UAE Team ADQ's Elisa Longo Borghini will return to racing next week for the first time since abandoning the Tour de France Femmes, as she builds towards trying to win her first elite rainbow jersey at the World Championships in Rwanda.
Longo Borghini won the Giro d'Italia Women for the second time in July, but then had to abandon the Tour de France after just stages due to a gastrointestinal illness.
According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, the Italian will form part of the UAE Team ADQ line-up for a double header of French races next week, Thursday's Kreiz Breizh Elites Féminin and then the WorldTour Classic Lorient Agglomération, formerly the GP de Plouay, on Saturday.
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Longo Borghini won the GP de Plouay in 2021, a hilly one-day race in Brittany that is often used as a pre-Worlds tune-up.
From there, Gazzetta report, the 33-year-old will head to altitude training on Mount Teide in Tenerife as she prepares for the testing, hilly course on the World Championships road race in Rwanda.
Despite her long and storied career, Longo Borghini has never won a world road race title, and has made it clear from the start of the year that Rwanda, alongside the Giro, was one of her two major goals of the 2025 season.
"It's a parcours, the one in Rwanda, that really suits my characteristics, so I would really like to be in good shape there," she told Cyclingnews in the spring.
"I'd love, once – maybe it's a dream, who knows – to win the World Championships. Dreaming is for free."
Her plight is helped by the fact that the Italian cycling federation has upped their team size for Rwanda, according to Gazzetta.
One of the nations ranked high enough to qualify for the maximum of seven riders, Italy were initially only planning to send four riders to Rwanda – with the high costs associated with the far-flung location seeing several teams shrink their budget and so squad size. They have now decided to send six elite women to back Longo Borghini's ambitions.
This will see Italy on par with the likes of the Netherlands and France in team size.
It's not yet clear which riders will be selected alongside Longo Borghini to tackle the road race on September 27, but the Italian team will be able to pick from the likes of, Soraya Paladin, Silvia Persico, Marta Cavalli and more as they chase a first women's road race title since Elisa Balsamo won in 2021.
