'I never imagined it would happen' – What does it mean to win your first Tour de France Femmes stage? Two 2025 winners relive their victories

Maëva Squiban and Mavi García may have different nationalities, be different kinds of riders and be at very different moments in their sporting lives, but they both had something in common in the Tour de France Femmes last year: massive reasons to celebrate.

García, 42, launched an 11-kilometre solo move on stage 2 to fend off the peloton by the bare minimum and claim the victory, whilst Squiban, nearly two decades younger than the Spaniard, later knocked out back-to-back stage wins in the westerly edge of the Alps.

Their successes were obtained via terrain and strategies that were far from similar, but from one key perspective, you could ask, and does that matter? After all, both riders ended up with their first-ever Grand Tour stage wins – in Squiban's case, her second too – and as such, come what may in the future, the 2025 Tour provided both riders with the highest of high points in their respective careers.

Yet if Squiban and García both emphasise how important those 2025 Tour wins will remain to them personally, it's striking that the logic behind that is for very different reasons.

For García, the victory closed a significant chapter of her life on the bike. "It's like the icing on the cake," she tells Cyclingnews earlier this year, whilst for Squiban taking back-to-back wins at 23 embodied the opening of a new phase as a pro, acting as kernels of inspiration for fresh dreams and ambitions.

That said, when both Squiban and García won last July, rather than being game-changers in the short-term, their immediate futures were already well on track. For García, winning at Quimper did not alter her already fast-maturing plans to move on from Liv AlUla Jayco and, as it happened, join Squiban at UAE Team ADQ for 2026. Nor did Squiban's first victory at Ambert on stage 6 in any way reduce her level of ambition to go for it again as soon as possible – proven by her managing to pull off a second triumph on stage 7 to Chambéry.

Just racing the 2025 Tour, the second in her career, had already been a major landmark for Squiban, given it had started right next to her family home.

"The first stage began just two kilometres from my house," she says with a notable ring of pride in her voice. "So my sister, my grandparents and my parents could all come and see me take part.

"Then when the team got third in a stage into Poitiers with my teammate Lara Gillespie, it was 500 metres away from where I'd once lived, so I knew all the roads that day by heart. Even before I won, it was already a really magical Tour."

García, on the other hand, came into the Tour de France with very different emotional baggage – a strong sense of points to prove, both regarding the season in general and to do with her team at the time, Liv AlUla Jayco. Having got off to a great start in 2025, she says things had then gone badly wrong at the Vuelta a España with illness and bad weather.

"And that was despite me having the best numbers of my entire year, better than the Tour or the World Championships," where she'd later take a bronze medal in the road race, she points out with a wry grin. Then by the time she got to the Tour de France, she and her team had very different ideas about what attitude to take to the eleventh Grand Tour of her career.

Despite her five top ten placings overall in the Giro d'Italia, including one podium in 2023, as well as a tenth place in the 2023 Tour de France, "the team didn't have the confidence in me to believe that I could go for GC, as was my idea," García says. "They simply wanted me to go to stages and I didn't think that was realistic.

"I'm no sprinter, I have to get to the finish line alone to have a chance of winning, so it's easier for me to get a good result overall than to try to fight for a stage, over and over again."

Things, however, went drastically wrong for García's GC dreams, after a major crash on stage 1 saw her lose four minutes to the other favourites. Whilst uninjured, from that point onward, if not at all enamoured of the idea of trying for stages, she recognised that in the 2025 Tour at least it was her best remaining option on the table. At the same time, she used her disappointment at her team's original decision as motivation for her new goal, telling herself that "if they didn't have enough faith in me to let me go for the overall in the Tour, I think that was something that pushed me even harder to go for the stage win. And it worked out."

Different trajectories at the Tour, and before

For Squiban and UAE Team ADQ, things were moving in a very different direction. By the time she went for win number 1, her squad had lost three teammates on three separate days, one of them as high-profile as double Giro d'Italia winner Elisa Longo Borghini. But at the same time, their Polish racer, Dominika Włodarczyk was very much in the thick of the GC battle and heading towards fourth overall and as a unit, Squiban says, despite their losses UAE Team ADQ were feeling, if anything, more cohesive than before. On a personal level, too, she'd already had that unforgettable start on home soil in Brittany to keep her commitment to the 2025 Tour near a high-tide mark.

"Of course I was disappointed to lose my teammates who were sick" – Longo Borghini on stage 3, Eleonora Gasparrini on stage 4, Karlijn Swinkels on stage 5 – "but this is the Tour, it's the biggest race in the world, so we had to concentrate on that, too, and no the day I won there were still four stages to come," she points out.

"On top of that, I was fighting for my first victory of the year with my new team, so that was very important for me.

"The day I won my first stage though, it wasn't that I felt particularly inspired when I woke up, it was just feeling like a normal day. I always had the idea, though, that I'd have a chance somewhere and that'd be it, I'd have to try. It was only during the stage itself that I felt good, though, so I went for it purely to see what might happen."

If Squiban was taking things step by step on the stage and in the race overall, when it came to the Tour, García, on the other hand, been fighting a series of demons that she'd definitely come across before. At some point in their career every almost longstanding pro has to work out how to battle against a dearth of mid-season results, and in García's case in 2025, that issue had materialised in a hugely disappointing Vuelta.

"For one reason or another, I never got to where I wanted, or whatever I was looking for I could never get that good result," she says about much of the first half of 2025

"That goes on weighing you down, and particularly when they [the team] are demanding you get results and you're feeling obliged to do it."

At 42, it's inevitable that the question of retirement is closer to the surface than in Squiban's case, say, and Garciá reveals that "I'd known that I wanted to continue [beyond 2025] but then when things don't work out as you want, I was starting to have some kinds of doubts.

"I knew I was leaving the team, too, and it was hard to see which way I was going. But I just knew that I had to move forward."

What it means to win

Come the day of her first Tour stage win itself, Squiban took it by storm by attacking 32 kilometres from the finish on the Col de Chansert, a cat. 2 climb that followed the even more difficult Col du Beal. In less than 2.5km of climbing on the Chansert, she gained an advantage of just over a minute, and despite the less complicated terrain that followed, she successively stayed away.

Her reward was to clinch the just second victory for a French rider in the revived version of the Tour de France Femmes after Cédrine Kerboal's win in 2024 – though there were plenty more to come last year. Indeed, that success set things up very nicely for her own second win 24 hours later, she explains, with her team's open-minded attitude to its own pre-race orders helping her to make that happen.

"Winning one stage in the Tour is already a big moment for the whole season and if it's the first time for a rider, then even more so."

"It confirms how hard you've worked and it shows what you can do, to yourself and to the team. So it maybe wasn't surprising that on the second day, I was really unleashed. My legs were going well, I told myself I knew I didn't have anything to lose, so I told myself to go and give it everything. You could say that the euphoria was partly responsible for my success."

She had deliberately ignored team orders, she adds, but she knew that UAE could be very open-minded in such questions.

"In the briefing Cherie [Pridham, team DS] told us to take it easy in the opening kilometres but I don't know why, I wanted to try from the start, and I decided to go for it anyway."

"Sometimes you just get that feeling and then when it happened, they were ok with me doing that too."

"That is something great about the team, they do give you that freedom of manoeuvre. So let's say I went beyond myself, because sometimes you know it's going to work."

If she had her first win to inspire her for victory number 2, it remained a voyage in the dark, she says, as the Col du Granier – the final ascent where she attacked to go for her win – "was completely new."

"I knew all the early stages of course, being so close to home, and I'd look at what was coming up on the Internet.

"But even if we went through it in real detail during the briefing, I'd never done an actual recon. So everything about the climb and descent - that was completely new."

García's move, in contrast, was forged more on blind hope than certainty that it was all going to work out.

"Thinking about it now, it's funny. I'd talked it through with my boyfriend about how even if I didn't get it right that often, at least that day everything lined up for it: it was a Sunday, everybody had the TV on anyway because it was the last day of the men's race, so that's why it got so much attention," she says.

"But the first day I had crashed and lost four minutes, I'd felt really rubbish because I'd gone to the Tour feeling great and the truth is that night I had gone to bed feeling utterly destroyed. But then I woke up feeling very determined to give it everything I had.

"I knew what the finish of stage 2 was like in general, I knew it was all very undulating, but those last 10 kilometres after I'd attacked flew by. I was so concentrated on what I was doing that by the time when I first realised where I actually was, there were only three kilometres to go. From then on it was very simple: give it everything."

While Squiban had plenty of time to savour her win, for García it was nip and tuck all the way to the finish line, as the favourites massed behind her and the gap shrank from 20 seconds to less than half that by the start of the closing, unevenly uphill, kilometre. The Spaniard was in plain sight for the peloton, Visma-Lease a Bike made a major effort to bring her back, but somehow, she stayed away.

"I really didn't believe I'd got it until I crossed the finish line. They were so close and finally it was a question of keeping on believing, not looking back and having the right kind of legs on the day, too. Otherwise, it just wouldn't have worked."

Both riders talk about their victories being compensations or rewards for the hard work they have put in, but it's noticeable how for García, she feels the biggest win of her career to date at her age is something like a crowning achievement, that it can't really get any better. That's something Squiban seemingly didn't doubt even before her victories: rather than capping her ambition, winning twice in the Tour in 24 hours both renders a third stage win even more desirable for her – and much harder to repeat.

"I know my rivals will be watching me and keeping me under much stricter control than before," Squiban says. "It's going to be way harder to get in the break, let alone win, and yet that remains a big objective."

"For the future, while I can say that it was the dream of my life to win a stage of the Tour, now I've done that, all the emotions I have when you look at the list of those who've won a stage of the Tour, you can see it's not just anybody who's done it. So I know have to win another one."

From García's point of view, her Tour stage victory is taken very much in the context of her looming retirement, but at the same time she does want to go on exploiting its memory as a boost to her confidence. Victory on stage 2 of the 2025 Tour de France doesn't have to be the closing line of a final chapter, in other words.

"Having that win in my palmarès really calms me down," she says. "I knew I was going well but it confirms everything I felt and on top of that, it rewards everything more than it confirms it. Two and two don't always add to four in cycling and sometimes things don't work out. That win was a real reward for all that hard work I'd done."

"I'm not going to say that this is my last year, there's a 98% chance that it will be, but if you say it is for sure, it feels like a prison sentence. Rather I prefer to think I'm the same as always, I just want to keep going to the races, go on being competitive and if I can get some kind of a result or help the team, that's what I'm taking with me.

"But this Tour win is like the icing on the cake, too and now it's what keeps me calm. I have the same feeling as when I got a medal in the Worlds in Rwanda," where she took bronze in the road race, "I was looking so hard for both results, at the Tour and the Worlds, and now I have got both."

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