Sarah Gigante pushes comeback limits with 190km Zwift ride after femur fracture

Sarah Gigante has taken her latest comeback to new extremes, completing a 190-kilometer indoor ride on Zwift during a 4.5-hour session over the weekend.

The Australian rider suffered a heavy training crash while training in August, right after the Tour de France Femmes, which left her with a broken femur and a premature end to the season.

The 24-year-old AG Insurance - Soudal rider had been one of the standouts of 2025, with two stage wins at the Giro d’Italia, third overall, and the mountains classification. She also came within touching distance of the Tour de France Femmes podium, before slipping to sixth overall after a brutal final stage in the mountains in which she lost 4 positions in the GC.

Gigante has been steadily recovering, and recently shared some updates on social media about her current condition. “Recovery is a bit more of a slog than I initially expected… I must have been a combination of naive and optimistic,” she wrote. “I like uphills more than I like uphill battles, but I’m doing my best to stay positive and not skip a single rep out of my billion physio exercises!”

AG Insurance - Soudal confirmed she would be sidelined for several months after the accident, and Gigante herself joked she’s been “almost living” at the Victorian Institute of Sport throughout her rehabilitation.

For now, her training remains exclusively indoors. “Riding will be all indoors for a while yet, but I started my time on the Zwift Ride with a nice 190km yesterday, so at least I can still train, albeit modified,” she said.

That was not all, as she followed her 190km effort with another 170km Zwift session the next day, humorously titled “Don’t think, just do” on Strava.

Gigante’s bad luck with crashes is nothing new. After an injury-plagued 2023 season in which she could race only the Tour of Scandinavia and the non-UCI event Tour of Bright (which she won), she made a powerful comeback in 2024, winning the Santos Tour Down Under on her debut with AG Insurance–Soudal.

The rest of the 2024 season was relatively quiet, although she managed to finish seventh at the Tour de France after a great display in the queen stage of the race: the famous Alpe d'Huez day in which Katarzyna Niewiadoma managed to defend the yellow jersey from Demi Vollering, winning the Tour de France with just 4 seconds of margin.