There was once a time where you could count the contenders for every Women’s WorldTour race on one hand. Mostly, the chosen few would ride in the colours of one particular world-beating Dutch team that now goes by the name of SD Worx-Protime (formerly Boels-Dolmans). With the likes of Demi Vollering, Anna van der Breggen, Chantal Blaak and more in their ranks, the squad was silencing, dominant and unflappable. Whether the race was in the mountains, on the white roads, or on the cobbles, at least one SD Worx rider would stand on the podium – winning was not a challenge, it was an expectation. But that was then.
In 2025, if we are to take the general classification from the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift as the prime example (the headline event on today’s WWT calendar), it becomes clear that things have changed. The top-10 of this year’s Tour, won in style by Visma-Lease a Bike’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, was made up of riders from eight different teams. Notably, the best placed rider from SD Worx was Van der Breggen, down in 11th place. Last year, nine different teams made up the top-10, a stark comparison to the year before when Demi Vollering and Lotte Kopecky had a stranglehold on the race, finishing first and second for SD Worx. Across the entire Women’s WorldTour calendar so far this year, the victories have been spread between nine teams – SD Worx have still taken four of them thanks to Lorena Wiebes’ unquestionable sprinting dominance and world champion Kopecky’s good run of form in the Classics, but this is only in races with particularly flat terrain suited to a bunch kick. When it comes to a stage racing and Grand Tour perspective, the Dutch team has tumbled down the rankings.
Does this change come from a decline in performance from SD Worx and its riders, or has the rest of the peloton stepped up its game to reach their level?
The answer, it seems, is a combination of both. As women’s cycling has grown in popularity thanks to races like Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France being added to the calendar, more teams have had the luxury of greater sponsor interest and increased budgets as a result. With this, access to better equipment is more common across the board, more riders are being paid a sizeable wage (the Cyclists' Alliance survey last year showed that salaries have overall been trending positively since 2018), the sport has become more professional and performances have improved as a result. At the end of the Tour de France Femmes this year, 2024 winner Kasia Niewiadoma commented that if she had produced the same power numbers in 2025 as she did when she won, the Polish rider believes she would have been 10 minutes down on the general classification. This is symbolic of a peloton that is getting faster and faster at an unprecedented rate.
But what of SD Worx, the team that once would have gone into every WorldTour race with expectation of victory? They still have the likes of Van der Breggen, Wiebes and Kopecky in their ranks, but in today’s era of women’s cycling it’s too expensive to buy all of the best talent. While before SD Worx was one of the very few teams offering a professional set-up and good salary, there are now a number of squads in the bidding war when it comes to contract negotiations. There are still areas of the sport where SD Worx pulls rank – bunch sprints and lead-outs with Kopecky and Wiebes – but when it comes to GC racing, they are playing catch-up. Van der Breggen’s headline-grabbing comeback to the sport in 2025 hasn’t produced the results they might have hoped for at races like the Giro and the Tour, and the team’s budget isn’t there to pay other potential Grand Tour winners what they are being offered elsewhere.
While this isn’t the story that SD Worx long-time team manager Danny Stam will want to read, it is overall a hugely positive sign of growth for the sport. It means that racing is fundamentally harder to predict and better to watch as a result. We only need to look back at the last two editions of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift to understand that. Each year as the stakes get higher in terms of both race prestige and monetary reward in terms of salaries and win bonuses, the level is going up. It is hard to imagine any other sport in the world right now experiencing growth at the same speed as women’s professional road cycling – in which you can win a stage race one year and believe you would be 10 minutes down with the same power numbers a year later. Perhaps most excitingly, it is showing no signs of slowing down.
