The 2025 women's WorldTour season is already well underway with action-packed racing in both hemispheres, and early wins from old hands and newcomers alike. A number of the year’s anticipated storylines have also begun to unfold – the debut appearances for big-name transfers including Elisa Longo Borghini and Demi Vollering; the first sprinters’ showdowns in the UAE; Anna van der Breggen’s un-retirement, etc. – but there’s plenty more still to break ground.
Perhaps the most eagerly awaited storyline is the liberated rivalry of Lotte Kopecky and Demi Vollering, teammates no more. But it goes way beyond the Belgian-Dutch duo. Marlen Reusser too is free of teammate status after moving to Movistar, with whom she’s already scored great results, while Elisa Longo Borghini’s de facto GC leadership after swapping Lidl-Trek for UAE Team ADQ is also producing great things in the early goings.
Elsewhere there’s also prolific winner Marianne Vos, sprinters Lorena Wiebes and Charlotte Kool, ones-to-watch Thalita De Jong, Noémi Rüegg, Chloe Dygert, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot and Mischa Bredewold, not forgetting ever-present names like Pfeiffer Georgi, Liane Lippert, Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig and reigning Tour de France champion Kasia Niewiadoma, the latter pair now teammates after the Dane’s own high-profile transfer. There are so many to root for, it's eye-watering.
The season’s appetisers are over, Omloop Nieuwsblad, the punchy cobbled opener, is a week away and the first mega showdowns are just around the corner. But who is racing what, and when will the biggest names do battle?
Also be sure to check out Joe Lindsey’s TV coverage guide to see where and how to catch the racing, here at Escape Collective.
N.B. While the startlist for Omloop Nieuwsblad is provisionally complete already, it gets pretty vague from that point on, and some teams appear to be keeping plans pretty close to the chest, which is partly why we’ve kept the foresight minimal, and homed in only on major WorldTour races and showdowns. Which brings us to the balance between one-day and stage races: unlike the crazy paving of the men’s spring calendar with Tirreno-Adriatico and Paris-Nice layered on top of one another in mid-March, the women’s peloton is (more) neatly partitioned, with no WorldTour stage racing until the Vuelta a España in early May, which kicks off a summer of stage races – interrupted only by the new WorldTour one-day race the Copenhagen Sprint on 21st June – that ends with the Tour de France Femmes Avec Zwift.
Raising the curtain on the Classics
- The elephant in the room is the absence of Kopecky until late March. In 2024, the world champion took a stage win on Jebel Hafeet and the overall victory at the UAE Tour, before taking second at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Trofeo Alfredo Binda, and victory at both Nokere Koerse and Strade Bianche. This year, though, she is devoting her preparation elsewhere – "I came second, twice, in the Grand Tours without really having any proper, or specific, preparation for them," Kopecky said during a team press event in January. "I am curious to see how far I can go, so we will make it a goal". The 29-year-old is opting then to delay the start of her season until the apparently irresistible Milan-San Remo, which looks like being the first major showdown of everyone’s favourite WWT superstars, including the world champion’s former teammates.
- Speaking of the SD Worx diaspora, they’ve mostly already met – minus Niamh Fisher-Black (Lidl-Trek), whose schedule has yet to be confirmed, but eyes on Strade Bianche – at Setmana Valenciana, where defending champion Marlen Reusser (Movistar) trailed eventual winner Demi Vollering (FDJ-Suez) by about half a minute on the crucial opening stage, and stayed close to seal the same position on the final podium, former SD Worx colleague Anna van der Breggen one step below her in third.
- That was but a prologue, though. After the second-tier (2.Pro) Spanish stage race, and of course the top-level UAE Tour, the next booking for much of the women’s peloton is Europe's first WorldTour race: Omloop Nieuwsblad, the opening event of the Spring Classics. And plenty of big names are going to be in attendance, except for the two most recent winners in Marianne Vos and Kopecky, and two-time champion Van der Breggen (2015 and 2021).
- In fact, the top finisher from 2024 Omloop who is starting this year’s event is Thalita De Jong, the versatile Dutch rider who made the jump from Lotto Dstny to Human Powered Health this winter, and whose 2025 has glowed thus far, including Trofeo Andratx victory and 10th overall at Setmana Valenciana where she never finished a stage lower than 12th.
- Flying high among the top squads, Lidl-Trek had no less than three riders in Omloop's top 10 last year in now-alumna Elisa Longo Borghini (now leading UAE Team ADQ), Shirin van Anrooij and Elisa Balsamo. However, the team's primary colours will get their Classics debut on the shoulders of alternate options this spring, with new signings Emma Norsgaard, Anna Henderson and Riejanne Markus joining Clara Copponi, Lauretta Hanson and Lizzie Deignan in a sturdy one-day lineup.
- The SD Worx leadership carousel is going to be one to keep an eye on as the Classics begin. We’ve already seen the return of Van der Breggen at the first stage race of her second coming – which has got the team’s Tour de France leadership questions swirling early, though for now Van der Breggen is absolutely definitely no-but-really going to be a super-domestique for the world champ in France – but with Kopecky staying away until Milan-San Remo and Van der Breggen leading the team in the 1.1-ranked Omloop van het Hageland on 2nd March, it's the turn of Wiebes to head up a strong squad that includes Setmana Valenciana stage-winner Bredewold, who will be one to watch this Classics season, especially in the early absence of the world champion.
- Theres is not the only superteam, though. Sure, Vollering is wearing the crown at FDJ-Suez, but fellow newcomers Juliette Labous, Elise Chabbey and Ally Wollaston – who was flying in Australia, and carried that form to Europe and victory at this weekend's Clasica de Almería – along with incumbents Évita Muzic, Vittoria Guazzini and Amber Kraak, make this a team to contend with on all terrains.
- At Visma-Lease a Bike, there’s a new and intriguing dynamic building with Marianne Vos the natural leader, and now Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, a still relatively unknown quantity after a turbulent kick-off at the UAE Tour, but the former world champion has huge aspirations for her return to the road, including a certain yellow jumper. While Vos, similar to Kopecky, is skipping the Classics opener that she won last year in favour of a later start at Trofeo Alfredo Binda – which she’s won a record-equalling four times since 2009 – as she builds up to Milan-San Remo, Ferrand-Prévot is expected to line up at Strade Bianche, where eyes will be on the French multi-hyphenate whether she likes it or not.
- The beloved Tuscan one-day race will, as ever, be one not to miss if at all possible. Reigning champion Kopecky will not be there, but 2024 runner-up Longo Borghini will be determined to prove her UAE Tour title was at least as much due to form as lack of top-drawer competition, along with Vollering and Niewiadoma, who have already met in Spain.
- Reigning champion of both La Flèche Wallonne and a memorable 2024 Tour de France, Niewiadoma joined much of the GC cohort at Setmana Valenciana to kick off 2025, but unable to follow Vollering et al. on stage 1, she settled into the bunch and helped out compatriot Agnieszka Skalniak-Sójka to sixth overall. Niewiadoma herself is one of the riders whose spring schedule is yet to be filled out, but it’s unlikely to see many changes to that of last season, where 20th at Amstel Gold was a solitary blip in a spring bursting with top results – a particular goal, as always, is Strade Bianche where Niewiadoma has consistently finished in the top 10 of every edition she's completed (one DNF in 10 appearances), including four podiums in a row from 2016-2019.
- What's more, the chances are that the super-team effect of adding popular Danish star Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig to Niewiadoma's already strong Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto roster will only help the German squad that also boasts recent Tour Down Under stage winner Dygert, the punchy Chiara Consonni and a couple of 2024's breakthrough stars, Neve Bradbury and Antonia Niedermaier.
Everyone’s curious about Milan-San Remo, obviously
The really great but also distinctly unsurprising news? It looks like everyone who is anyone is going to be on the start line of what is nominally the first-ever Milan-San Remo Donne, which will mark the end of a three-weekend run of Italian one-day races after Strade Bianche and the oft-overlooked, but always brilliant, Trofeo Alfredo Binda.
Naturally, everyone wants a chance to mark their name in history, in what many see as another step forward for women's cycling.
"I feel like it's going to be another race that will just raise the level even higher," Niewiadoma told Cycling Weekly last autumn. "It's just another thing that motivates you, being able to be the first woman to win Milan-San Remo after a break now of however many years."
Picking up where the Primavera Rosa (1999-2005) left off, the first edition of the new WorldTour race is yet to have the route confirmed, but it is set to run on the same day as the men’s race, and, like the Primavera Rosa, is likely to be contested over the last 120-odd kilometres – at least – of the Monumental parcours we know well, winding along the picturesque Ligurian coastline towards the double-header of climbs, the Cipressa and Poggio, then the fierce run-in to the line on the Via Roma in San Remo.
The chances of it starting in Milan, though, are nil. Look to Genoa, which would bring the race close to the UCI's maximum permitted distance of 160 km, or Arenzano, which is a little further west and about 25 km closer to San Remo, and a key milestone in the interminable men’s race as the first town it passes through after reaching the coast.
Regardless of just how long they're able to make it, seeing the women's WorldTour peloton taking on those infamous roads and climbs is a tantalising prospect, and with what's set to be one of the strongest fields of the season thus far, it's sure to be a highlight of the spring.
The Grand Tour pathway through the Ardennes
Looking a little further into the future, all the way to late April, the Ardennes Classics – Amstel Gold, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège – are where to truly assess the form of this season’s top GC contenders.
As ever, even the top GC riders in the women’s WorldTour cannot be tempted away from the early Classics, especially in Italy, but with the exception of a few obvious names, many of those expected to contend the Grand Tours will take a break after Milan-San Remo, then return for one last test in the hilly terrain of the Ardennes.
Kopecky, Vos, Longo Borghini and Reusser – and young 2024 breakout (on the road) Puck Pieterse – have already made their intentions known for the Holy Week of Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, but Vollering, Niewiadoma and Van der Breggen are all expected to swap the cobbles for the forest, where they’ll be joined by many of the aforementioned for at least one of the three hilly classics.
The Vuelta follows fast on the heels of Liège-Bastogne-Liège (27 April) with stage 1 rolling out of Barcelona just a week later on 4th May. So there’s really no time to re-evaluate if things go wrong for the likes of Vollering, Reusser and Lippert, Mavi García, Vos and Ferrand-Prévot who have already put their names down for the Spanish stage race.
In 2024, SD Worx-Protime ran away with 14 out of 27 WorldTour events (stage races counted as singular, not individual stages), Lidl-Trek and Visma-Lease a Bike distant podium finishers with four and three each. But if we look only at WorldTour one-days, it's significantly closer: five for SD Worx (Kopecky, Weibes and Bredewold) to Lidl-Trek (Balsamo and Longo Borghini) and Visma-Lease a Bike's three (Reijnhout and Vos).
This year, with the somewhat flattened field of competition thanks to the excellent business done on the transfer market, it's almost certainly going to be at least a little more evenly spread, and that can only be a good thing.
Bring it on.
Abby Mickey contributed to putting together this piece.
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