{"id":661909,"date":"2026-05-10T13:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T13:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/661909\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T13:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T13:45:11","slug":"paula-blasi-wins-la-vuelta-femenina-2026-rouleur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/661909\/","title":{"rendered":"Paula Blasi wins La Vuelta Femenina 2026\n\u2013 Rouleur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s say you took any of the top 10 women\u2019s WorldTour riders in the UCI rankings at the end of last year, and told them that in six months time they would win a major Classic and a Grand Tour in the space of three weeks. They\u2019d be pretty chuffed, right? Now let\u2019s say you told the same thing to 65th-ranked Paula Blasi (UAE Team Emirates ADQ), the duathlete who committed to professional cycling only two years ago. She\u2019d probably tell you to politely do one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wait, there\u2019s more! Not just any Grand Tour, but the pinnacle of cycling in her home nation, La Vuelta Femenina, where no Spaniard has ever taken home the\u00a0maillot rojo \u2013 and ousting none other than Anna van der Breggen along the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So you can understand how 23-year-old Blasi might\u2019ve been feeling as she crossed the line atop the mythical Alto de l\u2019Angliru in second to win the general classification of this year\u2019s edition, a mere 21 days after taking her first WorldTour win at Amstel Gold. The grimace on her face as she inched herself up the ascent in northern Spain stretched into a beaming smile, her arms open to welcome in glory. Chuffed might be an understatement.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Read more\u00a0–\u00a0 A star is born: Paula Blasi announces her arrival with convincing Amstel Gold win<\/a><\/p>\n

In a Vuelta edition shaped by crashes, late attacks, and sprint finishes \u2013 and which felt like SD Worx\u2019s race to lose \u2013\u00a0 the Spaniard had stayed close enough in the general classification fight until the final weekend test which suited her best. The taste of victory for Blasi was of course made sweeter by the Queen stage on which she won: the impossible gradients of the Angliru, the cruelest climb in professional cycling featured in a women\u2019s race for the first time. A dwindling oxygen supply twisted the knife for the peloton as the road pointed skyward, the ascent\u2019s unfathomable steepness relayed to fans at home via the contorted faces of the faces trawling up a diagonal line across television screens. A quip posted on social media after the race by this year\u2019s green jersey winner Lotte Kopecky on social media helped to put things in perspective: \u201cwalking was the better option.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anything that happened on those slopes would therefore earn bragging rights to history, but it was the youngsters of the peloton who took the chance and ran. Blasi, Juliette Berthet (FDJ-Suez), Marion Bunel (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Petra Stiasny (Human Powered Health Team) \u2013\u00a0 with a sprightly average age of 22 between them and spirit to match \u2013 made up the leading quartet on the final gradients after passing Liane Lippert (Movistar), the remains of an early breakaway, on the opening slopes of the climb. Stiasny led the group of favourites before Bunel pushed past, only to be dropped by a surging Blasi, until the Swiss rider retook the lead with just over two kilometres to go.<\/p>\n

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Out of the many adjectives (or profanities) one might use to describe the 24% ramp of L\u2019Angliru\u2019s most punishing sections, \u201cbeautiful\u201d is probably the last pick \u2013\u00a0 unless you\u2019re 24-year-old Stiasny, who extolled its difficulty before the race and conquered the climb thereafter to take her first WorldTour victory with a flick of the wrist.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had only one thing in my head. Everyday, for me, it was a dream to win this stage,” Stiasny told the TV cameras after the stage, her eyes wide with shock at what she\u2019d just accomplished. “When I arrive at Angliru, I feel free. I feel in my place, in my happy place. This is my kind of climb, this is my gradient.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the usual GC suspects were nowhere to be seen. Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-Sram) slipped backwards, as she had done in the previous stage. Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot (Visma-Lease a Bike) cracked. Overnight leader Van der Breggen fought with characteristic grit, but couldn\u2019t live up to the warning she\u2019d issued her young rivals on the notorious wall of Les Praeres the day before. She let Blasi go with four kilometres to the finish. A lead undone, a veteran dethroned: unable to cling on, the former world champion slumped to a fifth place stage finish, taking third overall.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A few metres away, Spanish camera crews and journalists swarmed Blasi, who, bent over her handlebars,\u00a0 shook her head in disbelief. The latest star of cycling\u2019s chronicle, and the real writer of their headlines: \u201c\u00a1Hist\u00f3rica Paula Blasi!\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the podium ceremony, before crowds gathered under the flag of her nation which billowed in the wind, Blasi\u00a0spoke in English to thank her teammates. One rider who didn\u2019t need a translation was her compatriot Mavi Garc\u00eda, an athlete with an understanding of what such a monumental win means to a relative latecomer to the sport. Garc\u00eda, who only began her professional cycling career at 31, is twenty years older than Blasi. As the Spanish national anthem rang out over the Asturian mountains, she waved to her fellow rider onstage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an\u00a0interview with the race organisers<\/a> in the lead up to this year\u2019s Vuelta, the pair had spoken about their similarities. \u201cShe is just like me, but 20 years younger. We get along super well and we are quite similar. I feel we can speak about everything. There are many aspects of myself that I can recognise in her,\u201d said Garcia, who was also a duathlete before committing to cycling full time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Blasi had returned the sentiment: \u201cWe both like to put on good shows, go on the offensive and make the race hard. It\u2019s good I have Mavi by my side, because she enjoys going deep but also knows when it\u2019s time to rest.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

If there was ever a time and place for Catalunya-born climber to dig deep, it was on that mountain-top summit finale, bolstered by the support of her mentor and spurned on by being within touching distance of success: \u201cI was not really feeling my best, but the team did an amazing job, and I can only be grateful for that. The one thing I could do was just not think about [the climb]. I would have stopped, but I started seeing Anna van der Breggen struggling, and I said, \u2018let\u2019s go for it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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The final podium of this year\u2019s Vuelta Femenina is a perfect picture, then, of the wider context of Blasi\u2019s win, and of the magnitude of what it represents. Young stars Blasi, Staisny and Bunel celebrate the biggest achievements of their short careers to date alongside Van der Breggen, one of cycling\u2019s most lauded veterans with 64 victories to her name. Role models and their followers shine on the sport\u2019s toughest stage, after the final leg of what was once a one-day token gesture tagged onto the men\u2019s race, now a fully fledged Grand Tour. It\u2019s a remarkable barometer of the state of women\u2019s cycling in the current moment, and a teaser of what is still to come.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Blasi now sits second in the Women\u2019s WorldTour rankings, with only Demi Vollering ahead of her. For la reina de la Vuelta celebrating with her team above the clouds, and for the rest of her generation, the sky really is the limit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s say you took any of the top 10 women\u2019s WorldTour riders in the UCI rankings at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":["post-661909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}