Tour de France Femmes 2025: stage four from Saumur to Poitiers – live | Tour de France Femmes
Published: 2025-07-29 13:15:21 | Views: 14
Key events
“It’s unfortunate,” the UAE Team ADQ director, Cherie Pridham, tells the reporter Matt Stephens of Elisa Longo Borghini’s withdrawal. “She battled through, of course. But riders’ health is more important than the competition … At the end of the day we’ve had a really good season. We came in very bold, hopeful for stages here, and that doesn’t stop.
“We have aspirations to continue to fight, and we will do that. Elisa will be back, we all know what she’s like, and we wish her well in her recovery. We start today with ambitions.”
Elisa Longo Borghini. Photograph: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images
“Elisa Longo Borghini has stomach issues,” says TNT Sports pundit Dani Rowe of the UAE Team ADQ rider who has abandoned this morning. “Also, a few other teammates have been struggling with sickness overnight.
“The worry is if it’s going to spread to the rest of the team … they’ll do all they can to isolate the riders if they’re not feeling great.”
Jeremy Whittle’s stage three report is here:
Preamble
Demi Vollering of FDJ-Suez will start today’s stage 4 despite a heavy crash on the approach to Angers yesterday. The 2023 Tour de France Femmes champion thus avoids the fate of several other high-profile riders in the first three stages: Marlen Reusser (Movistar), Charlotte Kool (Picnic PostNL) and Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE Team ADQ) are among eight riders in the peloton who have abandoned already.
“It’s not normal, the attitude of many teams and many riders. They’re disrespectful. We lose the respect in the last years in men’s and women’s cycling,” said Vollering’s team manager, Stephen Delcourt, after yesterday’s accident. The highly decorated Dutch rider will doubtless be riding through a lot of pain after a heavy impact on her back, knee and glutes yesterday.
The irrepressible Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease A Bike), meanwhile, retook the GC lead after yesterday’s stage, won by Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-ProTime). Vos is a mere 6sec ahead second-placed of Kim Le Court Pienaar (AG Insurance-Soudal) and 12 sec in front of her own Visma teammate, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, in third place overall. Those narrow gaps will mean plenty of nervousness among the GC teams with the potential for surprise attacks, especially if the wind blows.
Stage four, a 131km trip from Saumur to Poitiers, should be one for the sprinters but the presence of the category-four climb of Cote de Marigny might tempt a few potential escape artists to give it a go. That summit of that solitary categorised climb comes after 101.6km of racing – but the chances are we see a race well controlled by sprinters’ and GC teams alike.
