This article was first published in Issue 139 of our magazine

Of the team’s many memorable moments of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift 2025, two acts of selfless teamwork stood out from AG Insurance-Soudal. Both involved the 25-year-old Australian, Sarah Gigante. In the final kilometre into Guéret on stage five the climber was at the front of a select group digging deep, putting all her effort into the finale as Tour winners Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney sat behind. But the rider from Melbourne was not doing it to preserve or bolster her own position on the general classification, but rather to set up her teammate Kim Le Court to take the stage win and the maillot jaune.

Moments before, Gigante had been off the back on the descent from Le Maupuy. Her determination to catch back and drive the front group on, meant they kept Marianne Vos at enough of a distance behind for Le Court to take the yellow jersey. The dedication to the team did not go unnoticed – Le Court became the first African to win a stage at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and said: “Without Gigante, I would not have done what I did today.”

Read more: Kim Le Court’s meteoric ascent through the pro cycling peloton

A few days later, Le Court – unprompted by the team car – was on the front of the peloton at the bottom of the Col de la Madeleine setting a pace for Gigante to attack, in doing so sacrificing all hope of retaining the yellow jersey. An hour or so later, a tearful Gigante stood shivering on the top of the summit, having finished second on the stage behind Pauline Ferrand-Prévot. “To have the yellow jersey sacrifice herself for me, that is next level,” she said. “That’s the kind of stuff that gives you goosebumps.”

It would be remiss to claim the riders were just returning favours. Rather, it is part of the culture at AG Insurance-Soudal – Gigante and Le Court are among a group of riders who not only have the will but also the longing to work, sacrifice and struggle for each other. Gigante herself is someone who thrives in that kind of environment, and her results from a flourishing 2025 season back this up.

A few months on from a fruitful summer, which included two stage wins at the Giro d’Italia in July and that prosperous Tour, Gigante is home in Melbourne. Neither the time passed nor distance from cycling’s European heartlands dim or dampen her enthusiasm for the ambiance in the AG Insurance-Soudal setup. When I ask Gigante about the team atmosphere, she lights up with excitement: “It’s really a lovely environment. I can’t even express how good the environment is, I just love the atmosphere so much.”

Gigante is someone who is quick to heap praise on others, in fact it quickly became apparent in our conversation that that is her first port of call. She speaks glowingly of the support she has received throughout her career. Despite only being 25, Gigante is a rider who has been through the wringer. Even during this year’s Tour de France, after her storming display on the Madeleine, she slipped off the podium places on the final stage, finishing sixth overall. A few weeks later in August, a fractured femur from a crash in training ended her season and prompted a return to Melbourne from her adopted home in Girona. It’s the latest setback in a long list.

“I’m used to it, but I wouldn’t say it makes it that much easier. What makes it easier is that I have built up an awesome support network. It helps a ton – my team is awesome, and my mom and my coach, they’ve all been through it a lot. Also being part of the Victorian Institute of Sport (VIS). They treat me like a queen there,” said Gigante, chatting to me after she had just finished her first swim at VIS, in her rehabilitation from the femur fracture.

“We weren’t really sure how I’d manage, because I dislocated my shoulder quite recently – during the Tour de France – so then we weren’t sure if I would be able to do freestyle with my left leg out of action and my right arm out of action,” laughed Gigante.

Overcoming barriers and getting the most out of her time on and off the bike is part of Gigante’s drive – whether it is during rehabilitation or balancing cycling with her academic pursuits, like her linguistics and geography degree at the University of Melbourne, which she finished two years ago.

“Cycling is time intensive, but you also have a lot of time off the bike,” she said. “I would love to ride 24 hours a day, but no one can, so I find it’s really a nice balance to have something else to do. Especially when you’re injured, or even just when you’re not going well on the bike. You don’t want to have all your self value based on how your training is going or how your racing is going. Because suddenly you lose your whole identity if you have to take a long stint off the bike.”

Gigante is not one to sit still. After her degree, she undertook a coaching course and has plans to do a Masters one day. Gigante’s multiple goals are rewarding, fun, sometimes stressful, but worth it. “By thinking not just about your own cycling 24/7, it doesn’t just make you a more well-rounded person, but a better cyclist too,” she said. “Because otherwise it can get to a point where you are a bit too obsessed with it. I like to stay busy, but no matter how much time I have, I always seem to fill it up.”

This has always been the case for Gigante and was perhaps most apparent when she was a teenager. “I found university quite easy in terms of balancing things compared to my last years of high school,” she said. “I’m just a really competitive person, and whenever I do something, I want to do my very best. So, it was the same in high school – we get a rank in Australia, a percentile, up to 99.95 and you really see how you turn out at the end.”

For those wondering – although she didn’t mention it in our chat – my research showed that Gigante, of course, achieved a perfect 99.95 in the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR). Cycling was and remains her primary passion, even if it was not initially obvious how she could break into the sport’s elite ranks. “I wanted to be a professional cyclist, but I never really looked into what that involved,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about it, apart from occasionally watching what I could find – the scraps of women cycling that was televised.”

However, Gigante had inspiration at hand from fellow Aussie Grace Brown, who she was briefly teammates with at Holden Team Gusto Racing when Brown was 25 and Gigante 17. Brown, now retired, bowed out of the sport in spectacular fashion in 2024 with a Monument title (Liège-Bastogne-Liège), an Olympic gold medal and a rainbow jersey in the individual time trial.

But long before that, Brown was inspiring an enthusiastic teenager about what was possible in the world of cycling for those who are driven enough. The limited coverage of women’s cycling at the time did extend to La Course by Le Tour de France, a race which Gigante remembers skipping her favourite group ride, the Tour of the 'Burbs, to watch. “I would do the group ride religiously every Tuesday and Thursday evening, but I remember I skipped it that evening to watch Grace at La Course, and I never skipped 'Burbs, no matter what. So, it was a big deal, getting to watch women’s cycling on the TV with a friend in it.”

Gigante was hooked and she went on to race at the Innsbruck World Championships in 2018 in the junior category. However, the step-up from the domestic Australian races was a challenge for her. “In Australia at the Nationals, we had like 20 riders and you could ride around the outside and attack,” she said. “That’s how I won the under-19 national road race. Then turning up to Innsbruck, hurtling along a highway with over 100 riders, it wasn’t easy. I certainly wasn’t getting any contract offers from that.”

The barriers – geographical, financial and cultural – for Australian riders are apparent at all ages and are particularly challenging for female athletes, with a lack of coverage and funding compared to the male sport. While in Europe, the best crop of talent can race at high-level races on weekends, not only gathering essential race-craft skills, but also competing under the watchful eyes of scouts.

Getting to Europe, though, is far from easy. “You can’t really skip school to go racing in Europe,” says Gigante. “And it’s not like you just go on the weekend to the Nations Cup. You might be working full-time to be able to pay for this expensive sport. But then you’d have to quit your job to go.” Gigante believes these factors may contribute to non-European talent being spotted from E-racing, a discipline she herself finished second in at the 2020 UCI Esports World Championships.

Gigante’s timeline reads like a story of perseverance. Back in 2018 when she was scoring a perfect ATAR while juggling ambitions of becoming a professional rider, she did so with two broken arms and her mum helping her transcribe homework tasks. The season ended and she hadn’t been picked up by a professional team. So after winning the National Road Championships in 2019, as an 18-year-old, she decided to take matters into her own hands: “When I won the Elite Road Nationals, which was a huge surprise, I went onto the UCI website and just emailed the top 20 teams.”

It didn’t work out immediately, but after a spell of amateur racing in America, Gigante got her opportunity in the professional ranks with Team Tibco-Silicon Valley Bank. But again, things didn’t run smoothly. From Covid-19 wreaking havoc on the European racing calendar, more injuries, and a spell at Movistar which ended by mutual agreement, Gigante was yet to make her break into the big time. By the end of 2023 things weren’t looking good and, with no contract offers forthcoming, she was expecting to race the 2024 Australian National Championships as an individual.

“I didn’t have a team any more – by my own choice – and I was in a bit of a pickle,” she said. “At that stage, I was thinking I’ll just go to Nationals as an individual, and then try to do the Tour Down Under, hopefully with the national team, and if I’m super strong, then hopefully I can get signed by someone. But I didn’t have to do that, because AG Insurance-Soudal took a chance on me.” Gigante, now in happier times, can look back at that period and its significance on her career and life with more serenity, and she is not the only one.

“I’m just so thankful still for them taking a chance on me. It was two years ago and actually, I didn’t know at the time, but they did the same thing at around the same time with Kim Le Court. She also was doing the same as me, just reaching out to all the WorldTour teams saying, ‘hey will you take a chance on me?’ I know I’m not the most conventional choice, and it was the same for her, because she’d not done road racing for 10 years, and I had had two super rough years.”

AG Insurance-Soudal took a chance on Gigante, but she also took a chance on the team. “When I was originally talking with the team at the end of 2023, they weren’t even a WorldTour team yet – they were just about to step up. And then the next year we raced together for the first time as a WorldTour team,” she said.

“At stage one of the Tour Down Under, Ally [Wollaston] won, and that was already like such a huge moment. Then just to see how everyone has stepped up since then. The team has got bigger and stronger and more experienced with Justine Ghekiere winning the Tour de France stage last year. And we believe we have so much more confidence now compared to then. I think when Kim won Liège this year, that’s when it all changed even more. It just seems to go up and up and up. I think the cool thing is the fact that so many different riders are performing and growing, it makes it even more special.”

And so we arrive in 2025 with a team that fostered the kind of environment perfect for a supremely-talented rider, who had been blighted by misfortune for the past few seasons. It was a recipe for success and this season was Gigante’s best yet. But, as often is the case on her timeline, it almost never happened. After she needed surgery to correct iliac artery endofibrosis, her campaign did not start until late May at the Tour of Norway. However, one month later she was winning two stages at the Giro, claiming the Queen of the Mountains jersey and standing on the third step of the overall podium.

“I didn’t feel like it was coming. My number one goal was just to be able to race pain-free,” said Gigante of her initial ambitions for the year. She more than exceeded this goal and after that Giro success she hurtled towards the aforementioned Tour de France, where she ended up with that sixth position on the overall classification, but her performance on the Madeleine showed she was one of the best climbers in the race behind the malliot jaune Ferrand-Prévot.

Along with the Tour of Norway, Giro and Tour, Gigante was also at the Tour de Suisse and so after only four races this year, she felt she was only just getting started before the femur fracture she is currently recovering from. Missing out on a World Championships in Rwanda that would have suited her attributes, was another setback. Her latest injury may have curtailed her best season yet, but Gigante knows she will be back – she has been through this before: “It feels like the end of the world in the moment, but then in the long run, it’s just like an annoying speed bump or a good story to tell.”

From skipping Tour of the 'Burbs to watch her friend compete in Europe, to devastating crashes, setbacks, and rehab programs, to ripping up the climbs of the Tour and Giro, it’s been quite the road for Gigante at the start of her career. There may be more speed bumps to come, but there will certainly be more open roads, with her opposition in the rearview mirror and just the glory of the finish line ahead.