This year’s Tour de France Femmes welcomes 147 riders to Lausanne this weekend for the Grand Départ of the race’s fifth edition, and all will be dreaming of ending the nine-day race with a win to their name.
No rider on the startlist knows the taste of Tour success as well as Dutch sprinter Lorena Wiebes, who has racked up five stage wins across four appearances to date.
Her SD Worx-Protime team may not be the all-conquering force it once was, but the team heads into this year’s race with ambitions on several fronts.
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Anna van der Breggen, a podium finisher at both La Vuelta Femenina and the Giro d’Italia Women, heads their GC challenge, while Wiebes, like Lotte Kopecky and Mischa Bredewold, will aim for stage wins.
But could a shot at the yellow jersey on the uphill opener in Lausanne also be on the cards?
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“It’s important to start good and that we can try to win as many stages as possible here,” Wiebes, who sprinted to victory in Angers and Poitiers last summer en route to the green jersey, said at the pre-race press conference on Friday.
“I will also try to do my best in tomorrow’s stage, of course. I think [yellow] is quite a big goal for the team, but we have to also see how the stage will work out.”
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Wiebes has worn yellow before, of course, having won the very first stage of the Tour after beating Marianne Vos to the line on the Champs-Elysées four years ago.
That famous finish in Paris runs uphill, but nothing like the conclusion of stage 1, which features a 2.6km fourth-category climb, averaging 4.6% to the line.
“Everything needs to be perfect,” Wiebes acknowledged, before pointing out just how much she’d like to wear yellow once more.
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“One time I had the experience to be in yellow, and if I’m able to wear it one more time, I will enjoy it even more. [Last time], I thought I needed to enjoy it more because it’s really special.”
Wiebes has won more than anyone else this year, as is usually the case nowadays. She has topped the season-end win list in four of the five years since ascending to the top of the sprinting pile in 2021.
In 2022, 2024, and 2025, she was the only rider to win more than 20 races, and she has 13 to her name so far this season – minus the Giro opener where she was disqualified for an underweight bike. So, along with the opener here, where will the other chances to add to her tally lie?
“Hopefully stage 2 can be a bunch sprint,” she said, before noting that it’s slim pickings the rest of the way.
“For the rest it’s not really a sprint, so I need to find myself maybe in a breakaway or something to try anything.
“Then for us it’s mostly that we aim for stage wins and then the best possible GC result with Anna. I mean, if we have a stage win, I think we can be already really happy with the Tour.”
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