2025 Tour de France Femmes - Overview of Leading General Classification Contenders
2025 Tour de France Femmes: A Wide-Open Race for the Yellow Jersey
The 2025 Tour de France Femmes promises to be a thrilling event, with a challenging route and the absence of key favourites due to crashes and illnesses.
The final two stages are medium-mountain stages, followed by two high mountain stages with key climbs. This terrain will test the endurance and climbing skills of the riders, making the race highly unpredictable.
Anna van der Breggen, a three-time world champion and Olympic gold medallist, will make a return to road racing in 2025, three years after retiring. She has been thrust back into the limelight as the sole GC leader for SD Worx-Protime, with Lotte Kopecky no longer aiming for the general classification. Van der Breggen's return could fill a gap in her extensive palmares by winning the Tour de France.
Defending champion Kasia Niewiadoma aims to make history by becoming the first rider to win the new version of the women's Tour de France twice in a row. Niewiadoma-Phinney won the 2024 Tour de France by a margin of four seconds.
Early withdrawals and crashes of key favourites like Demi Vollering and Elisa Longo Borghini have made the race more unpredictable, opening up the general classification battle to a wider range of contenders. Vollering, a pre-race favourite and one of the world’s best GC riders, crashed on Stage 3 and is likely to be compromised for the rest of the race, while Longo Borghini has also abandoned.
With Vollering’s fitness now in doubt, riders such as Niewiadoma, van der Breggen, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot, Pauline Rooijakkers, Liane Lippert, and Sarah Gigante are seen as more viable GC challengers than initially anticipated. The climbs ahead will test these riders differently, adding to the unpredictability of who will wear the yellow jersey at the end.
Ferrand-Prevot, a versatile rider with a history of success in various disciplines, cannot be discounted as a contender for an overall place. If she manages this feat, she would be the first French rider to win the Tour de France since Bernard Hinault won the men's title in 1985 and Jeannie Longo won the women's title in 1989.
The route does not include a time trial, but there are opportunities for every type of rider. Niamh Fisher-Black will lead Lidl-Trek at the Tour de France Femmes, as Elisa Longo Borghini has moved to UAE Team ADQ. Ferrand-Prevot has won the overall title at Emakumeen Bira and finished second overall at the Giro d'Italia Women, two of the biggest stage races in the world for women.
The 2025 Tour de France Femmes will cover 1,165 km across nine days of racing, making it a gruelling test of endurance and skill. With the unpredictable nature of the race and the absence of key favourites, this edition could potentially be the most unpredictable in the event's four-year history.
Mountain biking and cyclocross are sports that some riders might choose to focus on as they prepare for the 2025 Tour de France Femmes, given the challenging terrain and unpredictable nature of the race. The absence of key favourites due to crashes and illnesses creates an opportunity for riders who excel in these disciplines to rise to the fore and potentially make a mark in the general classification.
