"I wasn’t even supposed to be here” - Paula Blasi flabbergasted with surprise Amstel Gold Race Ladies victory

Paula Blasi’s victory at the 2026 Amstel Gold Race Ladies stunned the international peloton—and the winner herself. The UAE Team ADQ rider delivered a standout performance, sealed with a solo attack that left favourites like Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney and Demi Vollering with no reply.

Yet beyond the result, her words after the race conveyed bewilderment, emotion, and an uncommon honesty. Far from immediate euphoria, Blasi admitted at the finish that she still hadn’t grasped what she had achieved: “No, I think I’ll need a couple of weeks or even months to take it in,” she began, after securing the biggest win of her life. A confession that captures the scale of a triumph as unexpected as it was brilliant.

The finale was as unpredictable as the race itself. The rider described the confusion of the closing kilometers: “Honestly, when I was alone and crossed the finish line, I didn’t even know how many kilometres I had left. So I thought ‘I hope I only have five to go.’ Then suddenly they told me ‘no, you need to hold it for 21.’”

Blasi stayed resolute despite the demands of a long solo, sustaining her attack strongly despite the strong work back in the peloton, which was often led by FDJ - Suez and SD Worx - ProTime. “I knew it was going to be a hard day out front.”

One of the most striking aspects of her win is that, minutes before the decisive move, she had lost contact with the main group: “In fact, five minutes before I made the move, I’d been dropped. So I came back and said ‘okay, let’s try, let’s see if I can help the team.’”

That shift in mindset proved crucial on a relentless day: “And suddenly I found myself in front. Yes, because at that point it was a really hard race. And how did I do it? I don’t even know.”

Blasi also underlined the tactical difficulty of the race, especially on terrain that was still new to her: “From the start I ride for the team. So I told the team I was really struggling to hold position because it’s my first race here in the Ardennes.”

The Spaniard clearly described the chaos in the bunch: “This peloton is crazy. It’s pretty hard to stay at the front. And, in fact, that’s the most important part.” Faced with that, she found an almost improvised solution in the break: “At one point I said ‘let’s go to the front if you can go better in the break, because then you don’t have to fight for position.’”

Perhaps the most revealing detail came when she recalled that her start was a late call-up: “To be honest, I don’t even know right now, because I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I was registered for the race just yesterday because we had some injuries and a few riders ill.”

With humility, Blasi closed with a candid reflection: “I need to take a deep breath and accept what just happened.”