The French queen
The 33-year-old Visma–Lease a Bike leader came into the final stage with a lead of 2:37 over Sarah Gigante (AG Insurance–Soudal), with pre-race favorite and 2023 TdFFaZ winner Demi Vollering in third, at 3:18, and last year’s winner, Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon//SRAM-zondacrypto), 22 seconds farther back in fourth. Ferrand-Prévot rode an intelligent race, limiting her efforts in the group containing her main rivals, which was eventually reduced to five as the riders approached the finish line.
The stage contained three categorized climbs, with the most difficult, the Beyond Category (HC) Col de Joux-Plane (11.6% @ 8.5%), in the middle of the 124.1 course from Praz-sur-Arly to Châtel. Vollering attacked the small lead group with 7km left to ride but made no headway. Ferrand-Prévot took advantage of the group’s slowing to unleash her attack and, though Lidl-Trek’s Niamh Fisher-Black tried to stay with her, she soon had a big gap on her rivals and gradually increased it as she powered to victory. After crossing the finish line, the exhausted Ferrand-Prévot lay down on the road and wept.
Perhaps the tears were about the hard work she put in to become the best female rider in the world. Having left everything on the roads of France for nine days, she speculated that she may not repeat the effort. “Because my preparation was so hard for the Tour de France, now I don’t really see myself doing the same again,” she said. “Maybe it’s just because I’m tired and want to have a small break. Over these past months, dedicating myself to this has been good, it’s paid off. But it’s also been really hard. That’s why I couldn’t do it multiple times in the year. It’s so much sacrifice. Anyway, I still have two years of contract, and I still love what I’m doing. It’s my life.”
Vollering finished second in the stage, 20 seconds adrift, with Niewiadoma-Phinney crossing the line at 23 seconds. Ferrand-Prévot’s Tour-winning margin was 3:42 over Vollering. Niewiadoma-Phinney came third, 4:09 behind. These are enormous gaps for a nine-stage race, more typical of Tadej Pogačar’s winning margins after 21 days of racing.
The queen on the queen stage
Ferrand-Prévot actually won the race on Saturday’s queen stage, which featured a summit finish on the legendary Col de la Madeleine (18.9km @ 8%). In one of the most devastating demonstrations of power and speed by any rider, male or female, in a Tour de France, she beat the impressive Gigante to the finish line on the summit of the Madeleine by 1:45. Fisher-Black finished third, at 2:15, while Vollering (FDJ-Suez) battled to come fourth, 3:03 adrift.
“It was so painful the last kilometers because I wanted to have the biggest possible gap for tomorrow [Sunday],” she said after her triumph. “It’s a dream to wear the yellow jersey. I can’t wait to see my teammates and share this jersey with them . . . to say thank you to them.”
When Gigante and Pauliena Rooijakkers (Fenix-Deceuninck) rode away from the small group of GC contenders 11.6km from the Madeleine summit, Ferrand-Prévot rode after them and soon caught up. “When I saw Sarah go,” she explained, “I said to myself, ‘I’m still feeling good, so I’m going to try to keep up with her.’ And then I knew I had to manage this effort over 1 hour 20 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. It was a bit like a mountain bike effort where you have to put yourself in the red zone and not go over it. I know I know how to manage this kind of effort pretty well.”
Eventually her 20-year-old French teammate Marion Bunel joined them after Rooijakkers was dropped and gave her a valuable slipstream in which to ride. At 9km, Ferrand-Prévot rode away from Gigante and went the rest of the way on her own, catching and then dropping Fisher-Black. She then had the stage, the race and the many jubilant French spectators lining both sides of the road all to herself.
Remarkably, this was only the second stage race victory of Ferrand-Prévot’s career, after a win in 2014, when she also won the road world championship. But the Reims native is a remarkable rider, the only rider, male or female, to ever hold world championships in MTB, cyclo-cross and road racing at the same time. And now the TdFFaZ is hers. That is a feat that neither Pogačar nor Mathieu van der Poel will ever accomplish. Ferrand-Prévot also won the mountain bike gold medal at last year’s Paris Olympics and this year’s Paris-Roubaix. She returned full-time to road cycling only last year with the intention of winning the TdFFaZ. Mission accomplished.
With her accomplishment and the way she demolished the best cyclists in the sport, Ferrand-Prévot must now be considered one of the best riders in the world, of any gender, if not the best.
The princess
Though Ferrand-Prévot won the big prize, another French rider made French hearts also beat faster this week. No one had heard of 23-year-old Maëva Squiban (UAE Team ADQ) before this race began. She’d won one minor race, had several podium finishes in second-level races, and was to be a domestique for team leader Elisa Longo Borghini. But, fatigued from her victory in the Giro d’Italia Women, which ended a mere two weeks before the TdFFaZ began, Longo Borghini dropped out after stage 3. Then two more UAE riders abandoned the race and suddenly the team found itself with only four riders left.
It looked like a catastrophe, until Squiban attacked from a breakaway 3km from the summit of the last climb of Thursday’s stage 6, the category 2 Col du Chansert (6.4km @ 5.4%), and rode a bold 32.3km solo to notch her first ever WorldTour win. Everyone was taken by the young rider’s boldness and explosive power. Bravo to her, we all said, and turned our thoughts to the GC race. But Squiban wasn’t done.
The next day, she announced that she would start racing from kilometer zero to get in another breakaway. And that’s precisely what she did, and then again attacked the breakaway a few kilometers from the top of the last categorized climb and again beat everyone to the finish line. Two TdFFaZ long solo wins in two days is a rare enough feat for a superstar, but it’s unheard of for an inexperienced 23-year-old riding in her first Grand Tour.
“Winning once at the Tour is already enormous. A second victory today, frankly, I’m at more of a loss for words than yesterday,” she said after the stage. “I said for a laugh yesterday that I’d attack at kilometer zero. I actually did it in the end, but really it was just a joke. It’s just incredible.”
It really was. But Squiban wasn’t ready to call it a race. She again joined a breakaway on Saturday’s queen stage and made it all the way to the lower slopes of the Madeleine before she finally tired. She had made such an impression with her riding and her personality that everyone was surprised when she was dropped. A shiny future awaits this new star of cycling. Squiban’s reduced team had an astonishing TdFFaZ with her two stage wins and a fourth-place finish in the yellow jersey competition by 24-year-old Dominika Włodarczyk, another domestique turned star.
The African queen
With this year’s World Championships to be held in Africa for the first time, it was only right for Mauritian champion Kim Le Court Pienaar to dominate the first part of the race. She was the first African to win a TdFFaZ stage, rode in the yellow jersey for four stages, rode furiously for bonus seconds and podium finishes and, to top off a magnificent performance, recovered from a crash on the queen stage to lead Gigante up the Madeleine until her legs finally gave out. She left everything on the road in every stage.
Not only that, but she was always an outspoken presence in the race, even opening a discussion about the effects of menstruation on women cyclists. After winning stage 5, she said, “My legs didn’t feel too good today. It’s that time of the month for me, so, yeah, my body was just more tired than usual. That’s just what women have to go through and I just had to fight through it and with the teamwork my team did, I just couldn’t give up.”
Female athletes have in the past been encouraged to suppress their periods because of the effect of menstruation on performance. But the times, they are a-changing. Le Court’s teammate Justine Ghekiere told Sporza that the team has integrated menstrual cycle tracking and personalized support into its performance planning. “They’re working very hard on it within the team,” Ghekiere said. “We have to enter all the data, and then they figure out how best to support us in those situations.”
Wiebes wins the Škoda Green Jersey
The least dramatic contest of the race was that for the Škoda Green Jersey. The race was practically over after Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx–Protime) outsprinted her only real rival for the prize, Marianne Vos (Visma–Lease a Bike), in stages 3 and 4 and took a 40-point lead. With no bunch sprints left in the race, Vos was never going to garner enough points from intermediate sprints, most of which were taken by breakaways, to catch her. On Sunday Wiebes took 20 points at the final intermediate sprint to bring her final total to 230. Vos had 178 points and Vollering finished third in the competition, with 147.
Results of Stage 9, 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift
- Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Visma–Lease a Bike 3:38:23
- Demi Vollering, FDJ-Suez +0:20
- Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney, Canyon//SRAM zondacrypto +0:23
- Niamh Fisher-Black, Lidl-Trek “
- Dominika Włodarczyk, UAE Team ADQ +0:33
- Juliette Labous, FDJ-Suez +1:49
- Sarah Gigante, AG Insurance–Soudal +3:53
- Cédrine Kerbaol, EF Education–Oatly +9:22
- Pauliena Rooijakkers, Fenix-Deceuninck +9:23
- Nadia Gontova, Winspace Orange Seal +9:26
Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift Final General Classification
- Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Visma–Lease a Bike 29:54:24
- Demi Vollering, FDJ-Suez + 3:42
- Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney, Canyon//SRAM zondacrypto +4:09
- Dominika Włodarczyk, UAE Team ADQ +5:45
- Niamh Fisher-Black, Lidl-Trek +6:25
- Sarah Gigante, AG Insurance–Soudal +6:40
- Juliette Labous, FDJ-Suez +9:13
- Cédrine Kerbaol, EF Education–Oatly +13:43
- Pauliena Rooijakkers, Fenix-Deceuninck +13:59
- Evita Muzic, FDJ-Suez +15:50