8 takeaways of the Giro d'Italia Women - Domestique Debrief

As they say in Italian: La campionessa è ancora la campionessa. Elisa Longo Borghini continued the pattern that Giro d'Italia Women winners have been following since 2018: if anyone wins the race, they immediately double it the following year, as Annemiek van Vleuten (twice) and Anna van der Breggen have both done within the past eight editions. 

However, Longo Borghini's achievement is exceptional because the last Italian to win the Italian Grand Tour twice in a row was Fabiana Luperini in 1997 and 1998. Longo Borghini is on a fantastic streak, having finished in the top 9 on 12 consecutive race days, including the entire Giro d'Italia Women. This is an incredibly consistent feat, as these days included mountain finishes, time trials and bunch sprints. 

Longo Borghini perfectly represented the Italian tricolour, which she won back two weeks ago in Levico Terme. Her team, UAE Team ADQ, also did a great job, especially Silvia Persico, who was a brilliant help to Longo Borghini on both the stage to Monselice and the penultimate day, which proved to be the decisive one, doing a fantastic job as her domestique. For Longo Borghini (as for many others), the Tour de France Femmes is next, where her best result so far is sixth place. Based on her form over the past two years, she will travel to Bretagne soon as a clear contender for the overall podium.

Before 2025, we had been amazed by Reusser's performances at SD Worx, and this year, Movistar revived the Swiss rider's general classification ambitions. As incredible as it may seem, Reusser, in her fifth professional season, is performing exceptionally well in this role. From the beginning of the season, there were signs that this collaboration could work, but the period beginning in May exceeded even her own and the team's expectations. Second at La Vuelta Femenina, first in Burgos, first at the Tour de Suisse, and second in the Giro, with a 15-stage streak during which she never finished outside the top 11. 

For a long time, it looked like Reusser would win this Giro as well, holding the lead in the general classification until the seventh day, but on Monte Nerone, arguably Movistar's greatest weakness became apparent: they did not have enough climbers who could pull Reusser up to Elisa Longo Borghini when she aunched an early attack and which probably surprised the Spanish team. With a narrow 18-second margin, the Swiss rider was pushed down to second place in the general classification. Regardless, Reusser's composure and performance will make her a worthy challenger to Demi Vollering, and Marlen is expected to start the Tour de France Femmes as a favourite.

Lotte Kopecky and Anna van der Breggen arrived at the Giro d'Italia Women as a powerful core for Team SD Worx-ProTime, and with Lorena Wiebes joining them, it was even possible to imagine that the three of them would win a considerable percentage of the stages. This did not happen, and there are several reasons for this. Unfortunately, Lotte Kopecky struggled with an injury, which was already evident on the first false flat finish to Aprica, where she finished more than a minute and a half behind the peloton despite being regarded as a contender for the stage victory. It later turned out that she had lower back pain during the race, which forced her to abandon early to focus on the Tour de France Femmes. 

Although Wiebes won two stages, her climbing performance was not convincing; she performed better in this area in the first half of the season. However, Wiebes has not yet won the points jersey at the Tour de France, and to do so, she will need to make the most of her sprinting opportunities, so in this respect, this race served as good preparation. 

As for Anna van der Breggen, this Giro was a mixed bag for her. She was excellent on the flat sections, did great in the time trial, and anticipated well on the crosswind day – but in the mountains, she fell behind the best (although it was clear that her form was steadily improving throughout the race). As a result, she finished the race in sixth position. In her comeback year, this is not bad, and before the season, it would undoubtedly have been considered an excellent result, but Anna set her expectations high at the beginning of the year. It will be very exciting to see how the team's form develops over the coming weeks and what the ceiling for SD Worx might be in the Tour.

We need individual time trials at the women’s Grand Tours – at least as long as those seen in the Giro d'Italia Women. I created a chart for the women's Grand Tours over the past four years, showing how many and what types of time trials there were in the given races.

The table clearly shows that while Spanish race organisers believe in team time trials (to a lesser extent in terms of the two-year moving average, as the average distance has decreased from 17.2km in 2022-23 to 12km in 2024-25), and French organisers are still testing the best format for the Tour de France Femmes, the Giro d'Italia Women is sticking with the individual time trial. 

The prologue-like distances have been replaced by distances of around 15km, which do create differences, but these are not decisive at all on a sufficiently challenging route. The Giro has found the perfect balance, which is otherwise quite difficult to achieve, and after last year's TT in Brescia, Bergamo – one of Lombardy's cycling gems – was the perfect choice as the host for the opening stage. I believe this approach could be a trend to follow for women's stage races in the coming years.

"They ain't ready for Sarah 3.0 come July," wrote Sarah Gigante from her hospital bed last December after her iliac artery endofibrosis surgery. The promise was made, and the 24-year-old Australian has kept it. She had already achieved excellent results and shown her attacking spirit in the lead-up races to the Giro in Norway and Switzerland. On the slopes and climbs of Valdobbiadene, considered the home of Prosecco, she crowned her career to date with a truly majestic performance. The attack, which came 2km before the mountain top, followed a very high-level climb, leaving the two biggest contenders in the race, Marlen Reussert and Elisa Longo Borghini, completely behind – it's incredible that this was Gigante's first serious mountain stage victory. She followed up this victory with another three days later, as she also won Monte Nerone with a 6km attack, giving everyone else more than a minute on this part – she was the best climber in this race, and her reward was winning the queen of the mountains classification and third place in the general classification.

However, the entire Giro d'Italia was not just Sarah's success, as the rest of the team also gave their all. 19-year-old Belgian Lore De Schepper is consistently showing that she will be a contender in the serious mountain stages in a year or two, as demonstrated by her eighth-place finish in Valdobbiadene. Urška Žigart continued the form she showed in Switzerland, once again competing at a very stable top 10 level, with last year's transfer seeming to have worked out well for both her and the team. The crazy thing is that this trio did not include Ashleigh Moolman Pasio, the team's most experienced climber (who was also in the top 20 on GC for a long time), or Liège–Bastogne–Liège winner Kim Le Court, who is preparing for the Tour de France Femmes and has also proven that she can be counted on in the high mountains. 

AG Insurance has a profound climbing core, and when we add to that they have a development team, which is perhaps the best in women's cycling, it's safe to say that AG Insurance - Soudal could become one of the top teams in the coming years under the expert guidance of Jolien d'Hoore, Fien Delbaere, and Dani Christmas.

Due to Demi Vollering's Vuelta victory and her complete focus on the Tour de France Femmes, her domestiques, Juliette Labous and Évita Muzic had the Giro d'Italia Women as their only chance to prove themselves as Grand Tour leaders. The omens leading up to the race were great. Labous had a solid season this year; her performance in the spring classics and her stint in May, where she achieved two top 5 results in two WorldTour races despite her domestique duties, gave cause for confidence. In Muzic's case, perhaps the only difference is that after an outstanding season last year, she has fallen back to her 2021-2023 level this year, which is still a high floor from which she could have built upon at Giro. 

Unfortunately, however, the race did not quite deliver what they might hope to have achieved. At Pianezze, they both finished more than two and a half minutes behind Gigante, which would have been almost impossible to make up in the middle of an eight-day race, and being on the wrong side of the crosswind the next day ultimately sealed their fate. In the end, Muzic finished 13th and Labous 29th, which was below some expectations. However, if this race was preparatory for the Tour de France Femmes, then they are in a good phase of development, and no-one should draw any negative conclusions from the past week.

During the 2023/24 off-season, the Lidl-Trek women's team began to seriously rejuvenate its roster, signing two of Canadian cycling's most talented young riders, Ava and Isabella Holmgren. The twins from Ontario have fascinating multidisciplinary skills and have achieved significant results in other disciplines. Isabella holds junior and U23 world championship titles in the Olympic classic mountain bike event. At the same time, Ava was runner-up in the junior cyclocross world cup at the end of the year. 

Their team, Lidl-Trek, has played a significant role in their assimilation into road racing, and Isabella demonstrated this most notably at this Giro. She shone in her first professional time trial, and the fact that she was only 25-30 seconds behind such excellent pacemakers as her teammate Shirin van Anrooij and Antonia Niedermaier, who won the youth competition, was fantastic. However, she then exceeded all expectations, finishing in the top 10 on the two most challenging days and securing third place on the extremely difficult Monte Nerone climb. 

Holmgren finished seventh overall, just 47 seconds behind the top five, and showed that she could be a serious GC rider in the long run. The question is which team Isabella will join, as her contract with Lidl-Trek expires at the end of the year, and the best teams will be lining up for such a talented rider. In any case, Holmgren has now arrived among the best, and with three months left in the season, she could even win a WorldTour race before the end of year.

I tried to find the available statistics, but going back ten years, I couldn't find anyone who has won two days during the Giro d'Italia Women from a breakaway or late attack. Liane Lippert has now achieved this feat, and what makes this fact even more powerful is that she won her two victories 48 hours apart, now collecting three of her 12 professional victories in this race. Lippert hasn't had a bad season so far, performing at her usual extremely high level, but over the past two years, her specialties have increasingly shifted towards being a brilliant puncheur, while she has increasingly given up on general classification successes (with such a great Marlen Reusser on the team, this proved to be a perfect change of profile). 

However, Liane is perhaps faster than ever before, especially on sprints after hard days – this was necessary for her to ultimately win both situations ahead of Pauliena Rooijakkers and Anna van der Breggen. One of Germany's top riders made the race truly exciting, and we will never forget Liane’s historic feat at the 2025 Giro d'Italia Women.