We take a closer look at the custom-painted bike ridden to the win on stage 4 of the Tour de France Femmes.
Alex Hunt, Cor Vos
Heading into this year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, there was one stage above all others that Marlen Reusser was targeting, for obvious reasons: the 21-kilometre individual time trial.
As the reigning European and World TT Champion, the Movistar team leader has made the discipline her own in recent years. For many, it wasn’t a question of if she would win, but by how much.
Tour Femmes: Reusser wins dramatic stage 4 ITT that sets up GC intrigue
Marlen Reusser takes over the yellow jersey with a 14-second lead over Demi Vollering as reigning Tour champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot loses over two minutes.
The route from Gevrey-Chambertin to Dijon had a little bit of everything. It opened on flat roads before tackling a 3.5-kilometre climb averaging around 7%, followed by rolling terrain and a fast, tailwind-assisted descent to the finish. As a result, many riders opted for a double chainring rather than a 1x setup, prioritising a wider gear range for the varied terrain over the simplicity and small aero benefits of a 1x setup.
Even during course recon, riders were returning to the team buses having touched 90 km/h on that descent, making gearing an even bigger talking point than usual. While many would still spin out their biggest gears on the descent, they also needed ratios that allowed them to stay within their preferred cadence at little more than 25 km/h on the climb.
Reusser’s bike, Canyon’s Speedmax CFR, has actually been around longer than the Tour de France Femmes itself, having launched in 2021. That’s hardly unusual, though. Unlike road bikes, where three-year product cycles have become commonplace, TT bikes typically remain unchanged for much longer.
As it happens, Canyon just last month debuted a new sixth-generation Speedmax. But the new bike was not raced in the men’s or women’s Tour de France, and at least in its sale versions uses an aero extension setup that is not UCI-compliant. The new Speedmax is not listed in the latest version of the UCI’s approved framesets document, dated July 2, 2026, but the launch was on July 9. We’ve reached out to Canyon to ask whether the new bike will be on a future UCI-approved list.
Time trial kilometres continue to shrink on the men’s calendar, and they remain a rarity in the women’s peloton too. Before the Tour’s ITT, there had been just two WorldTour-level time trials in 2026: the Tour de Suisse Stage 4 ITT and the Giro d’Italia’s Stage 4 mountain time trial.
That scarcity makes it difficult to judge form, while also meaning the Women’s WorldTour’s TT bikes rarely emerge from storage. Reusser herself had raced just one WorldTour-level TT before the Tour, at the Tour de Suisse two months earlier, where she beat Zoe Bäckstedt on a course with similar elevation gain and distance.
Random tech finds from the opening days of the Tour de France Femmes
Who knew we would be looking at the anatomy of Patrick Star before the start of stage 1?
With the climb and descent breaking up the course, Reusser didn’t demolish the field by the margins we’ve become accustomed to seeing. She still claimed the stage, though – her third Tour de France Femmes stage victory of her career – and put valuable time into her GC rivals.
Ahead of the stage, I took a closer look at the bike that would go on to win, and just how the world champion likes to set it up.
As the current holder of both the European and World Championship titles in the discipline, Reusser’s bike celebrates both with the rainbow bands on the fork and the European motif on the seat tube. 
More riders than expected were running double-chainring setups to better accommodate the huge range of speeds experienced out on the course. Reusser, however, stuck with her familiar 1X setup with a monster 58-tooth ring up front.
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