Lorena Wiebes takes yellow jersey in Tour de France Femmes opener, Giro controversy looms

Lorena Wiebes took the first yellow jersey of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes after climbing the Côte Saint-François and outsprinting race favourites Kim Le Court and 2023 champion, Demi Vollering.

“The team worked super hard today,” Wiebes said. “When Demi attacked, I knew I had to follow. It was a long sprint, but I’m super happy.”

It was the Dutch rider’s sixth stage win in the Tour de France Femmes. The 27-year-old also won the opening stage of the 2026 women’s Giro d’Italia in May but was disqualified because her bike had an illegal weight, an outcome which left her team considering legal action against cycling’s governing body, the UCI.

“I’m really happy with the support I have had from the team and the staff,” she said. “They fully believed in me, when even I had some doubts.”

Wiebes, of SD Worx-Protime, leads the race overall by four seconds from Le Court and six seconds from Vollering. The defending champion, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, finished eighth and is 10 seconds behind the race leader.

The final outcome of the race is likely to be decided by minutes, although Lars Boom, sports director to Vollering, who lost the 2024 race by just four seconds, valued the time gain.

“That’s always nice,” Boom said. “You never know what’s going to happen with wildfires in France, so in the end it’s always better to get seconds than to have to gain seconds.”

The high temperatures and rolling roads split the field after 83km, on the third category Côte de Villars-le-Comte, where numerous riders lost contact with the peloton and one of the day’s four breakaways, French rider Océane Mahé of the lowly Ma Petite Entreprise team, took the lead in the Queen of the Mountains classification.

But with 50km left to race the quartet’s advantage began to dwindle and they were finally swallowed up with 6km remaining, on the lakeside approach to Lausanne’s uphill finish.

Vollering, buoyed by the announcement that Red Bull has become her FDJ United–Suez team’s latest sponsorship partner, led into the final 600m, but Wiebes’ turn of speed was too much for her compatriot, who was surprisingly overtaken by Le Court in the closing metres.

Wiebes came to the Tour Femmes looking for vindication after the Giro controversy in late May. Her win was wiped out by disqualification after her bike weighed in at slightly under the regulation 6.8kg. Wiebes also lost the pink race leader’s jersey and a bitter dispute ensued between the team and the UCI over the methods used to measure the bike’s weight.

“I would have been perfectly fine with it if the scale had consistently shown the same weight,” Wiebes said. “But having the bike’s weight vary during the weighing process – that was the most frustrating part for me.”

Her SD Worx-Protime team manager, Danny Stam, said that a legal case against the UCI was now pending.

“Our team’s lawyers are working on it,” he told De Telegraaf. “We’ve received feedback but it’s going to be a long process. Still, justice needs to be served.

“I just find it unacceptable that a decision with such a huge impact on a rider is made when a bike is hanging from a tent that’s nearly blowing away. Can’t we operate a bit more professionally in this day and age? Can’t we just weigh a bike inside an enclosed truck, away from the wind? Instead of: ‘Now it weighs this, now it weighs that.’”

Tomorrow’s second stage begins in nearby Aigle, ironically on the doorstep of the UCI headquarters, where Wiebes will take to the start line in the yellow jersey. Five more climbs and high temperatures may make it another tough stage, but the flat finish on Geneva’s Quai du Mont-Blanc looks well-suited to the Dutch rider.