KIGALI, Rwanda (September 27, 2025) — In the land of a thousand hills, where eucalyptus trees cast long shadows across red earth roads and the air hangs thin at 1,800 metres, a twenty-four-year-old from Sherbrooke, Québec wrote herself into cycling folklore. Magdeleine Vallières Mill had arrived in Kigali carrying the weight of expectation—not just her own, but that of a nation that had never tasted Elite World Championship gold on the road.
The EF Education-Oatly rider had prepared meticulously for this moment, her form honed during a pre-race altitude camp that left her confident she was flying. From the start, her Canadian teammates—including EF Education-Oatly’s Alison Jackson—rode for her, understanding that sometimes dreams need a supporting cast to become reality.
The penultimate day of the 2025 UCI Road World Championships unfolded like the best of cycling’s great narratives: tactical chess played at 50 kilometres per hour, with the Rwandan hills serving as both stage and executioner.
Across 164.6 brutal kilometres—eleven laps of a 15.1-kilometre circuit that climbed 3,350 metres of vertical punishment—the women’s Elite field would be dissected by two savage ascents. The Côte de Kigali Golf, 800 metres at 8.1 percent, came first on each lap like a persistent question. Then the cobbled Côte de Kimihurura, lurking within the final three kilometres, delivered the answer.
Austria’s Carina Schrempf understood the assignment early, slipping away on lap two with the conviction of a rider who knew her moment had arrived. For three hours, she carved a solitary furrow through the Rwandan countryside, her advantage swelling to three minutes as the peloton played the waiting game behind. But road racing is rarely about the first to leave; it’s about who remains when the mathematics of suffering finally add up.
The chase began to coalesce with surgical precision. Belgium’s Julie Van de Velde bridged to Schrempf on the cobbles of Kimihurura with 77 kilometres remaining, then Shirin van Anrooij marked the move for the Netherlands. The race was beginning to show its true face. Van Anrooij’s solo bid lasted until lap seven, where Spain’s Mireia Benito and Switzerland’s Noemi Rüegg seized the narrative thread. But cycling’s cruelest truth is that someone must always pay for ambition, and with three laps to go, the intensity reached its crescendo.
Italy’s Elisa Longo Borghini—a rider whose palmarès reads like a dissertation on tactical acumen—accelerated from the bunch as the lead duo succumbed to the chasers. Yet even her timing, so often impeccable, proved insufficient against what was to come.
On the penultimate ascent of the Côte de Kigali Golf, the race distilled itself to its essential elements. Spain’s Mavi García, New Zealand’s Niamh Fisher-Black, and Canada’s Magdeleine Vallières Mill—a former trainee at the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle—emerged from the carnage as the trilogy that would decide the rainbow jersey. Germany’s Antonia Niedermaier and the Netherlands’ Riejanne Markus joined them for the final act, but by then, the script was already being written in Vallières Mill’s mind.
The final lap exploded at every echelon. Switzerland threw everything into the furnace—Marlen Reusser and Elise Chabbey lighting the touchpaper, while France’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot added her own accelerant to the fire. But Vallières Mill had read the race perfectly, joining the late move and keeping its momentum alive by pushing on the front while the pre-race favorites in the peloton looked at each other with uncertainty.
When she reached the bottom of the final climb, all that remained was to unleash everything she had stored during those altitude training sessions. “I knew I probably wouldn’t win in a sprint against Niamh, because she’s so strong,” she would later reflect. “We were both really committed to the break, working really hard. I saw that she was fading a little bit, so I told myself I just have to go all in now and try.” When Vallières Mill kicked at the bottom of the final ascent of Kimihurura, nobody possessed the currency to match her transaction.
She crossed the line 23 seconds clear of Fisher-Black, with García completing the podium at 27 seconds. Chabbey, who had made the final selection, settled for fourth at 41 seconds—a cruel reminder that in cycling, proximity to greatness offers no guarantee of sharing in it.
“It was my dream to win it, and it’s true now! It’s crazy!” she said through tears of joy at the finish, the emotion of a lifetime’s ambition finally realised overwhelming her composure.
“The girls believed in me, so I believed in myself and I really committed to going for it,” Vallières Mill said afterward, her voice carrying the weight of a nation’s cycling dreams finally realised. “I prepared well, so I knew I was in good form. I just tried and told myself I didn’t want to have any regrets… I don’t! It’s great to do it here, and with the Worlds next year in Montréal, it’s perfect.”
Standing on the podium afterward, emotion evident in her voice, she reflected further: “It was my dream to win.” The disbelief was still palpable: “I don’t believe it yet, for sure not… I’ve been dreaming about this for a while now!”
In the land of a thousand hills, Canada had finally found its cycling summit. The rainbow jersey, that most coveted of cycling’s prizes, would fly north across the Atlantic, carried by a rider who understood that sometimes the greatest victories come not from overwhelming power, but from the courage to seize the moment when it arrives.
As Longo Borghini reflected in defeat: “Sometimes it’s not the one with the biggest power that wins, it’s the most clever.” In Kigali, on this September afternoon, cleverness wore Canadian colours and spoke with the voice of a champion who had dared to dream of rainbows in Rwanda.
2025 UCI Road World Championships – Women’s Elite Road Race (Kigali, Rwanda – 164.6km)
Rank
Rider
Country
Time
1
Magdeleine Vallières Mill
Canada
4:34:48
2
Niamh Fisher-Black
New Zealand
+0:23
3
Mavi García
Spain
+0:27
4
Elise Chabbey
Switzerland
+0:41
5
Riejanne Markus
Netherlands
+0:57
6
Antonia Niedermaier
Germany
+1:17
7
Demi Vollering
Netherlands
+1:34
8
Kimberley Le Court Pienaar
Mauritius
s.t.
9
Marlen Reusser
Switzerland
s.t.
10
Kasia Niewiadoma
Poland
s.t.
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