Lorena Wiebes won the second stage of the Tour de France Femmes and kept the yellow jersey after a late sprint finish in Geneva. The Team SD Worx-Protime rider burst clear in the final 250m to beat Elisa Balsamo, with Marianne Vos third.
The 147.9-kilometer stage from Aigle to Geneva rewarded the fastest finisher after Riejanne Markus spent much of the day out front and still had more than a minute in hand before the chase closed hard in the final kilometer. She was caught 500m from the line, just as the sprinters were launching, and Wiebes made the move count with another clean finish.
For Wiebes, the result carried extra weight because she won in yellow. She said her team had worked hard all day and that the effort made the finish even better, while also saying every sprint feels exciting and a little nervous because one mistake is enough to end it. That is the kind of race she now keeps winning: she has seven Tour de France Femmes stage wins since the race returned in 2022, a total that already places her among the defining riders of the event’s short history.
The stage also fit a larger pattern for Team SD Worx-Protime, which had riders at the front of the peloton throughout the day. The Tour de France Femmes Grand Depart was being held beyond French borders for only the second time, after the 2024 edition began in Rotterdam, and the route swept north from Aigle around Lac Leman before arriving in Geneva in Switzerland.
There was still a small opening for the day to turn out differently. Markus went alone in the final 40km and forced the sprinters’ teams into a chase, but the gap could not survive once the pace lifted in the closing stretch. Wiebes’s second straight victory did more than add another line to the record book; it showed that even on a stage shaped by a long escape, the race is still hers to lose when the finish is fast and the timing is tight.
