Women's Tour de France 2025: Maëva Squiban plays a double role

On Friday evening in Chambéry (Savoie), as she was about to speak in front of the Tour de France cameras, Maëva Squiban was lost for words, overwhelmed by the performance she had just achieved. How could she be otherwise? The day before, the 23-year-old Frenchwoman, who had not yet achieved any prestigious success on the professional circuit, had delivered one, escaping solo in the Auvergne mountains to win in Ambert for the first time in her career on the Tour de France. Among the followers, it was rightly called an exploit. But then, how can we describe what the rider from the Emirati team UAE-ADQ accomplished this Friday, August 1st?

The race had barely started in the early afternoon, at the start of Bourg-en-Bresse, when Maëva Squiban once again took off. The idea came from a joking promise made to one of her friends, she would later explain, once she had crossed the finish line. A bluff, for the fans and the cameras, the day after a day that had, inevitably, left its mark. Except that the joke became serious. The Brest native quickly found herself surrounded by around fifteen other runners, including the recent French champion Marie Le Net, and the double Belgian world champion Lotte Kopecky .

Over the course of a stage divided into two parts – the flat first, over a hundred kilometers, then a series of climbs – the breakaway built up a solid lead over a peloton that was moving slowly forward. The gap exceeded five minutes when the road began to turn up. And once again, as the kilometers ticked by, as the bodies began to tire, the Frenchwoman appeared more forceful, surprisingly fresher too, in short, simply stronger than her companions in the race. Like the day before, Maëva Squiban crossed the final summit, the Col du Granier (17 kilometers from the finish), alone, with no one within a hundred meters of her rear wheel, benefiting from her hard work in the mountains over the past few years, having moved to the Var region to work on her altitude skills.

On the descent to Chambéry, she sped straight ahead, sometimes exceeding 80 km/h, to offer herself another moment of glory. She would say afterward that she couldn't hear anything. Neither the noise of the many spectators along the road. Nor the gaps, given in her earpiece by her sports management. The others were far away, however: she crossed the line with almost a minute's lead over her compatriot Cédrine Kerbaol . Almost a copy and paste of the day before: on Thursday, another Frenchwoman, Juliette Labous, had succeeded her on the finish line. In three and a half editions of the Tour de France, only one Frenchwoman had managed to win a stage. Maëva Squiban did it twice in two days.

Each time, the feat is measured by the reaction of those close to her. On Thursday, it was one of her teammates, not selected for the Tour and who had come to see her race, who, taking her in her arms, in tears, whispered in her ear, addressing herself as much to Squiban as to herself: "Do you realize? A stage of the Tour de France?" On Friday, it was her father who questioned her, just as incredulous: "But what have you done to us now, my dear?"

The performance is all the more remarkable given that the Breton woman could have not participated in the Tour de France. In May, during a training outing, she found herself thrown onto the asphalt, hit by a car. She would come away with pain all over and two months without being able to race, which would cost her her participation in the French championships. "My helmet saved my life," she wrote on her social networks.

Her story with the Tour de France hasn't always been easy either. Her first, in 2022, the rider who was then riding for Stade Rochelais, ended up in the hospital after a fall during the second stage that left her with a broken sacrum. In 2024, she finished the penultimate stage in tears, second across the finish line after long believing she had secured the greatest victory of her career. It took her a year to achieve it, and more like twice than once.

On Thursday evening, Maëva Squiban flooded her social media with photos and videos of her victory. In one of them, she was seen with her few remaining teammates (three of the seven UAE-ADQ riders had to abandon the race due to injuries) uncorking a bottle of champagne. We hope her team had kept another one chilled for her.

Updated August 1 at 8 p.m. with more information