One year ago Kasia Niewiadoma was winning the Tour de France. In typical Niewiadoma form, she attacked her competitors and was soloing to the biggest victory of her career. Only, it didn’t work out the way she had dreamed. In the final kilometres on the Col du Tourmalet, Demi Vollering caught her, passed her, and took the yellow jersey for herself.
One year later the tables have turned. Niewiadoma rode a near-perfect race and became the next Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift champion atop Alpe d’Huez.
“Throughout my whole career, there were so many times I would miss out on the victory because of something and I feel like this week was perfect for me and my team,” Niewiadoma said at the finish. “Despite a few crashes, we were still able to stay cool and focus on our goal. In order to be able to win big races you need everything on your side.”
A long time coming
For Niewiadoma and her team, the victory is everything they could have dreamed of. Canyon-SRAM has been around for eight years, they’ve gained and lost riders, and in recent years they’ve had to rebuild their team. They’ve added fresh talent, hired new directors, and tried to grow as an organization along with the sport of cycling.
Niewiadoma was their star rider from the moment she signed with them in 2018. In her first two years she won multiple WorldTour events including the Amstel Gold Race, but in 2020 she started to plateau. From that year to the spring of 2024 Niewiadoma experienced a drought. Her only win was the Gravel World Championships at the end of 2023.
“The most decisive race was Gravel Worlds,” Niewiadoma said of her journey towards winning the Tour. With that win in Italy, she realized she was spending too much energy fearing her competition. “Once I was able to specifically drop Demi [Vollering], that’s when I realized I can do it. I just need to have more faith or use my power in a better or smarter way.”
Already in 2022 there had been a hint of the story that unfolded on Alpe d’Huez on Sunday. Niewiadoma rode consistently well in the first edition of the Tour de France Femmes and ended the race third overall, nearly six and a half minutes behind the winner Annemiek van Vleuten. She didn’t put in any outrageous attacks, but the hunger was there.
After the 2022 season, she went back to the drawing board. She worked on her weaknesses and her team worked on theirs. New riders were hired, and the following year Canyon-SRAM was a new team. They won a stage of RideLondon with Chloe Dygert, a stage of the Giro d’Italia with Antonia Niedermaier, and a stage of the Tour with Ricarda Bauernfeind.
Niewiadoma’s time came on the seventh stage of the 2023 Tour. On the Col d’Aspin, the climb before the dreaded Tourmalet, Niewiadoma took advantage of the fact Vollering and Van Vleuten only had eyes for each other, and attacked. The effort would guarantee her third overall. The same result as the year prior, but a lesson was learned.
It was these seemingly small moments that started the avalanche that led to the Niewiadoma we are watching on our screens now.
While the signs were there in 2022 and 2023, 2024 has been a year of resurgence for Niewiadoma. A win at La Flèche Wallonne, her first WorldTour victory since 2019, was only the beginning. She had her eye on the Tour de France Femmes.
Niewiadoma has spent the last two years working on her training methods, adapting herself and learning from her own mistakes in races. The rider who won the Tour on Sunday by only four seconds was able to remain calm when faced with defeat. She was able to only expend the amount of energy she needed to keep her pace up as long as she needed. It’s something Niewiadoma has worked on, and her team knew it was what she needed to do to win the race.
After all, Canyon-SRAM had come to the race with one goal and one of the strongest teams on the startlist. It was a team of youngsters keen to be part of something massive. The yellow jersey was their only ambition. Niewiadoma has changed in the last two years, but her overall victory was also thanks to the team changes made around her.
“I think she improved the last two years quite a lot,” said Canyon-SRAM sports director Adam Szabó. “The last few years made a big difference in her training approach and I think we changed quite a bit in the team structure. We’ve grown as a team a lot and that has helped a lot.”
It all started in Liege
Niewiadoma made her first move of the race on the fourth stage from Valkenburg to Liege, a Classics-style race that suited her aggressive racing style. Vollering matched her, and the battle began.
“It was a nice combination of Ardennes Classics and of course, I love this kind of racing,” Niewiadoma said of stage 4 where she moved from 46th up to third overall. “I love short and punchy hills so I was targeting that stage. Unfortunately, I lost the sprint but I was happy we were able to create a gap on the others during that stage.”
The race was thrown on its head when Vollering crashed on stage 5. Niewiadoma took yellow, and all of a sudden winning the Tour was not only within reach, but the jersey was on her shoulders. All she needed to do was stay with Vollering, and not allow her to take any time. But of course, riding aggressively is in Niewiadoma’s nature, and that’s what she did on stage 7.
At the end of that stage, ending on Le Grand-Bornand, Vollering and Niewiadoma went head to head, and it looked like Vollering came away on top. She gained four seconds on Niewiadoma, but the Polish rider and her team said they weren’t worried; that four seconds was nothing. She had a slightly different perspective once the race wrapped up on Sunday, having won by that margin.
“Four seconds seem to be magical now.”
Kasia Niewiadoma
An epic final stage
Vollering had gone into the final, mountainous stage with confidence. Her team sent four riders up the road, but the plan unravelled before it could come to fruition. The 22-rider break never got the gap it needed, and none of Vollering’s teammates made it to the valley before the final climb to pace her. Vollering took the race into her own hands, attacking on the Col du Glandon, taking Pauliena Rooijakkers with her.
“It was terrible,” Niewiadoma said of the moment Vollering attacked on the Col du Glandon, the penultimate climb on Sunday’s stage. “The climb was very hard and I felt I was losing my legs and then she attacked and it wasn’t ideal. I just knew that I had to stay patient and keep my pace. On the descent, I was able to refuel, and I felt like I regained my power.”
At this point, both Vollering and Niewiadoma were isolated. Vollering had no teammates with her in the lead – her only teammate, Niamh Fisher-Black, was in the group with Niewiadoma. Likewise, Niewiadoma was the only Canyon-SRAM rider in her group.
That said, the 29-year-old Polish rider did have the help of some other competitors in the valley before the race finally reached the slopes of Alpe d’Huez. She was especially grateful for Lucinda Brand, who was riding in support of Gaia Realini for Lidl-Trek but ultimately happened to keep the two leaders – Vollering and Rooijakkers – close enough for Niewiadoma.
Once they were on Alpe d’Huez, it was Vollering vs Niewiadoma. To win the Tour, Niewiadoma didn’t need to win the stage – she just needed to ride at her own pace, manage her effort, and keep the gap under 1:15, factoring in any time bonus Vollering would take at the finish line.
“On Alpe d’Huez I knew I had to pace myself smart and give my best in the last 5 km just to minimise the gap as much as possible,” Niewiadoma explained.
“This climb was all about the legs,” said Szabó. “We saw when she was on the front she was gaining seconds so we encouraged her to take the front as much as she could and just to keep a steady pace and it would be all good.”
Not that it felt that easy to Niewiadoma.
“To be honest, for a second I lost faith that I could still do it,” she said. “On the radio they were screaming so much in the last 2 km so I’ve gone [from] such a terrible time on this climb – I hated everything – to then arriving at the finish line and learning I won the Tour de France. It’s insane.”
“I put on 10 years in the car today,” said Canyon-SRAM’s other sports director Eric Zabel. “In the valley I was confident. By 10 to go, not, but by 5, 4, 3 km to go the hope came back.
“Actually, Kasia asked us by 10 km to ‘shut up’, and then we just said ‘find your rhythm, go your speed, don’t go over the limit.’ By 4 km to go we said ‘all in, all in, all in.'”
Vollering ultimately beat Rooijakkers to win the stage and the clock started. The whole cycling world held its breath as Niewiadoma sprinted through the final 500 meters. The eruption of sound and emotion when Niewiadoma crossed the line could have caused a Taylor Swift-style earthquake. She’d done it. Kasia Niewiadoma had won the Tour de France Femmes by four seconds.
What it means
“Throughout the stage, I was going through different thoughts and an emotional rollercoaster so to be able to pull it off on the finish line by just a couple of seconds is a dream come true,” Niewiadoma said. “I need some time to let everything sink in. I am really looking forward to going to the team bus, celebrating with my girls, and actually realizing what just happened.”
“I am pretty overwhelmed right now with emotions,” Szabó said. “It’s an incredible feeling.”
Against all odds, with Vollering the better climber on paper and Niewiadoma’s history of only just missing out on major victories in the sport, she pulled off the biggest win of her career on one of the most iconic climbs in cycling, by the smallest winning margin in Tour history (men’s or women’s).
The Olympics hadn’t gone her way, but all it took was one week for the universe to decide it was her time to shine.
“I am so happy for Kasia she is not the third time in a row third,” Zabel said after the race.
Niewiadoma doesn’t win races as often as Vollering, Lorena Wiebes, or even Elisa Longo Borghini, but for the last 11 years, she has been a consistent force in the peloton. If there is a move, Niewiadoma is there. If there’s a hill, she’s attacking it. She races with her heart, but this year she’s relied on her head as well. The combination has brought the 29-year-old a win for the ages, and the only question now is: what can she do next?
The other race that has eluded her throughout her career is Strade Bianche, where she has finished on the podium four times, three of them in second. Surely a win there is now on the horizon for Niewiadoma.
Not that she’s thinking about that just yet. Now is the time to enjoy knowing that all that hard work, all those years of near misses and heartbreaking moments, have paid off. Kasia Niewiadoma just won the Tour de France Femmes, and women’s cycling is all the better for it.
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