacked, I wanted to see if Demi could follow, and I saw she wasn’t able to. I tried to get back up to Sarah, and when I got there, we reached Marion, who was on a slightly flatter part, and that allowed me to recover on her wheel to then attack, accelerate, and try and drop Sarah.”

It was a victory, she added, that was crafted in the “fine details”.

“Everyone rode perfectly as a team. That’s why I’m really happy, because it was all down to teamwork – it’s a victory for the team.”

Ferrand-Prévot’s Tour heroics come almost a year to the date she won the mountain bike gold medal at the Paris Olympics. Returning to the road, after a six-year hiatus, she set herself the goal of winning the Tour within three years. “This victory today is a sign that I made the right choice,” she said.

“It was a challenge, really, a challenge to see if I could do it. Voilà, I know there’s still another stage, and I haven’t won yet, but to wear this yellow jersey is really a little girl’s dream come true. It’s an amazing feeling. I just want to see my team-mates to thank them and celebrate with them tonight.”

In the meantime, the Frenchwoman now faces an hour-and-a-half transfer to her hotel for the evening. She’ll have a massage when she gets there, she said, and then try and get a good night's sleep. On Sunday, she has the chance to make history as the first Frenchwoman to win the modern Tour de France Femmes. Her 2:37 lead suggests that, barring catastrophe, she’ll almost certainly do it.

“I know that the girls will be 100% behind me,” Ferrand-Prévot said. “As I said, it’s really a little girl’s dream to wear this yellow jersey, so in any case, my Tour de France is a success.

“Today I felt really good, so why would I feel bad tomorrow? We’ll have to be vigilant. I did a recon of the stage – I know the Joux-Plane and the Corbier. It’s going to be interesting.”

At the summit of the Col de la Madeleine, 2,000m in the sky, Demi Vollering tosses her bike across the finish line. The pre-race favourite has won a two-up sprint against Fenix-Deceuninck’s Yara Kastelijn. Breathless and exhausted, she bows her head over her handlebars. There will be no victory celebrations, though. The dash was for fourth place.

On the gantry above the two riders the clock ticks to three minutes and three seconds; it’s the time Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has had to toast her win on the Queen stage of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and start to come to terms with the fact that she is now the yellow jersey. It’s also the time that Vollering has lost to her GC rival, a gap that will be difficult to overcome on the final day.

Many penned stage seven as the day Vollering would take flight, as she had done on the Col du Tourmalet two years prior. Instead, she found herself chasing, suffering on the slopes of the Alps.

“I just feel not really myself,” the FDJ-SUEZ leader said, swarmed by TV cameras beyond the finish line. “I just missed some power in the legs – my heart and lungs were ok, but my legs were just finished today.”

Over the first week of racing at the Tour – in spite of Vollering's day three crash – seconds separated her from her GC rivals. She went into stage eight just 31 seconds off the top step. The gaps have now blown out to minutes.

Ferrand-Prévot leads by 2:37 to AG Insurance-Soudal’s Sarah Gigante, who climbed six places with her move on the Madeleine. Vollering occupies the final podium spot, just 22 seconds ahead of last year’s winner Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto), but still 3:18 adrift of yellow.

What went wrong on the Madeleine? “Actually, I felt good in the beginning, but I just didn’t have an answer to Gigante’s attack,” Vollering said. “Normally I should be able to follow. I'm very disappointed in myself, of course, but it is how it is.”

Gigante’s attack came inside 12km to go. “I was definitely dreaming of winning this stage,” the Australian said afterwards, “but I’m happy with second.”

The move ripped the GC group apart, dragging Ferrand-Prévot with it, but distancing Vollering, who then had to close a small gap to Niewiadoma. For the rest of the stage, Vollering was forced to chase by herself – after all, who would pace the pre-race favourite? – but her engine could only get her so far.

“I rode flat out to the finish in the final kilometre,” she said. By that point, though, Ferrand-Prévot was already necking her recovery drinks. “I didn't have much left, but it was at least enough to drop Kasia. Maybe I can get a podium finish in the GC, but we'll see… At the moment, I'm pretty rotten. Let's recover first, then look at tomorrow.”

Stage nine, it’s certain, will be no procession. The road to Châtel is mountainous, with almost 3,000m of climbing before the race closes, and the yellow jersey is crowned.

The GC battle has finally opened up – there’s room yet for some last-minute changes. But, as Ferrand-Prévot’s celebrations at the summit of the Madeleine showed – the fist-pumping, the beaming smile, the tears of joy – the Frenchwoman knows her buffer is comfortable.

France should soon have its yellow jersey. Vollering may have to wait another year for hers.

She drives her teammates crazy with French rap, loves to attack, descends like a devil and climbs with the best. UAE Team ADQ’s Maeva Squiban has stunned the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift with two back-to-back stage wins, emerging as this season’s breakout star.

The 23-year-old “pocket rocket” from Brest, Brittany, has lit up Stages 6 and 7 of women’s cycling’s biggest event with her long-range attacks and fearless style. Her wins weren't just opportunistic; they were deliberate and confident. An announcement that Maeva Squiban has arrived.

“I think we know who she is now,” said her sports director, Cherie Pridham.

Squiban started cycling at 13, after unwrapping a mountain bike on Christmas. She joined her local club in Brittany and quickly stood out. In 2019, she netted a silver medal at the French junior national time trial championships and a win at the Chrono des Nations juniors. The Stade Rochelais Charente-Maritime continental team welcomed her as a stagiaire in 2020 and a full-time contract followed in 2021.

She made her Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift debut in 2022, but it ended in heartbreak. A crash on stage 2 left her with a broken sacrum and a long road to recovery. But she came back stronger. In 2024, riding for Arkéa‑B&B Hotels Women, she flirted with the podium, finishing second on stage 7 and placed fifth in the young rider classification.

UAE scooped her up ahead of the 2025 season on a two-year deal, primarily to support, and learn from, team leader Elisa Longo Borghini.

The team lined up at the Tour with high hopes. Longo Borghini had just won her second Giro d’Italia Women and was eyeing a yellow jersey to match that of Tadej Pogačar’s on the men’s side of the UAE programme. But it wasn’t meant to be. Illness took Longo Borghini out after stage 2, and two more riders fell sick before the race hit the high mountains. Only four remained standing by stage 6.

With GC hopes dashed, the team pivoted. Stage wins became the new mission, and Squiban took her shot on the Col du Chansert. Too far down in the overall to be a threat, she was let go. And then she was gone. Soloing for 31 kilometers, Ambert welcomed her in with a deafening road, as she delivered France its first stage victory of the Tour.

It was a breakout performance. And it lit a fire.

Pridham talks about Squiban like one would about a young colt: young, full of raw energy, eager to break and run free. By the next morning, she was tugging at the reins again.

"[I] didn't quite think it was going to happen today, but Maeve was confident this morning. She said, 'I want to go from kilometre 0.' And we were like, 'OK, but kilometre 0 is a long way',” Pridham said.

Nearly 160 kilometres, in fact, but Squiban didn’t hesitate. With a punchy attack from the gun, she made the early selection. And the directors did their best to keep her on a short leash at first.

"We held her back a little bit," Pridham revealed. "We knew when she was on the climb, we could let her fly, but it was just about keeping her under control, keeping her rhythm, and [then] letting her do her thing.”

And what a thing of beauty it was.

Squiban stretched her leash to take the QOM points atop the Côte de Saint-Franc. She did it again on Côte de Berland. Then, on the day’s biggest challenge, the Col du Granier, she was finally unleashed. And she soared.

None of the breakaway companions could match her on the uphill. And on the descent she delivered a masterclass. With the guts and confidence only seen in compatriot Cédrine Kerbaol (EF Education-Oatly), Squiban pushed her Colnago to its max, hitting speeds of 90kph while staying in complete control.

In Chambéry, the crowd thundered, banging on the boards and waving their flags. France now had its third-ever stage win at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and Squiban had delivered two of them in a row.

Pridham was over the moon. "What a sensation, absolute sensation," she revelled. "We have one of the best climbers here in the world. Absolutely stunning."

Squiban has single-handedly turned the team's Tour experience around, and the whole team is buzzing.

"We don’t stop dreaming, we just continue in the same vein, and nothing is impossible," said Pridham.

Sitting seven minutes down on the GC with two brutal mountain stages ahead, for Squiban to take the GC win would take something miraculous at this point. But they've got a second card to play. Polish rider Dominika Włodarczyk is sitting in 11th place overall, less than 2 minutes behind yellow-jersey wearer Kim Le Court-Pienaar.

"I never say never," said Pridham about a GC victory. "Now we know what we’re capable of doing with Maeve, we need to go back to the drawing board and have a look at how we’ll progress but one day at a time."

It's highly unlikely we've seen the last of Squiban this Tour. After today's point-hunting, she's now second in the Queen of the Mountains classification, behind Elise Chabbey (FDJ-Suez). Wouldn't a polka dot jersey be a nice momento for her breakout performance?

It would make for “the perfect Tour de France," Squiban admitted. "But it’s not really my goal to be honest. Tomorrow we fight for the GC with Dominika, and that will be more important than the jersey."

No matter what happens, UAE Team ADQ's Tour has been saved.

“I’m speechless, I’m so proud of UAE Team ADQ. If we could go home now we would,” said Pridham.

Le jour de gloire – the day of glory – might not have arrived for France’s GC hope Pauline Ferrand-Prévot on stage seven, but if everything goes to plan, she’ll be wearing the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift’s yellow jersey in less than 24 hours.

The 33-year-old, riding her Tour debut after a six-year hiatus from road racing, is currently second overall, 26 seconds down on AG Insurance-Soudal’s Kim Le Court-Pienaar. For a moment on Friday’s seventh stage – won by UAE Team ADQ’s Maeva Squiban in Chambéry – the Visma-Lease a Bike rider led the virtual classification, before Le Court rejoined the GC group on a descent, and the leaders crossed the line together.

Missing out on the yellow jersey, Ferrand-Prévot said afterwards, was no big deal. “It’s not for today,” she explained. Her plan is hatched for Saturday’s summit finish.

When Ferrand-Prévot, the Olympic mountain bike champion, returned to the road this season, she was clear she wanted to win the Tour de France Femmes within three years. Her preparations for this year’s race pivoted around one climb in particular – the 18.6km Col de la Madeleine, the summit finish of Saturday’s penultimate stage.

Ahead of the race, the Frenchwoman visited the mountain twice. Asked by Cycling Weekly how well she feels she knows the ascent, her response was fast and confident. “I know a lot,” she said.

“I went to do the recon there, many times, because I knew it was important to know. The race will be decided there. You know, in mountain biking, you know every single route, every single corner – I also wanted to have the same pattern and to know very well the climb like this. You feel much more comfortable, you know where you are, and it’s also mentally easier.”

When the Tour route was unveiled last October, it was the Madeleine, the curtain closer of this year’s Queen stage, that attracted the most attention. “It’s around an hour and 20 or 30 minutes' worth of climbing – an effort I’m used to doing in mountain biking,” Ferrand-Prévot said. “I think it’s going to be a head-to-head race, and I’m going to concentrate on myself and my effort.”

It’s the same approach the Visma-Lease a Bike leader has taken throughout the first week of racing, and as yet, she’s still to be tested. “I’m not tired,” she said. “I was in control today. For me, it’s been a good day.”

There was a moment on stage seven, after she crested the Col du Granier, when Ferrand-Prévot began to imagine herself in yellow. Le Court had suffered on the climb and fallen away. “I thought maybe it could happen,” the Frenchwoman said, but again she stayed calm.

“I told myself, ‘My race is tomorrow.’ Today it wasn’t the goal to take the yellow jersey.”

That prize, she hopes, will come on Saturday. France has now waited 40 years for a home winner of the Tour, the last being Bernard Hinault in 1985. The French have faith that the next one will be Ferrand-Prévot.

Each day at this year’s race, the 33-year-old’s Visma-Lease a Bike bus has been swarmed with fans. They’ve painted signs carrying her name, waved bottles for her to sign, and cried at her for autographs each time she's carried out her turbo trainer routines. After stage seven, as she spoke to the media, she tore the race numbers off her jersey, and handed them to a girl who watched her in awe.

It goes without saying: Ferrand-Prévot is the people’s favourite on the ground. Does she feel confident for the race’s finale? “You can’t be confident,” she replied. “I don’t know how the others are now, but for sure I felt good again today. I didn’t use a lot of energy. I think I’m still fresh for tomorrow, so, let’s see.”

If everything goes to plan, les enfants de la patrie – the children of the fatherland – will be chanting her name at the podium. The day of glory may be imminent.

Maeva Squiban made it two wins in two days on stage seven of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, soloing to a famous victory in Chambéry.

The 23-year-old UAE Team ADQ rider attacked over the top of the Col du Granier and held on on the descent to do it again after she soloed to the win on stage six in Ambert on Thursday.

Behind, the GC riders finished more or less together after coming to a stalemate on the run-in, with Cédrine Kerbaol (EF Education-Oatly) finishing in second, and Ruth Edwards (Human Powered Health) in third.

The yellow jersey, Kim Le Court, was briefly dropped on the Granier, but fought back on the descent to finish with her GC rivals.

"It’s incredible," she said post-stage. "This morning, I said OK I’ll attack at kilometre 0, finally I did it. It was an amazing day. I think my sports director is proud of what we did today."

Squiban's victories represent a turnaround for UAE Team ADQ's Tour de France, after the team lost their leader Elisa Longho Borghini before stage three, and are down to just four riders.

Her win on stage six was just the second by a Frenchwoman at the Tour, but now the country has three - two of which belong to Squiban.

How it happened

A flurry of attacks started stage seven of the Tour de France Femmes, but it took around 20km until the first riders broke clear on this transitional stage in Savoie. A 17 rider group formed, however: Lotte Kopecky (SD Worx-Protime), Chloé Dygert (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto), Marie Le Net (FDJ-SUEZ), Maeva Squiban (UAE Team ADQ), Eline Jansen (VolkerWessels), Justine Ghekiere (AG Insurance-Soudal), Shirin van Anrooij (Lidl-Trek), Megan Jastrab (Picnic-PostNL), Ruth Edwards (Human Powered Health), Célia Le Mouel (CERATIZIT), Mareille Meijering (Movistar), Maud Rijnbeek (VolkerWessels), Alice Maria Arzuffi (Labora Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi), Lucinda Brand (Lidl-Trek), Alicia González (St Michel-Preference Home-Auber93), Fiona Mangan (Winspace-Orange-Seal), Susanne Andersen (Uno-X Mobility).

The break had well over four minutes of advantage in the early part of the stage, before the peloton started to bring it down towards the finish.

A crash for Soraya Paladin (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto) saw the Italian abandon the race with over 100km to go on the day.

At the intermediate sprint in Groslée-Saint-Benoît, Mangan took the points. The first classified climb of the day came with 51km to go, with González, Andersen, Brand and Mangan dropping back before the action really started going uphill.

Atop the Côte de Saint-Franc, Squiban, stage six’s winner, took the points, as the break grew smaller again. The Breton repeated the feat on the Côte de Berland.

With 29km to go, 13 riders remained out front, but on the Col du Granier, Squiban, Meijering and Edwards pushed on, before Squiban dropped everyone else to go solo towards the top of the climb.

Meanwhile, the yellow jersey Kim Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal) was dropped from the peloton, along with Puck Pieterse (Fenix-Deceuninck). In the group of favourites, Pauliena Rooijakers (Fenix-Deceuninck) forged on, along with Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto), Demi Vollering (FDJ-SUEZ) and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike).

Squiban pushed on alone, taking the points at the top of the Granier. Meijering, Van Anrooij and Edwards chased behind, but it did not look like they would catch the Frenchwoman out front.

Vollering pushed the pace as the race approached the top of the Granier, attempting to take control of the descent, but close to the finish in Chambéry, Le Court caught her GC rivals.

In the run-in, Cédrine Kerbaol (EF Education-Oatly) hit out in search of bonus seconds, and finished second behind a rampant Squiban.

Results

Tour de France Femmes stage seven: Bourg-en-Bresse > Chambéry (159.7km)

1. Maeva Squiban (Fra) UAE Team ADQ, in 3:58:26
2. Cédrine Kerbaol (Fra) EF Education-Oatly +51s
3. Ruth Edwards (USA) Human Powered Health, at same time
4. Shirin van Anrooij (Ned) Lidl-Trek +53s
5. Dominika Włodarczyk (Pol) UAE Team ADQ +1:00
6. Kim Le Court (Mau) AG Insurance-Soudal
7. Anna van der Breggen (Ned) SD Worx-Protime
8. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-SUEZ
9. Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto
10. Niamh Fisher-Black (NZl) Lidl-Trek, all at same time

General classification after stage seven

1. Kim Le Court (Mau) AG Insurance-Soudal, in 22:28:31
2. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike, +26s
3. Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto, +30s
4. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-SUEZ, + 31s
5. Anna van der Breggen (Ned) SD Worx-Protime, +35s
6. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, +1:04
7. Cédrine Kerbaol (Fra) EF Education-Oatly, +1:09
8. Sarah Gigante (Aus) AG Insurance-Soudal, +1:14
9. Evita Muzic (Fra) FDJ-SUEZ, +1:35
10. Juliette Labous (Fra) FDJ-SUEZ, at same time

For a rider who had just fallen off the provisional podium at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, Demi Vollering cut a relaxed figure after stage six.

Beyond the finish line in Ambert, the Dutchwoman reached for a fan’s bottle, and signed it with a smile. She then laughed up at one of the locals, who bellowed down to her from the window of a house nearby.

The stage had been, compared to the previous days, an easier ride for the FDJ-SUEZ leader. Her day three crash now a memory, she finished alongside her GC rivals, with little to separate them over the climbs, and only bonus seconds bumping her down to fourth.

The gap to the yellow jersey, Kim Le Court-Pienaar (AG Insurance-Soudal) has now stretched from 23 to 31 seconds. Just one saw the reigning champion Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto) jump into third.

And still, despite the time losses, the race had panned out in the “perfect situation”, Vollering said.

“We didn't have to do anything, while AG [Insurance-Soudal] lost all their domestiques,” she said. “Our plan was to send Elise [Chabbey], or at least some of our team’s riders, ahead. That way, we could put pressure on the other teams to chase."

With UAE Team ADQ’s Maeva Squiban solo up the road, it was Le Court’s AG who took on the charge. The Mauritian’s plan for the day was to take all six bonus sprint seconds and the stage win, as she had done the day before. She settled for four seconds and third.

"I mean, in the end, you try to grab what you can grab,” Vollering said of the scrap for seconds. “But, yeah, Kim, I mean, she's so explosive, so I could not hold the wheel yesterday and today. I didn't want to totally kill myself, because the Tour is still long.

“If every time you go all out for these bonuses, you can maybe feel it a bit towards the end.”

It’s these bonus seconds, though, that have made the difference so far between a closely matched field. Without her 34, Le Court would be fourth overall; instead, she leads the race by 25 to Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike).

“I think the micro-accelerations can add up,” Le Court said afterwards, “but the seconds at the bonus sprints can also add up... For me it’s important to gain as many seconds as possible, because I don’t know how I’ll do in the big mountains stages.”

As the race now heads uphill, the GC gaps are expected to open up. Friday’s seventh stage will finish in Chambéry, a town placed at the gateway to the Alps. A weekend finale in the mountains will then follow. Come the finish line in Châtel on Sunday, Vollering’s 31-second deficit to yellow could well prove inconsequential.

“Everybody looks very good uphill, so I’m looking forward to the coming days to see what we can do in these kinds of finishes,” the Dutchwoman said.

But beware her rivals; Ferrand-Prévot is yet to be tested, Niewiadoma is racing with vim, and fifth-placed Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) is only seconds away. What about race leader Le Court? “I felt really, really good, better than I really expected. So no, no signs of weaknesses on my side so far,” the yellow jersey said.

The fighting talk is out. It’s time for the contenders to enter the Alpine ring.

In a field of black saddles at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, there's one that stands out.

It's flashy, transparent, and eye-catchingly different.

Fitted to the yellow bike of the race leader, Kim Le Court-Pienaar, a new-look S-Works saddle has entered the peloton.

Launched last month, the product is an updated model of the S-Works Power saddle, named the 'EVO'. Le Court's translucent version is an unreleased colourway, currently only available to the pros.

"It's limited edition," she told Cycling Weekly, in a rush to make the stage start. "They're promoting it."

'They', in this case, is Specialized, the brand that supplies equipment to Le Court's AG Insurance-Soudal. Contacted by Cycling Weekly, a spokesperson from the brand said the saddle was created by their in-house "body geometry" team, along with scientists, medical experts, and input from pro riders.

So what makes it so special? The EVO is made using Specialized's 'Mirror' technology, a 3D-printed honeycomb of liquid polymer. Around 21,000 stringy nodes make up the saddle's structure, almost three times the number of the previous S-Works Power saddle.

As such, the saddle is said to be particularly comfortable, relieving more pressure from the rider – 34.1% at the nose, and almost 30% at the sit bones, compared to regular foam equivalents.

According to the brand, it's "built for riders who move", and used too by Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step).

As for the colour, Le Court's striking choice strays from the standard black of the rest of the bunch, and is set on a red, carbon fibre shell.

It's the same saddle that was also spotted at the men's Tour de France, earlier this month, on the bike of Pascal Eenkhorn (Soudal Quick-Step).

"The coloured saddles on the pro bikes help us tell this story," a Specialized spokesperson said, "and really stand out as something different in what is usually a sea of black saddles.

"However, it does showcase what our engineers can do now, not only with Mirror tech but colours too – so watch this space for the future."

Though the translucent version is not yet on the market, the same saddle is available in black for £379 ($449, $475).

It was first and second for France, as Maeva Squiban (UAE-ADQ) thundered to victory in the sixth stage of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in a race dominated by the young French rider. Juliette Labous (FDJ-Suez) came in over a minute behind her compatriot, with Kimberley Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal) coming in third.

Squiban took hold of the race on the Col du Chansert, as she took the lead from Elise Chabbey (FDJ-Suez) in the polka dot jersey, holding a steady lead of over a minute in the final half of the race, despite being only one of four UAE-ADQ riders in today’s stage. The dominance of the rider from Brittany was on full display as race-favourites battled it out behind, on the hardest stage of the Tour so far.

Le Court maintains her lead on the race, and will wear the yellow jersey on tomorrow’s stage, sitting at 26 seconds ahead of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot.

"It's a dream," Squiban said after the race.

"It's an amazing feeling. I didn't expect to do that. I knew we had a strong team, we are only four [riders] now but we were all really strong and we knew we were able to do something big today and we did it so it's a special day for us."

How it happened:

Stage six was set to be the hardest of the Tour so far, with five categorised climbs dominating the course, the first of which came at 37km into the race, the Côte de Courpière (1.7km at 6.8%).

At the start of the race, riders quickly battled to get out of the peloton, with Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime) in green making an early break, soon joined by current Queen of the Mountains, Elise Chabbey of FDJ-Suez.

Asserting herself as temporary race-lead, Chabbey took the early intermediate sprint taking the maximum 25 points before being subsumed by the pursuing bunch of 20 riders.

Only four kilometres on from the sprint, the breakaway riders began their first climb of the race, the category 3 Côte de Courpière, 40 seconds away from the peloton. Led by Chabbey, with Human Powered Health’s Lily Williams and Movistar’s Liane Lippert representing three of the mix-up of 14 teams appearing in this 20-strong breakaway.

The break, however, dropped to 12 riders after the second climb of the day, with Brodie Chapman (UAE-ADQ) collecting the maximum points, with Chabbey picking up an additional two points on Côte d’Augerolles (2.7km at 5.1%).

The third climb took Wiebes victim, as the sprinter temporarily dropped from the peloton on the lead up to the 10.3km climb, Col du Beal. At the opposite end of the race, the peloton pushed ahead with an advantage of over a minute.

Wiebes battled to stay in the peloton as she, and other riders including FDJ-Suez’s Ally Woolaston were repeatedly dropped.

Even before the riders had hit the categorised climb, they had been riding an incline of 5% over about 20 kilometres, meaning that the race had arranged and rearranged even before they hit Col du Beal. Once on the climb though, riders start to flag, with Millie Couzens (Fenix-Deceunick) and SD Worx-Protime’s Blanka Vas clinging on to the back of the yellow jersey group, separated from the peloton by just 35 seconds.

Pushing towards the top of the mountain, FDJ-Suez looked to make a bid for the upcoming points, with Amber Kraak attacking at the front of the breakaway. However, her charge was unsuccessful, and the rider looked to pay for this early attempt at 47.9km to go as the peloton caught her, along with Lidl-Trek’s Lauretta Hanson.

The Queen of the Mountains points were scored by Silke Smulders (Liv AlUla Jayco), picking up 10 points against the polka-dot jersey. Though on the descent, Chabbey was back at the head of the race, in a small three-rider breakaway alongside Smulders and Usoa Ostolaza (Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi), though only separated by eight seconds by a chase group. The rest of the race spilled out close behind, with a strung-out peloton only thirty seconds behind.

The trio’s tentative lead was quickly closed as the peloton caught up with the break, suppressing Chabbey’s solo attack as they did so.

Then, on the fourth climb of the day, the French rider, Maeve Squiban (UAE-ADQ) made a successful attack, leading out the race and picking up the five points available at the top of Col du Chansert, with a lead of 1:10, with 29km left to race.

On the descent, Niamh Fisher-Black (Lidl-Trek) was hit with a gearing issue, unable to push down the mountain with the peloton. Squiban, however, maintained her lead at the front of the race with an ever-strengthening lead of 1:20. Behind her, in the fight for bonus points, Kim Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal) crossed the line just ahead of Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney of Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto.

It was Squiban’s race to win, from there-on out, the Breton rider holding a consistent lead from the group in pursuit to allow the young rider to enjoy her hard-won victory.

Results

Tour de France Femmes 2025, stage six: Clermont-Ferrand > Ambert (123.7km)

1. Maeva Squiban (Fra) UAE Team ADQ, in 3:20:46
2. Juliette Labous (Fra) FDJ-Suez, +1:09
3. Kim Le Court (Mau) AG Insurance-Soudal, +1:13
4. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-Suez,
5. Dominika Włodarczyk (Pol) UAE Team ADQ
6. Margot Vanpachtenbeke (Bel) VolkerWessels CT
7. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike
8. Magdeleine Vallieres (Can) EF Education-Oatly
9. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck
10. Puck Pieterse (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, all at same time

General classification after stage six

1. Kim Le Court (Mau) AG Insurance-Soudal, in 18:29:05
2. Pauline Ferrand-Prevot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike, +26s
3. Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto, +30s
4. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-SUEZ, + 31s
5. Anna van der Breggen (Ned) SD Worx-Protime, +35s
6. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, +53s
7. Sarah Gigante (Aus) AG Insurance-Soudal, +1:03s
8. Puck Pieterse (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, +1:12
9. Cédrine Kerbaol (Fra) EF Education-Oatly, +1:24
10. Evita Muzic (Fra) FDJ-Suez, at same time

AG Insurance-Soudal's Kim Le Court-Pienaar might be a new name on the women's WorldTour, but she's no stranger to the African cycling community, having competed professionally both on the road and mountain bike in South Africa and Europe. While some of her best results have come off-road (she's won the Absa Cape Epic and Swiss Epic, two of the toughest races on the mountain bike marathon calendar), 2024 represented a breakout year with victories at the Giro d'Italia and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

The Mauritian has carried her form and hunger to perform at the highest level into 2025, winning stage 1 of the Tour of Britain, and now finds herself with three podium finishes in the first five stages of the Tour de France, the last of which was an emphatic win to regain the maillot jaune (yellow jersey) she wore on stage 3. As the first African to wear the yellow jersey and win a stage at the Tour de France Femme, she's riding a special bike to mark the occasion – a yellow Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL8.

Like the checkered theme applied to the Tarmac SL8s of Florian Lipowitz and Lorena Wiebes, Le Court's bike was also painted by the Italian company Lumar Colors.

At 1.68m tall, Le Court rides a small frame. To differentiate her bike from those of her teammates, it's been painted in a yellow gradient hue with a checkered treatment that is globally symbolic of racing. The bright-yellow fade is the perfect backdrop for the maker's name and sponsor logos – here taking the form of Specialized, S-Works and Shimano wordmark logos. The front of the head tube is painted entirely black to reverse out the Specialized S symbol.

The frame is contrasted equisitely by the gloss-black surfaces of the componentry. As a sponsor of the team, the bike is outfitted in a Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset, which takes care of shifting and braking duties. Roval handles much of the ancillary kit, including the Rapide integrated handlebars and 63/58mm Rapide CLX III wrapped in Specialized Turbo Cotton TLR 28C tyres. Other notable additions include the personalised name sticker with Mauritian flag and the recycled inner tube on the right fork leg to house the timing transponder.

The balance of the build is a meld of functional yet complementary items such as the colour-coded Tacx Deva bottle cages, Supacaz bar tape, and anodised-red K-Edge Garmin computer mount. Another superb addition is the Specialized S-Works Power EVO with Mirror saddle, pictured here with new translucent 3D lattice complete with red base – this not only adds another layer of texture and depth to the bike but also matches the colour of the computer mount and CeramicSpeed bottom bracket cups.

For the second time in a week, Kim Le Court-Pienaar buried her face in her hands. Wearing the yellow jersey at the Tour de France was a fantasy that had never even crossed her mind growing up, 9,000km away, on an island in the Indian Ocean. Now, with a stage victory in the town of Guéret, she had achieved it twice.

A smile beaming across her face, she took to the podium to receive her honours. “I think just having it on my shoulders is already a dream come true for me,” she said. “Well, stage three, having it on my shoulders, was really a dream come true – I was living it like it wouldn’t happen again, and now it’s happening again. It’s really amazing.”

Le Court’s pro career, still only 18 months old, has been one of historic firsts. She’s the first Mauritian – male or female – to compete at cycling’s highest level, after signing for WorldTour squad AG Insurance-Soudal. She’s the first African to win a Monument. As of Sunday, she’s the first African woman to lead the Tour. And now she’s the first to win a stage, too. “I think someone needs to hit me in the face to make me realise,” she said.

Her path to the yellow jersey has been unconventional and unique. From overcoming a malaria scare, to abandoning her road racing career, and later emailing teams to ask for a contract, here’s how she worked her way to the Tour’s top step.

Born in Curepipe, the second biggest town in Mauritius, Le Court jokes that her childhood consisted of “beaches and coconuts”. She was brought up by a Scottish mother and a Mauritian father, of French descent, alongside an older brother, who too would later become a road cyclist.

At three years old, however, Le Court’s life came under threat. Diagnosed with malaria on a trip to France, she ended up in a coma, given a 10% chance of survival. “In France, they didn’t really know what malaria was,” she told Sporza. “They kept saying it was a fever. Because of this, they caught it very late, and the disease had already penetrated deep into my body.”

In time, the doctors were able to treat her and find a cure – “miraculously,” her father told Le Parisien. The day after she woke up, she rode a bike through the corridors of the hospital. “It was as if I was destined to be a cyclist,” she said.

Inspired by her brother, Le Court got her first proper bike when she was 12. She raced against the boys at home in Mauritius, for lack of a large enough girls’ field, before moving to South Africa in her teenage years. There, she dived into mountain biking, a discipline in which she now counts multiple Continental-level medals.

In 2015, then only nineteen, Le Court joined her first UCI road team, a British squad called Matrix Fitness. One of her first races was the UK's Women's Tour, where she finished dead last, an hour down. The following season, she swapped to a Spanish team, but the level still proved too high.

“It didn’t go very well at all,” she remembers. “I was a DNF or last place in every race, so it really wasn’t a memory to remember.”

Her European dream over, she packed her bags and moved back to South Africa. She’d then spend the next seven years competing on her mountain bike – winning big races like the Cape Epic and Swiss Epic – and working part-time as a bike fitter.

Come the summer of 2023, however, and Le Court was ready to give road racing another stab. “I’d achieved all my mountain bike goals, so I wanted a new challenge,” she says.

“My husband started sending emails [to teams] in August, which was actually very late – I only realised it was extremely late once I was in a team in 2024, and contracts were already getting signed in March. I don’t know how I got the chance. I think I maybe reached the right person at the right time.”

That person was Natascha Knaven-den Ouden, the then manager of Le Court’s current AG Insurance-Soudal. “When I ‘discovered’ her, she was already older than most development riders,” says Knaven-den Ouden. “What stood out wasn’t just her numbers, it was how she raced: smart, committed, instinctive. It was with incredible mindset. That’s the kind of talent you see when you look beyond power numbers and truly understand racing.”

Within months of joining the squad, Le Court was winning big. She did the double at the Mauritian National Road Championships in June, and the following month, won her first Grand Tour stage at the Giro d’Italia Women. Less than a year later, she took a momentous victory at Liège-Bastogne-Liège – “I only knew I was the first African to win a Monument after the race,” she says.

The victory, celebrated in her national jersey, thrust Mauritius into the global spotlight. An island, smaller in size than the English county of Worcestershire, had produced one of the best talents in the sport.

Having targeted stage wins in last year's edition, Le Court came to this Tour de France Femmes with the goal of winning the yellow jersey. “She’s focused and she knows what she wants,” says her team-mate Sarah Gigante. “She’s also really kind and appreciative as well. I think that’s super important in a leader.”

Second on stage one, a third place the following day was enough to move her into the race lead. So special was the feat that she refused to believe it at the time, telling her team staff at the finish line in Quimper that she “wanted to see it for myself”. The confirmation soon came, and so did the tears.

Back home, the prime minister of Mauritius, Navin Ramgoolam, toasted the “remarkable achievement” of Le Court’s yellow jersey on social media. “She is an inspiration to our youth, and a source of immense national pride,” he wrote. “Thank you for flying the flag for our country so high.”

Le Court’s first stint in yellow would only last a day. Now, after outsprinting her GC rivals to win stage five, she’s taken the jersey back. Can she keep it until the end? “We’re going into the mountains now and I don’t know how I’ll do against the pure climbers,” she says. Still, she adds: “Anything can happen.”

It all feeds into Le Court’s ongoing, wider goal – something that transcends the Tour and the colour of the threads that make up her jersey. “I want to keep on growing African cycling for women, and for men, in general, and try and motivate the young women out there that it’s possible,” she says.

“Ten years ago, I was barely finishing races – I almost gave up on the sport – and now I’m sitting here with yellow on my shoulders at 29 years old. It really is possible.”

Our columnist Marley Blonsky is currently at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. For many racers, the nine-day battle for the iconic yellow jersey is the biggest event of the year. For Marley, it's her first ever in-person experience at a WorldTour road race, and she's got questions.

How do riders pee mid-race? What do they eat to survive such intense efforts? What do they hear in those earpieces? And what’s with all the different races happening within the race?

Marley, an unapologetically curious and new cycling fan, is here to ask all the “dumb” questions you’ve always wondered about but never dared to ask.

To help decode the experience, she turns to Veronica Ewers, a pro cyclist for EF Education–Oatly who rode herself into the top 10 of the general classification at the 2022 Tour de France Femmes. Though Ewers isn’t racing this year’s edition, her experience and no-nonsense answers offer a unique, insider look at what really goes on in the peloton.

The Video Interview:

Interview highlights

Don't have time to watch the whole video? Not a problem. Here are the highlights:

How does stage race like the Tour de France Femmes work?

"There are several races within the race. Each stage is a race, but then there's a race of all of the stages together, which is the general classification. The person that finishes all of the stages with the least amount of time is the general classification winner.

"Then of course there's the winners of each stage. Those are the first people to cross the line.

"There is the best young rider classification, which is the same as the general classification but for riders under the age of 23.

"Then there is a queen of the mountain classification. That's [about collecting] the most points on the climbs. Say there are four big climbs in a single stage. Maybe three of them are considered Queen of the mountain climbs and each of those will have points. If you get to the top as the first person, then you get the most amount of points crossing the line over the top. And the more points you accumulate, then that goes to the Queen of the Mountain classification. And if you have the most points, then you get to wear the polka dot jersey, which is really cool.

"Then the last [race] is the sprint jersey. There are also intermediate sprints within each stage, which just helps make the race even more exciting. Similar to the Queen of the Mountain classification, it's for each sprint. So if you cross the line of the sprint first, you get a certain amount of points. And if you have the most points, then you get to wear the [green] sprinter's jersey."

 How do you go pee during the race? Is it an agreed upon mile marker? Do you all chat in the peloton? How does that work?

 "That is a great question and I personally am terrified of going pee during a race because, for us women, it's a little bit more difficult than just, you know, whipping out your penis and peeing really easily. We have to sort of fully unclothe to go to the bathroom, which takes a bit more time.

'If I needed to pee, I would say it in the radio to my team: 'Hey, I need to pee. Does anyone else need to?'. Because it's better to stop with other people so that you can work together to get back to the peloton.

"In longer races, usually you'll hear somebody in the peloton yell 'pee stop', and then half the bunch stops for a pee. That's generally how it goes. We have to make sure that we're out of towns a good amount to do that, just for public decency, which I can definitely understand."

So you're not wearing drop tail bibs?

"No, normally, uh, we will be wearing speed suits, which is just the zipper up front. So you have to take the top off and then pull everything down. So you're pretty much naked on the side of the road."

Are folks chatting in the peloton? Are you guys talking to each other? Is it like zone five effort the whole time and just breathing to stay alive?

"It's very dependent on the situation. Most races are not full gas the entire time, although sometimes it feels that way. But there are definitely moments, especially in the neutral, when we'll just be chatting amongst friends who might be on other teams or with teammates.

"Then during the race as well, if there's a more calm moment, we'll maybe chat. If I'm next to teammates, I'm usually talking about maybe strategy or just checking in with them and seeing how are you doing? Do you need anything? Especially if I have a race leader, I'll ask if they need something.

'When it's a high-stress moment, for example, during a lead out, there's a lot of yelling. Well-intentioned, but you know, 'move right', 'move left'. 'Go!' means, go harder, 'off' means get off the front so that rest of the people can go. So you have to listen quite intently, and make sure that you can hear your teammates."

What do you hear in your ear pieces?

"Everybody [on the team] hears the same thing on the radio, so if one of my teammates speaks, we all hear it and then the director in the car also hears it. If the director speaks into the radio, we all hear what they're saying.

"Most of what we hear is information about what's coming up. For example, if there's a town with a bunch of roundabouts coming up, it's really helpful to know that because roundabouts can be quite hectic and dangerous at times. Normally we'll have done our research to know when certain towns are coming up but it's just a good reminder to hear that.

'We'll also be reminded to eat and drink, which is really important. And then, yin the finale, if one of us is upfront, you just hear, you know 'go, go, go, push, push, push. You gotta keep going'. You know, a lot of motivation, which is really fun to hear if you're off the back, just trying to finish, but is also really motivating when you're that person at the front."

What are you eating and drinking and how frequently?

"My team uses Amacx Nutrition, which is really solid. It has an energy line, which is 30 grams of carbs per serving. And then there's the turbo line, which is 40 grams of, carbs per serving. We generally get to determine which we'd like to use, except when it's a certain temperature, then we're supposed to use energy because of the sodium content.

"But yeah, the general rule is to have at least 80 grams of carbs per hour. But I believe most teams are pushing 110 [grams of carbs] per hour.

That's gels or it can be rice cakes that our soigneurs make. It can be bars, it can be drink mix.'

How do you recover and get ready for the next day?

"That is probably the most important thing to be honest. My team's protocol normally is when you finish, you cross the finish line, we have immediately a cherry juice recovery drink as well as water if we would like. Then we'll get to the bus, and we'll have a carb- and protein-dense recovery drink on our bikes while we warm down. Then we'll shower and then have our post-race meal.

"So we're just ensuring that we're refueling to prepare for the next day. While we're on the bus to transfer, we have the squeezy boots for massaging our legs, or cooling equipment if it's really hot. Then we'll get to our hotel, have massages with the soigneurs, and mostly just stay off our feet as much as possible.

"We'll have dinner and try and sleep as much as possible."

What's your favorite thing to eat after a meal or after a big ride?

"Normally I would say I'm not the most hungry after. I think at a race, I just want something simple, so like chicken and rice with some sort of decent sauce. But sometimes we'll have gnocchi and chicken, which is nice.

"Simplicity. Salty, actually, because we have so much sweet stuff while we're on the bike."

What do you eat before the stage?

"It's very dependent on what time the race starts. If it's a mid-morning start, I'll have a pretty large breakfast, which will be eggs and rice pudding with fruit. If it's an afternoon race start, we will have rice and eggs."

So I recently learned that the women's Tour is shorter than the men's. Why?

"That's a good question. Honestly, don't have an answer. I think there are a lot of logistics. I think, historically, there's this misconception that women aren't capable of longer races, which obviously isn't true because the original Tour was 17 or 18 stages.

"I think at one point it, it could have been that a lot of women's teams, [didn't have] deep squads, but we have very deep squads now and it's a very, very strong peloton. We're more than capable. I think it's just a lot of logistics and misconceptions."

It just hasn't been Kristen Faulkner's week. The reigning Olympic champion struggled with illness in the lead-up to the nine-day Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. And while she still took to the start of women's cycling's biggest event, she did so with less-than-ideal fitness and health.

Things only went downhill when racing got underway. The 32-year-old American was involved in two crashes in the first four stages, nearly missed the time cut on Stage 2, and has come out saying that every day has been 'a fight.'

Today, Faulkner once again hit the deck. This time during the neutral roll-out from Chasseneuil-du-Poitou. She abandoned two hours later.

"She gave everything to support her teammates, but will now return home to focus on rest and recovery. Wishing you all the best, champ," her team announced on social media.

The EF Education-Oatly rider had been tipped as one to watch this Tour, particularly in the early stages. Coming off a career-best season in 2024, where she stormed to a convincing Olympic road race title, Faulkner excels in punchy one-day terrain and aggressive breakaways, exactly the kind of racing featured in the Tour’s early stages. But her easily recognisable stars-and-stripes jersey, indicating her as the U.S. national champion, was only every seen at the back or in crashes.

Enduring five tough days in the saddle was hard enough, but doing it while exposed and vulnerable in the public eye made it even more emotionally draining.

“One thing about being in the spotlight, when you have a bad day, everyone sees it. It’s hard to show up when you feel terrible, let alone on international TV,” she said.

"Most people get to choose what moments they share on social media. For us racers, it’s just our raw selves, and we don’t get to choose what the cameras zoom in on or what people see.

"I hope it’s relatable, and reminds people that even the strongest struggle, whether you’re an Olympic medalist or not. Every champion, every leader, every Instagram model has moments like this. We’re all human."

She is far from the only rider to suffer misfortune. This year’s Tour has already been marked by a wave of withdrawals due to illness and injury, sidelining several top contenders, including Marlen Reusser (Movistar), Charlotte Kool (Picnic PostNL), Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE Team ADQ), and Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek).

The Tour de Frances Femmes avec Zwift continues tomorrow and is headed into the mountains. Stage 6 will be the first mountain day with the peloton tackling four categorised climbs on their 13.7-kilometre-route from Clermont-Ferrand to Ambert.

Nobody knows the value of seconds like Kasia Niewiadoma. At last year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, after more than 24 hours of racing, the Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto rider won by just four ticks of the clock’s big hand – the smallest margin in the history of the Tour.

The memory of that edition is omnipresent at this year’s race. Bonus sprints, and extra seconds across the line, have turned into gold dust. As the mountains now loom, and with just 27 seconds separating first from fifth, all the GC contenders want to bank as much as they can.

“You never know what can happen in the end,” Niewiadoma told Cycling Weekly after stage five. “If you can see some seconds, it seems like everyone is ready to embrace that.”

With 9km to go on day five's road to Guéret, the reigning champion chased down Kim Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal) on a climb. The move wasn’t for the victory, however, but a green gantry pitched halfway up, where six, four and two precious seconds were on offer; Le Court took the biggest prize, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) earned four, and Niewiadoma swept up the scraps.

It was this attack, which eased slightly over the line, that Le Court had initially been targeting. “My main goal was to take the bonus sprints,” she said of the stage. Not the victory? “Whether I won the stage or came second or third, it didn’t matter. I would have still gotten yellow on my back.”

It was an extra, then, that Le Court would go on to also claim the stage, fending off a select group of her GC rivals, including Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime), Demi Vollering (FDJ-SUEZ) and Niewiadoma. The Mauritian now leads the race again, thanks, primarily, to bonus seconds. No other rider has taken more than her 26 – without them, she’d be in fourth.

“I think we’ve seen a few Tours on the women’s side that have been lost by seconds, so I think we’re fighting for every second possible,” Le Court said in her winner's press conference. “You just never know. Last year was played by four seconds. Maybe today six seconds is going to pay off later on.”

It’s a fact of which Vollering needs no reminding. Last year’s runner-up, the Dutchwoman felt the agony on Alpe d'Huez of falling the wrong side of the clock. This time, she's determined to not let it happen again. The FDJ-SUEZ rider finished second on stage five, picking up four seconds that lifted her above Niewiadoma in the standings.

“It was really like 'playing the game', so I really liked this last part,” smiled Vollering as she spun out her legs on the turbo. “I was really, really close, so it was a good feeling to have a sprint final like this again.”

During her warm-down, 200m up the road, Niewiadoma laughed to her sports director outside her team bus. “It’s funny,” she said, “we’re fighting for seconds, but on [the Col de la] Madeleine [on stage eight], it could be minutes.”

Still, as Niewiadoma said herself: "You never know what can happen in the end.” The Tour is unpredictable. Every second counts.

Kim Le Court won stage five of the Tour de France Femmes in Guéret after a tough final 30 kilometres that decimated the bunch.

The AG Insurance-Soudal rider was the first rider home from an elite lead group that formed over the final climbs and included Demi Vollering (FDJ-Suez) and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) among others.

The stage also saw yellow jersey Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease a Bike) dropped over the final climb and consequently losing her yellow jersey.

The stage was also marked by numerous crashes, with eight riders including Kristen Faulkner (EF Education-Oatly) and Karlijn Swinkels (UAE Team ADQ) forced to retire.

Afterwards Le Court described the team's three-part plan for the stage.

"We had a very clear plan to stay safe in the early part of the race because it was very flat and there were a lot of big crashes," she said.

"The big goal was to take the bonus sprint, which I managed to do, and then if we finished in a small group then try and take the stage victory."

She described being slightly out of position in the finishing sprint as the line came sooner than she expected, but added: "Luckily I had the fastest kick in the group."

She also paid tribute to team-mate Sarah Gigante, who did a lot of work for Le Court in the final few kilometres.

"That helped a lot," she said. "I think if I didn't have Sarah with me then maybe the [Vos] group behind would have come back – because some girls weren't keen to pace. I think it was only me Demi, and Kasia that were keen to do the work.

"Once Sarah got back on after the downhill I was really really lucky to have her because she committed fully to the line. It shows that teamwork is what you need in the sport."

With Le Court celebrating despite a fast-approaching Vollering, who looked like she might almost pip the Mauritian rider on the line, she admitted: "Maybe I gave a fright to people watching at home," but explained that she was never in doubt about the result.

"[On the bike] when you turn around you can see that you have the speed and you will cross the line first," she said.

With Vos finishing 33 seconds in arrears on a number of her GC rivals, she now sits in sixth place at 37sec. Le Court leads Ferrand-Prévot by 18sec and Vollering by 23sec.

How it happened

Today's stage saw the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift reach central France, with the longest stage of the race taking the riders from Chasseneuil du Poitou to Guéret. For context, the 165.8km distance was very nearly as long as April's women's Tour of Flanders, and nearly 20km longer than the Paris-Roubaix.

The profile described an almost imperceptible uphill line over the first two-thirds of the stage, before hitting a trio of classified climbs, the first coming after around 130km.

Francesca Barale (Picnic PostNL) was one of the first riders to get a significant gap, and she was joined, as she no doubt hoped she would be, by four others – Alison Jackson (EF Education-Oatly), Anneke Dijkstra (VolkerWessels), Catalina Soto (Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi), and later joined by Brodie Chapman (UAE ADQ).

After at first appearing unsure, the peloton seemed to deem this breakaway one that could be allowed a long leash, and the five riders drwe out a gap of four-and-a-half minutes.

However, it seemed inevitable that the climbs at the end of the stage could trip the attackers up, and so it played out.

With the gap already having been significantly reduced by the peloton, the break began to fragment.

Brodie Chapman (UAE Team ADQ) attacked on the Côte du Peyroux with around 25km to go, dropping Jackson and Barale.

Stage win hopeful and green jersey Lorena Wiebes, who won yesterday, was dropped on the climb as the peloton fought to close on Chapman, but was shepherded by Lotte Kopecky, who gave her a wheel to follow.

Aussie time trial champion Chapman was nearly caught on the early part of the descent with the gap closing to within a handful of seconds. However, against the odds, she managed to draw it out again on the flatter terrain.

With around 17km to go, just before the final climb of the day to Le Maupuy, Chapman was joined by more riders – Maeva Squiban, Shirin van Anrooij, Silke Smulders and Dilyxine Miermont, forming a very strong quintet.

The GC riders, including Vos, Sarah Gigante were active on the front of the peloton, pegging the five escapees at close range – 12-13 seconds – as they reached the foot of the Maupuy climb.

Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto drove the reduced peloton up the lower slopes of the climb as Squiban attacked and Chapman and Miermont fell back to the bunch. But Squiban's efforts came to nothing, with the bunch finally bearing down on her with 9km to go. Nieuwiadoma and Vollering up at the front, with Gigante driving it hard, but Kim Le Court is first over first

Vos was distanced over the top to the tune of 20 seconds, with Kasia Nieuwiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto) and Van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) pushing hard down the hill with Gigante, Vollering and Le Court all in tow.

Try as she might, Vos was unable to make inroads into the gap to the leaders, and she watched her GC lead slip away as the elite group slowly opened the gap further. With Gigante working hard on the front and Le Court conserving as much energy as possible, the stage was set for the Liège-Bastogne-Liège winner to take her first Tour Femmes win.

Results

Tour de France Femmes 2025, stage five: Chasseneuil du Poitou > Guéret (165.8km)

1. Kim Le Court (Mau) AG Insurance-Soudal, in 3:54:07
2. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-Suez
3. Anna van der Breggen (Ned) SD Worx-Protime
4. Kasia Nieuwiadoma (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto
5. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike
6. Sarah Gigante (Aus) AG Insurance-Soudal
7. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, all at same time
8. Marianne Vos (Ned) Visma-Lease a Bike, +33s
9. Évita Musik (Fra) FDJ-Suez
10. Elise Chabbey (Swi) FDJ-Suez, both at same time

General Classification after stage five

1. Kim Le Court (Mau) AG Insurance-Soudal, in 15:07:14
2. Pauline Ferrand-Prevot (Fra) Visma-Lease a Bike, +18s
3. Demi Vollering (Ned) FDJ-SUEZ, + 25s
4. Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Pol) Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto, +24s.
5. Anna van der Breggen (Ned) SD Worx-Protime, +27s
6. Marianne Vos (Ned) Visma-Lease a Bike, +37s
7. Pauliena Rooijakkers (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, +45s
8. Sarah Gigante (Aus) AG Insurance-Soudal, +55s
9. Puck Pieterse (Ned) Fenix-Deceuninck, +1:04
10. Cédrine Kerbaol (Fra) EF Education-Oatly, +1:16

After his GC leader crashed in a heap on the floor, the frustration was clear in Stephen Delcourt’s voice. “There’s a real lack of respect in the peloton,” the FDJ-SUEZ manager told the media. “Today it’s the fault of the riders.”

The pile-up came on a tight, right-hand bend. Barrelling towards a sprint finish on stage three of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, the teams grappled against each other to take the corner first. Then came a touching of wheels, and Demi Vollering, caught up in the melee, was one of more than ten riders who hit the ground.

Battered and dazed, the Dutchwoman suffered neck and knee pain, and was checked twice for concussion. She would later be cleared to continue the race, but Delcourt feared otherwise at the time.

“What we saw today is the individual behaviour of someone who takes too much of a risk in a corner, and could destroy Vollering’s Tour de France,” the FDJ-SUEZ manager said.

“It’s not normal the attitude of many teams and many riders. They are disrespectful. We lost the respect in the last year in men’s and women’s cycling. How is it possible everybody wants to play with their life like this?”

Delcourt’s comments have since been the subject of tension between teams at the Tour de France Femmes. Is there really no more respect in the peloton? Visma-Lease a Bike sports director Jos van Emden hit back the claim.

“What he’s saying is completely ridiculous,” Van Emden told De Telegraaf and Het Nieuwsblad, asked about Delcourt's comments. “He seems to want a peloton of eight riders with Demi in it, riding in a golden cage. Come on, this is the sport, isn’t it? Nothing happened that shouldn’t have. He’s just been influenced by Demi, by her dramatic behaviour.

“Delcourt saying people’s lives are being put at risk – that’s just not true. That’s not reality. If you think that, maybe you should do another sport.”

Delcourt and Van Emden were seen having a heated discussion among the team buses ahead of Wednesday’s fifth stage. Speaking to the French press, Delcourt clarified that his initial frustration wasn’t only in reference to Vollering’s crash, but safety in general in the peloton.

For other team directors, though, the fighting for position at this year's Tour has brought nothing unruly or out of the ordinary. “Everyone has the same right to be there. It’s not that some riders have bigger rights or less rights,” Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto sports director Adam Szabó told TNT Sports.

“I think, if you have a strong team and you can position your team well, or your protected leader well, then it’s up to the strength of the team.”

Marianne Vos, who has been in the peloton for 20 years, shared a similar opinion.

“It’s just a sport where you have to fight for position,” the Visma-Lease a Bike rider and current yellow jersey wearer said. “I don’t think maybe it’s not about respect, but it’s about everybody fighting for every centimetre.

“Unfortunately, things can happen like [the crash on stage two]. Of course, it’s the riders that fight for the position that make it dangerous, but it’s not really something that’s about respect.”

As the race now heads for the mountains, the simmering tension between the GC teams will start to boil on the road. The war of words between bosses looks to be over. "Let's let the performances on the road do the talking," Delcourt said.

No rider has been counting down the days to this year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift as closely as Shari Bossuyt. After serving a two-year suspension, the Belgian has now been allowed to return to the peloton, and is making a long-awaited “dream” debut.

Bossuyt’s career was upended in March 2023, when she returned a positive result for the banned hormone Letrozole in an anti-doping control. She has maintained her innocence ever since, and the French anti-doping agency concluded she had not intentionally taken the substance.

At the time of the result, then 22 years old, Bossuyt was made “non-active” by her team, Canyon-SRAM, and later left the squad. She chose not to appeal her suspension, for lack of “strength or money”.

“It was a really hard time, but it was the situation,” she tells Cycling Weekly, rolling through the media zone ahead of stage three of the Tour de France Femmes.

Now dressed in the colours of AG Insurance-Soudal, who she joined in mid-June, the Belgian is buoyed by her return to the scene. She was able to train “almost every day” over the last two years, she says, never losing motivation.

“I think I’m missing a little bit of race fitness, so I think only every day can be better,” she says.

How does it feel to be in the pack again? “Oh, really good,” she smiles. “I’m really happy to be back, to be actually riding the Tour de France. It’s incredible… I only dreamed of it.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when the 24-year-old feared her career as a professional cyclist was over. "No one seems to realise what an impact this has on someone's mental health,” she said in a social media post last January, “having to walk around every day with the 'stamp' of a doper, it's almost unbearable.”

Casting her mind back to that period now, Bossuyt is short for words. “It was hard, eh,” she says, hesitant to linger on the past. “One year ago, I looked and I saw the Tour de France was exactly one month after my return, so that was a big dream to train for it.”

With the suspension now behind her, and having made it to the Tour, Bossuyt’s mentality is clear: “I’m looking forward, not back anymore.”

The Belgian went on to finish sixth on stage three – only her seventh race day in two years. She'd then repeat the feat on stage four, a result that left her "happy but also a bit disappointed", and confirmed her form is coming back.

She now has a new long-term goal: the LA Olympics in 2028. Bossuyt missed the Games in Paris last year, where she would have competed on the track with Lotte Kopecky, a world-title-winning Madison pairing. Again, though, there’s no dwelling on the past.

“We’re looking forward to [20]28,” Bossuyt says with a smile. Her difficult chapter is behind her.

On Tuesday afternoon, Demi Vollering (FDJ-SUEZ) rolled across the stage 4 finish line in Poitiers unscathed and visibly relieved. After a hard crash the previous day, it had been uncertain whether the Dutch GC favourite would be able to continue the nine-day Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

The FDJ-SUEZ leader was caught in a mass pile-up with 4km to go on Monday’s stage, and she was among the last to get back on her bike. With a torn kit and in evident pain, Vollering was escorted to the finish line by her teammates. She underwent an initial medical evaluation that evening, with further assessments scheduled for the following morning.

It wasn’t until just hours before the start of Stage 4 that her team confirmed she had cleared a second concussion protocol and would continue her bid for the yellow jersey.

“I was really relieved. This morning I had a lot of pain in my neck. I could barely hold my head up,” Vollering said after the stage. She sported kinesiology tape on her neck and was attended to by the team’s medical staff upon her return to the team bus.

“Luckily, it went well on the bike, which gave me a good feeling. No headache either, so that was good news," Vollering commented.

Stage 4 presented another sprint day with the same crash risks as the stage before. The peloton was tense at times, especially when crosswinds split the group and riders scrambled to hold position. But Vollering’s team kept her well protected near the front.

“The team did a great job keeping me hidden and protected all day,” she said. “Today’s finish was a little chaotic again, so that tension was definitely there. Everything was going fine until a rider slammed into my side, and I came to a complete stop for a moment. But I made it through and luckily didn’t lose any time.”

As in Stage 3, the 5km safety zone was in effect for Stage 4, meaning Vollering retained her position in the General Classification.

Still, the crash brought back difficult memories. In last year’s Tour de France Femmes, Vollering suffered a similar fall and ultimately lost the race by just four seconds—the narrowest margin in Tour de France history. Monday’s crash left her both physically sore and mentally shaken.

“A crash like that always affects you,” she admitted. But her confidence appears to be returning. “I think the shock has faded a bit now.”

With the mountains looming at the end of the week and the GC battle about to ignite, Vollering is now focused on what’s ahead. With the crash behind her and her composure restored, she said she’s “looking forward to a battle.”

“That’s how we roll!” shouts Mischa Bredewold into her sports director’s face at the SD Worx-Protime bus in Poitiers. A handful of minutes have passed since her team-mate, Lorena Wiebes, thrashed everyone in the sprint on stage four of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. The victory made it two in two days for the squad, and back-to-back wins for the Dutchwoman. Bredewold and the rest of the squad could not stop smiling. Everything was right in the world.

This time last year, however, the same scene cast a different mood. The best sprinter in the world, Wiebes left the Tour winless, an outcome nobody had predicted. She'd come into the race from winning five out of six stages at the Baloise Ladies Tour. What had gone wrong?

“I just wanted to win so bad that it didn’t work out,” Wiebes now recalls. It’s an easier memory to discuss now, as she sits in another winner’s press conference, back on the top step at the Tour. “I think the thing last year was, of course, the pressure that I also put on myself,” she says.

So, this time round, she decided to flip her approach entirely. No longer would she fixate on getting her arms in the air. She'd still try her hardest in the sprints, but if she didn’t cross the line first, she’d just shrug, smile, and whistle away.

It’s a hard shift to make for a rider who has now collected over 100 victories. But, true to her word, it’s what she did on stage two, when she finished second to Liv AlUla Jayco's Mavi García. “I think for people it’s strange that maybe I’m not frustrated,” she said, non-plussed, at the time. “Everything I achieve here is extra for the season.”

Extra? At the biggest race in the world? Surely there’s more jeopardy than that? “The most important thing was to keep on thinking the season is still good, even if you don’t win in the Tour de France,” Wiebes says.

It’s all part of a “free mindset” that has liberated her at this year’s race. “Now, it’s all fallen into place,” she smiles. “It’s different when you put just the pressure on yourself. Of course, we have some pressure from the team, but it doesn’t feel like you have a lot of pressure from the team.”

Back at the SD Worx-Protime bus, beneath a canopy of leafy trees, the ambiance was like a garden party. Anna van der Breggen, the GC leader, squeezed in to join her team-mate Blanka Vas in an ice bath fit for one person. The pair splashed Lotte Kopecky, who warmed down on the rollers beside them. In return, the world champion flashed back a grin, and threatened to squirt them with her water bottle.

Between high-fives, the team’s sports director, Danny Stam, found a moment of seriousness to reflect on the stage. The lead-out, he said, hadn't “completely worked out”. But the celebrations showed it didn’t matter. “It was planned that Anna should make the lead-out from the bottom, more or less, and then Lotte should take over,” he said.

Instead, Van der Breggen came back to do another turn, and Wiebes found herself isolated on the finishing straight. “I knew it was up to me to find the final position and be able to sprint,” she said. Guided by her free mindset, she blasted along the barrier and clear of Visma-Lease a Bike's Marianne Vos. She flexed her muscles across the line. The victories were flowing again.

“I think, ‘til now, it’s a great season,” Wiebes said – in 38 race days, she has won 16 times. “[20]22 was already a really nice season with the win on the Champs-Élysées, and getting the yellow jersey for a day. But then I think the level of the other wins were not as high as this year. Winning Milan-San Remo was also a big one. I can say I think this is my best season ‘til now.”

With the sprint stages now passed at the Tour de France Femmes, Wiebes can toast a job well done. There will be no winless edition in 2025.

Demi Vollering’s bid to win this year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is still alive, after she was cleared to continue the race following a crash on stage three.

The FDJ-SUEZ leader came down in a mass pile-up inside 4km to go during Monday’s stage. One of the last to get up, she was helped to the finish by her teammates, and was later tested for concussion.

Vollering’s team manager, Stephen Delcourt, also confirmed she suffered pain in her knee and back. She has now been deemed fit enough to ride on.

Less than three hours before stage four, FDJ-SUEZ issued the following update: “Further medical examinations and a second concussion protocol Demi Vollering underwent this morning with the team doctor, ruled out the risk of concussion.

“With the support of FDJ-SUEZ team, Demi Vollering is determined to take part in today's stage. The team remains vigilant and will further follow her situation during the efforts (warming up and race).”

"I feel OK," Vollering said to the media before stage four. "I hit my head also a bit but the team did a really good examination and for now it doesn't look like I have concussion so that's the good news.

"When I was on the ground I had some throwback to last year but luckily this time it was in the last kilometres, for the rule, so I didn't lose time. My team was there with me, so I'm really glad."

Beyond the finish line in Angers on Monday, Vollering was captured by SBS telling her soigneur that she had a “headache” when she was on the ground. She then returned, limping, to her team bus, where she and her team staff examined her helmet for signs of damage.

FDJ-SUEZ issued a statement at 11pm after the stage to confirm that Vollering had suffered “multiple contusions” and had undergone an initial concussion assessment. She did not go to hospital, but instead was scheduled to have a second concussion test in the morning, “to rule out any suspicion”.

As her crash came within the 5km safety zone, Vollering was given the same finishing time as the front group on the stage and did not suffer any losses in the GC.

Speaking ahead of the race, she said she was “looking forward to a battle” for the yellow jersey she won in 2023. The Dutchwoman lost out on the overall victory on her title defence last year by just four seconds to Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto), in what is the narrowest winning margin in Tour history.

Stage four of this year’s nine-day edition is expected to finish in a bunch sprint in Poitiers. The race will have its first mountains test on Thursday, stage six, in the Massif Central.