“We just need to dare” – Lotte Kopecky starts Tour de France Femmes in fighting move after injury hit 2025

Lotte Kopecky will not be chasing the yellow jersey at the Tour de France Femmes this year. The reigning world champion had planned a GC battle with her former teammate Demi Vollering but has pulled back from that ambition due to lingering back pain. Instead, Kopecky and her Team SD Worx - Protime team will focus on stage wins, shifting tactics just days before the grand départ. While she’s still recovering from a difficult winter, Kopecky says the decision to pivot is both practical and necessary.

“At this moment, I’m just trying to get the GC out of my head,” she told Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. “The team is saying GC is, if we are really honest, quite a hard task. We just need to dare to say we let it go. We are here with a really strong team who can win a lot of stages, so I think it’s only fair to say that you just need to change cards and not put all the eggs in one basket.”

In 2023, Kopecky led the Tour for six days and finished second to Vollering. Her runner-up finish at the 2024 Giro d’Italia Women further validated her potential in stage racing. “There were some thoughts and some possibilities,” she reflected. But despite a resume that includes multiple wins at the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Strade Bianche, and two world titles, the 29-year-old is still chasing her first grand tour win.

“I hope so,” she said when asked if she was fully recovered. “At the moment, it’s pretty good, but training and racing are two different things. I didn’t have the most easy season, let’s say. I had a really hard winter with the injury. Maybe [the back pain] is coming from the knee, having a little bit of a different position. I cannot say how it started. I just hope it disappears like it started.”

Kopecky, who won the Velo d’Or in 2024, has won multiple stage races, including the Tour of Britain, the Belgium Tour, and the UAE Tour. But unfortunately, she will have to wait until 2026 to test her ability to fight for the GC in the high mountains.

Kopecky emphasized the importance of being honest with herself and her teammates. “You need to be fair with yourself and with your teammates,” she said. “I don’t want them to sacrifice or to ride everyday full gas for me, and I say after six days, ‘Sorry, but my back is hurting and I cannot do this.’ I also don’t want to disappoint them. It takes off a lot of pressure for me. I think, for this year, it’s the best thing to do."

“It is what it is now at the moment and I cannot change anything about it, so we’ll just try to make the best of it.”

The Tour of Flanders win back in April was the highlight of her season so far, and she will be hoping to add to her stage win in 2023 at the Tour when the race gets underway this weekend.

The Belgian says she’ll take things one day at a time, and is measuring expectations for now. “We’re going to see day by day, but at this moment, I would be really happy to win a stage,” the world champion from Flanders said. “If I can, let’s say, win the first stage or the second one – we have to see – once the climbs are going up, for sure I’m really going to try to hang on and see where I can get. But that’s only on the fifth day. We have to wait. Let’s see.”