Tour de France Femmes 2025: stage four from Saumur to Poitiers
Date: 2025-07-29T11:45:39.000Z
Title: Preamble
Content: 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.
Stage start: 1.45pm UK time / 2.45pm local time
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