Just as the men have finished their race in Paris, the starting gun has gone off for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. And with her first two stage wins in a row, Lorena Wiebes is immediately making a statement.
In Lausanne, she had already made her mark in the final stretch. A stage that looked flat on paper, but with four climbs and a 2.5-kilometer final climb, was anything but a simple sprinter’s affair. Célia Gery made a move, Demi Vollering accelerated, and Kim Le Court-Pienaar joined the breakaway. Wiebes survived it all and, 200 meters from the finish line, made the decisive move. A bike length was enough for the victory and her first yellow jersey. A day later, in Geneva, the script seemed to take a different turn for a moment. Riejanne Markus launched a 39-kilometer solo breakaway and held on until 400 meters from the finish, where the thinned-out peloton finally caught her. Just in time for Wiebes, who made a decisive move and left Elisa Balsamo and Marianne Vos behind. Two stages, two victories, and the yellow jersey firmly draped over her shoulders.
For Wiebes, it felt like more than just a victory. Less than three months ago, she was disqualified from the Giro d’Italia Women—after winning a stage, no less—because her bike weighed 6.78 kilograms during a weigh-in. That was 20 grams under the UCI minimum of 6.8 kilograms. A disqualification that caused quite a stir in the peloton and beyond, and which Wiebes herself described as unjust. She said the incident actually gave her extra motivation. With two stage wins in the first two days of the Tour de France Femmes, that doesn’t seem like an empty statement.
The story behind the story
Because how do you process something like that? How do you keep riding with the feeling that a victory was snatched away from you by twenty grams, and then come back with a double victory in the biggest women’s cycling race of the year? It’s exactly those kinds of stories that take center stage during De Laatste Etappe. On November 2, the theater evening returns to the Beatrix Theater in Utrecht, where the 2026 cycling season will be wrapped up the way it should be—not with results, but with the stories behind them.
Wiebes was named Female Cyclist of the Year in 2025 and accepted the award on stage at the Beatrix Theater. With this season—in which she turned her Giro disappointment into back-to-back stage wins at the Tour de France Femmes—she is once again among the obvious contenders for that title this year.
