Marlen Reusser has had a rollercoaster of a season so far in 2026. After a horrible crash at the Tour of Flanders left her nursing fractured vertebrae, the Movistar leader took almost two months away from competition before returning at the Giro d’Italia. Considering where she’d been just weeks earlier, Reusser’s handful of top-10 finishes, including second in the mountain time trial, proved a strong showing, but her form was not where she wanted or hoped it would be at that stage in the season.
Her return to the Tour de Suisse was, then, not just a return home, but a chance to test her growing form with the Tour de France Femmes in mind. It was a dramatic race, but one that couldn’t have ended any better for Reusser who secured her first GC title of 2026 with back-to-back stage wins on the closing weekend, including a monumentally challenging Queen Stage.
“Honestly, I couldn’t wish for better,” Reusser said in her winner’s interview after stage 5. “Of course, super happy with how everything went. It’s not like I came into this race with the biggest confidence. We more said like, let’s do it, it’s Tour de Suisse, and you never know. And then, what was it, the third day when Elisa Longo suddenly got so much more time because we went the wrong way, and somebody crashed, almost, and blah blah. [After that] I was thinking, it’s almost impossible, so I’m super happy that it worked out. And I think today I really could profit from this situation in the GC that we had, and that they’d look at the others, and this helped me a lot.”
[race_result id=14577 stage_id=90187 count=5 gc=0 year=2026]
[race_result id=14577 stage_id=90187 count=5 gc=5 year=2026]
Reusser’s third overall victory at the Tour de Suisse was built on a stellar time trial on Saturday’s stage 4 in which the world champion put over a minute into incumbent race leader Elisa Longo Borghini who dropped to second, 10 seconds down. The Italian was then the only rider within a minute of Reusser’s newly-claimed yellow jersey, while further back, the standings were poised for a shakeup on the mountain finale; Cédrine Kerbaol started stage 5 a minute 20 seconds down, and four others – Sarah van Dam, Femke de Vries, Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney and Kim Le Court-Pienaar – were all within 45 seconds of the podium.
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