‘I never imagined it would happen’ – What does it mean to win your first Tour de France Femmes stage? Two 2025 winners relive their victories

For Squiban and UAE Team ADQ, things were moving in a very different direction. By the time she went for win number 1, her squad had lost three teammates on three separate days, one of them as high-profile as double Giro d’Italia winner Elisa Longo Borghini. But at the same time, their Polish racer, Dominika Włodarczyk was very much in the thick of the GC battle and heading towards fourth overall and as a unit, Squiban says, despite their losses UAE Team ADQ were feeling, if anything, more cohesive than before. On a personal level, too, she’d already had that unforgettable start on home soil in Brittany to keep her commitment to the 2025 Tour near a high-tide mark.

“Of course I was disappointed to lose my teammates who were sick” – Longo Borghini on stage 3, Eleonora Gasparrini on stage 4, Karlijn Swinkels on stage 5 – “but this is the Tour, it’s the biggest race in the world, so we had to concentrate on that, too, and no the day I won there were still four stages to come,” she points out.

“On top of that, I was fighting for my first victory of the year with my new team, so that was very important for me.

“The day I won my first stage though, it wasn’t that I felt particularly inspired when I woke up, it was just feeling like a normal day. I always had the idea, though, that I’d have a chance somewhere and that’d be it, I’d have to try. It was only during the stage itself that I felt good, though, so I went for it purely to see what might happen.”

Squiban was aggressive all through the Tour (Image credit: Getty Images)

If Squiban was taking things step by step on the stage and in the race overall, when it came to the Tour, García, on the other hand, been fighting a series of demons that she’d definitely come across before. At some point in their career every almost longstanding pro has to work out how to battle against a dearth of mid-season results, and in García’s case in 2025, that issue had materialised in a hugely disappointing Vuelta.

“For one reason or another, I never got to where I wanted, or whatever I was looking for I could never get that good result,” she says about much of the first half of 2025

“That goes on weighing you down, and particularly when they [the team] are demanding you get results and you’re feeling obliged to do it.”

At 42, it’s inevitable that the question of retirement is closer to the surface than in Squiban’s case, say, and Garciá reveals that “I’d known that I wanted to continue [beyond 2025] but then when things don’t work out as you want, I was starting to have some kinds of doubts.

“I knew I was leaving the team, too, and it was hard to see which way I was going. But I just knew that I had to move forward.”

Come the day of her first Tour stage win itself, Squiban took it by storm by attacking 32 kilometres from the finish on the Col de Chansert, a cat. 2 climb that followed the even more difficult Col du Beal. In less than 2.5km of climbing on the Chansert, she gained an advantage of just over a minute, and despite the less complicated terrain that followed, she successively stayed away.

Her reward was to clinch the just second victory for a French rider in the revived version of the Tour de France Femmes after Cédrine Kerboal’s win in 2024 – though there were plenty more to come last year. Indeed, that success set things up very nicely for her own second win 24 hours later, she explains, with her team’s open-minded attitude to its own pre-race orders helping her to make that happen.

“Winning one stage in the Tour is already a big moment for the whole season and if it’s the first time for a rider, then even more so.”

“It confirms how hard you’ve worked and it shows what you can do, to yourself and to the team. So it maybe wasn’t surprising that on the second day, I was really unleashed. My legs were going well, I told myself I knew I didn’t have anything to lose, so I told myself to go and give it everything. You could say that the euphoria was partly responsible for my success.”

She had deliberately ignored team orders, she adds, but she knew that UAE could be very open-minded in such questions.

“In the briefing Cherie [Pridham, team DS] told us to take it easy in the opening kilometres but I don’t know why, I wanted to try from the start, and I decided to go for it anyway.”

“Sometimes you just get that feeling and then when it happened, they were ok with me doing that too.”

“That is something great about the team, they do give you that freedom of manoeuvre. So let’s say I went beyond myself, because sometimes you know it’s going to work.”

The Frenchwoman’s bravery was rewarded twice in a row (Image credit: Getty Images)

If she had her first win to inspire her for victory number 2, it remained a voyage in the dark, she says, as the Col du Granier – the final ascent where she attacked to go for her win – “was completely new.”

“I knew all the early stages of course, being so close to home, and I’d look at what was coming up on the Internet.

“But even if we went through it in real detail during the briefing, I’d never done an actual recon. So everything about the climb and descent – that was completely new.”

García’s move, in contrast, was forged more on blind hope than certainty that it was all going to work out.

“Thinking about it now, it’s funny. I’d talked it through with my boyfriend about how even if I didn’t get it right that often, at least that day everything lined up for it: it was a Sunday, everybody had the TV on anyway because it was the last day of the men’s race, so that’s why it got so much attention,” she says.

“But the first day I had crashed and lost four minutes, I’d felt really rubbish because I’d gone to the Tour feeling great and the truth is that night I had gone to bed feeling utterly destroyed. But then I woke up feeling very determined to give it everything I had.

“I knew what the finish of stage 2 was like in general, I knew it was all very undulating, but those last 10 kilometres after I’d attacked flew by. I was so concentrated on what I was doing that by the time when I first realised where I actually was, there were only three kilometres to go. From then on it was very simple: give it everything.”

While Squiban had plenty of time to savour her win, for García it was nip and tuck all the way to the finish line, as the favourites massed behind her and the gap shrank from 20 seconds to less than half that by the start of the closing, unevenly uphill, kilometre. The Spaniard was in plain sight for the peloton, Visma-Lease a Bike made a major effort to bring her back, but somehow, she stayed away.

“I really didn’t believe I’d got it until I crossed the finish line. They were so close and finally it was a question of keeping on believing, not looking back and having the right kind of legs on the day, too. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t have worked.”

García’s win was meaningful on more level’s than one (Image credit: Getty Images)

Both riders talk about their victories being compensations or rewards for the hard work they have put in, but it’s noticeable how for García, she feels the biggest win of her career to date at her age is something like a crowning achievement, that it can’t really get any better. That’s something Squiban seemingly didn’t doubt even before her victories: rather than capping her ambition, winning twice in the Tour in 24 hours both renders a third stage win even more desirable for her – and much harder to repeat.

“I know my rivals will be watching me and keeping me under much stricter control than before,” Squiban says. “It’s going to be way harder to get in the break, let alone win, and yet that remains a big objective.”

“For the future, while I can say that it was the dream of my life to win a stage of the Tour, now I’ve done that, all the emotions I have when you look at the list of those who’ve won a stage of the Tour, you can see it’s not just anybody who’s done it. So I know have to win another one.”

From García’s point of view, her Tour stage victory is taken very much in the context of her looming retirement, but at the same time she does want to go on exploiting its memory as a boost to her confidence. Victory on stage 2 of the 2025 Tour de France doesn’t have to be the closing line of a final chapter, in other words.

“Having that win in my palmarès really calms me down,” she says. “I knew I was going well but it confirms everything I felt and on top of that, it rewards everything more than it confirms it. Two and two don’t always add to four in cycling and sometimes things don’t work out. That win was a real reward for all that hard work I’d done.”

“I’m not going to say that this is my last year, there’s a 98% chance that it will be, but if you say it is for sure, it feels like a prison sentence. Rather I prefer to think I’m the same as always, I just want to keep going to the races, go on being competitive and if I can get some kind of a result or help the team, that’s what I’m taking with me.