Dutch domination and multi-mountain challenges - Five conclusions from La Vuelta Femenina 2025

Following the spring Classics of March and April, the Women's WorldTour turned to the first Grand Tour of the season as the peloton headed south to Iberia.

The 11th edition of La Vuelta Femenina took in seven days of racing across Spain, bringing the riders from Barcelona to the summit of the Alto de Cotobello via hills, sprints, a team time trial, and two major summit finishes.

It was a week of Dutch domination as four women – Demi Vollering, Marianne Vos, Anna van der Breggen, and Femke Gerritse – shared the individual stage wins between them following Lidl-Trek's TTT triumph.

The conclusion of the race saw Demi Vollering crowned as the queen of the Vuelta, continuing her flying start to life at FDJ-Suez. However, there was much more to the race than Vollering and her compatriots scooping up the glory.

With the year's opening Grand Tour in the rear-view mirror, we offer our five conclusions to La Vuelta Femenina 2025.

Demi Vollering is the strongest GC rider on the strongest stage racing team

Demi Vollering moved to FDJ-Suez ahead of the 2025 season, and the team signed strong support for their new star with Juliette Labous joining Evita Muzic on their climbing squad. Vollering, Labous, and Muzic formed an unbeatable combination on the mountain stages, something that isn't a given when putting together a new team.

Labous and Muzic would be leaders in their own right at most other teams, but they happily scaled back their own ambitions to ride in service of Vollering.

On both stage 5 and stage 7, Muzic and Labous worked hard on the penultimate climbs to reduce the size of the group of favourites. On the finishing climb of the former, to Lagunas de Neila, they kept pushing to set up Vollering's stage-winning attack on the last 3km

On the latter, it was Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) who took the lead, preventing any attacks before the final kilometre, but this couldn't stop Vollering from digging deep towards the end of the climb and distancing her former coach by 25 seconds for another solo victory that confirmed her as the Vuelta overall winner.

After she missed the 2024 Tour de France Femmes victory due to losing time after a crash, Vollering and her new team look more than ready for the stage races to come this summer.

Anna van der Breggen back at her best

In 2021, the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta was the final stage race before Anna van der Breggen retired from cycling, moving into a sport director role with SD Worx-Protime instead. Her retirement was a surprise to many at the time as she was still very competitive, having won, among other races, the Giro d'Italia, Vuelta a Burgos, and La Flèche Wallonne that year.

Eventually, Van der Breggen was second-guessing her decision, too, and after three years behind the wheels of team cars, she returned to racing for 2025. The Vuelta Femenina was her first Women's WorldTour stage race (after the ProSeries-ranked Setmana Valenciana in February).

With her experience and tactical nous, the 35-year-old grabbed the opportunity to descend away from a reduced group to a solo victory on stage 4. She finished third on stage 5, but it was the final stage in Asturias that saw Van der Breggen's greatest performance.

On the 10.3km Alto de Cotobello, she set the pace for almost 8km, reducing the group of favourites to only the top four GC riders. She could not keep up with Vollering and Marlen Reusser (Movistar) at the end, dropping to third overall, but the GC podium finish shows that Van der Breggen is back.

Vos is boss in the Vuelta sprints

For the third year in a row, Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease A Bike) has won the green points jersey at La Vuelta Femenina. And for the third year in a row, she won two stages while doing it. Add two second places to that, and the points classification wasn't even close, with Vos' 245 points dwarfing the 149 points of Demi Vollering.

Ever since the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta was renamed to La Vuelta Femenina, moved to early May, and extended to a full week for the 2023 season, Vos has made the Spanish stage race a cornerstone of her racing calendar.

For various reasons, top sprinters Lorena Wiebes and Elisa Balsamo have been taking breaks from road racing in early May for several years in a row, and Vos has carved a niche for herself where she can be the undisputed favourite in sprint finishes.

But being labelled the favourite is one thing – confirming that status by winning two of the three sprint stages and finishing runner-up on the third one as well as on the hilly stage 4 is quite another, and a testament to the strength of Vos even in her 20th pro season and the support of her team.

Opportunities for lesser-known riders

The calendar spot and somewhat less lofty status of La Vuelta Femenina compared to the Giro Women or Tour de France Femmes has been a benefit not just to Vos, though, as the race offers opportunities for talents who aren't yet considered as being at the very top of the sport.

Femke Gerritse (SD Worx-Protime) took her first Women's WorldTour victory when she outsprinted Vos to win stage 3, taking the overall lead and wearing the red jersey for two days. 20-year-old Marion Bunel (Visma-Lease A Bike) proved her climbing prowess by placing seventh and ninth on the two mountain stages, though time lost on the first road stages meant that a top GC result was out of reach.

Usoa Ostolaza (Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi) impressed with a very well-paced climb to the Lagunas de Neila, coming from behind to pass Bunel and Cédrine Kerbaol on her way to a fifth place on the stage, but the Spanish champion could not repeat her feat on the final stage and dropped out of the GC top 10.

Monica Trinca Colonel (Liv-AlUla-Jayco), on the other hand, finished in the top-20 on every stage, showing that she is not only a climbing talent but also adept at staying well-positioned in the peloton on hectic stages with echelon action and in sprint finishes, something that other climbers sometimes lack. Only in her second pro season after switching over from Gran Fondo racing, Trinca Colonel will be a GC contender to watch.

More multi-mountain stages, please!

Stages 5 and 7, with their summit finishes, were the days that decided the general classification, and they would have been so even if they had only included those finishing climbs. But both stages were not just flattish stages with a hard finishing climb, as is so often the case on the women's calendar.

Instead, stage 5 comprised two ascents of the Lagunas de Neila climb, turning left 2.5km from the finish line at the Alto de Rozavientos to descend and tackle the whole climb once more. Stage 7 was even more challenging with the uncategorised Puerto de Pajares, followed by the Alto de la Colladona, Alto de la Colladiella, and the Alto de Cotobello.

The presence of multiple climbs on the stages significantly altered the way the races developed. In the end, both stages were won by Demi Vollering, but the attacks from Mareille Meijering (Movistar) on stage 5 or Femke de Vries on stage 7, as well as the move by Evita Muzic and Mavi García (Liv-AlUla-Jayco) ahead of the Alto de Cotobello climb would likely not have taken place without the earlier climbs.

Last but not least, multi-mountain stages are considered a completely normal, indeed necessary, part of Grand Tours or week-long stage races in men's road cycling. They should get the same status in women's racing.