Age is just a number and yellow changes hands - Takeaways from the Tour de France Femmes stage 2

Stage 1 saw surprising performances from some of the sport’s biggest names as the likes of Elisa Longo-Borghini (UAE Team ADQ) and Lotte Kopecky (SD Worx-Protime) lost over a minute in the GC. Later it was revealed that neither were looking at the overall fight and the performances are either deliberate or as good as they can manage. 

Onto stage 2, though…

Out of all the riders to win on a stage like today, you may not have had the 41-year-old Mavi Garcia (Liv-AlUla-Jayco) close to the top of the list. The oldest rider in the race has even said she has been eyeing retirement. But, a perfectly timed opportunistic move, as the peloton lulled, meant that the |Spanish rider was able to take a chance and get a gap. 

Garcia was helped by the fact that she lost over five minutes on the opening stage. There was absolutely no urgency to chase her down at first. She stretched out a good gap and managed to hold on all the way to the line. 

It clearly meant so much to her but also to her close friend and teammate, Letizia Paternoster (Liv-AlUla-Jayco), who was in floods of tears while giving interviews after the stage. Paternoster has tasted similar glory this year when she got to wear the red leaders jersey at La Vuelta Femenina. 

It has been quite the year for the Mauritian national champion, Kim Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal), winning Liège–Bastogne–Liège being a clear career highlight for her. However, she now has another massive moment to tick off the career bucket list as she took the yellow jersey at the Tour de France Femmes thanks to her consistency. 

On day one, Le Court was pipped to the line by a flying Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease a Bike). This time, though, the GOAT was unable to stay up near the front and go for another stage as Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-ProTime) surged to second place behind Garcia and Le Court took third, plus four bonus seconds. 

Thanks to countback, Le Court went top of the pile in the GC standings and will wear yellow tomorrow. The question is, how long can the first African to wear yellow in the Tour de France Femmes keep it for?

The usual battle for the green points jersey looks to be really starting to kick off in the race as Marianne Vos and Lorena Wiebes went head-to-head in an intermediate sprint for the first time. 

Wiebes did get beyond Vos in the end but the European champion was thoroughly tested by the rider in yellow who put in a very strong sprint for the points. In the finish, it was Wiebes that came out on top on the line, where she took second on the day with Vos back in fifth. 

In the points standings it shows just how close it is as the riders are split by just four points with the first real sprint stage still to come on stage three. 

It was revealed yesterday in a piece by Escape Collective that Elise Chabbey (FDJ-Suez) took the mountains jersey on stage 1 because she just took an opportunity and it wasn’t the plan for her to be in polka dots at all. 

In the piece she said how she just saw the line and went for it but wasn’t sure if she took the jersey or not. Well, she did. And it absolutely inspired her today. 

She was on the attack whenever she had a chance to get QOM points. Saying that, she did not have it her own way at all as the Dutch star Silke Smulders (Liv-AlUla-Jayco) pipped her to the post a couple of times. Much like the points classification, the mountains classification is just split by four points between Chabbey and Smulders. 

Chabbey has also become the first woman to wear the QOM jersey in every ‘Grand Tour’. 

As ever in the opening stages of a big race, nerves are high. This isn’t helped by the first stages of this year’s race being some of the most difficult to navigate in the bunch safely in the whole of France. This, unsurprisingly, led to crashes happening. 

Much like stage one, there were some early spills. However, the main ones came shortly after each other with the likes of Olympic champion Kristen Faulkner (EF Education-Oatly), Thalita De Jong (Human Powered Health), Elena Pirrone (Roland), Dominika Włodarczyk (UAE Team ADQ) and others all going down. 

Speaking of crashes, one non-starter today was sprinting star Charlotte Kool (Picnic-PostNL). She had to leave the race before the start of stage two as she was just suffering too much from her crash at the recent Baloise Ladies Tour. She joins Marlen Reusser (Movistar) on the list of abandons.