When Pauline Ferrand‑Prévot soloed onto the Roubaix velodrome in 2025, the women’s peloton finally had its missing narrative piece.
Lotte Kopecky already owned the cobbles and the rainbow bands. Demi Vollering already ruled the week‑long climbs. Ferrand‑Prévot’s return to the road – and immediate capture of Paris–Roubaix and the Tour de France Femmes – completed a new hierarchy.
With Lorena Wiebes locking down most orthodox sprints, 2026 looks like an arms race for everything else. Monuments, punchy uphill finishes, long TTs, mountain summits: the calendar now bends around three riders whose skill‑sets overlap far more than they diverge.
So how does the season actually map out if Kopecky, Vollering and Ferrand‑Prévot all want the same races – and can all plausibly win them?
The new hierarchy: Wiebes for speed, a trio for everything else
Strip it back and the sport is oddly simple right now:
- Pure bunch sprints: Wiebes is the default favourite.
- Selective sprints, reduced groups, Classics, GC: the terrain of Kopecky, Vollering, Ferrand‑Prévot.
It’s that second category that defines modern women’s racing – and where the overlap is sharpest:
- All three can climb better than almost any “sprinter” and sprint better than almost any “climber”.
- All three are willing to attack from distance rather than wait for formulas to play out.
- All three sit on long, secure contracts with teams prepared to build seasons around them.
But the 2026 calendar, and the way their teams are structuring around it, forces their paths to diverge just enough to be interesting:
- Kopecky has explicitly stepped back from GC experiments and is returning to a Classics‑first identity.
- Vollering has a leaner race program with FDJ–SUEZ, built almost obsessively around the 2026 Tour de France Femmes.
- Ferrand‑Prévot is trying to defend that same Tour while still keeping a toe in off‑road and cherry‑picking Monuments.
That tension between specialisation and versatility is what will decide how many jerseys – and which colours – end up in each wardrobe.
Lotte Kopecky: back to basics, back to the cobbles
On paper, 2024 still looks like the peak of Lotte Kopecky’s career: world titles, Paris–Roubaix, Strade Bianche, stage‑race GCs, European TT gold. In practice, it may prove to have been an outlier – the year she tried to be everything, everywhere.
The back problems that wrecked much of her 2025 spring and forced a climb‑heavy GC experiment to be shelved have triggered a reset. The SD Worx–Protime plan for 2026 is brutally simple:
- No Tour de France Femmes GC bid. Kopecky and the team have drawn a line under that idea, at least for now.
- Classics as the north star. Paris–Roubaix, Tour of Flanders, Strade Bianche and a cluster of WorldTour one‑day races are the season’s real currency.
- Stage hunting rather than long‑GC. In week‑long races and Grand Tours she’ll cherry‑pick finishes that suit a hard lead‑out and reduced‑group sprint.
From a performance standpoint it makes sense. At her best, Kopecky is almost unbeatable in small‑group sprints after hard racing. She has the engine to outlast conventional sprinters on climbs and the top‑end to beat most climbers in a dash for the line. The more a race looks like Flanders 2025 – selective, windy, chaotic – the more it bends to her will.
The risks are obvious too:
- Back health remains the elephant in the room. A vertebral issue doesn’t disappear because the calendar has been simplified.
- The Classics are increasingly deep; every year another handful of riders learns how to survive 150 km at 4+ W/kg and still sprint.
But if she makes it to March in good condition, Kopecky starts 2026 as the most likely winner of at least one of Flanders, Roubaix and Strade. And with Wiebes covering mass sprints, SD Worx can spend the whole spring funnelling resources into that plan with almost zero internal conflict.
Demi Vollering: all‑in on yellow
If Kopecky is narrowing the aperture, Demi Vollering is doing the opposite – but in a different direction.
Her move to FDJ–SUEZ has created a rare structure in women’s cycling: a big‑budget team openly built around a single rider and a single target. The 2026 TdFF route – with a 21 km time trial and a Mont Ventoux summit finish – reads like it was designed by her coach.
Vollering’s toolkit is almost tailor‑made for that profile:
- Climbing: long, controlled efforts where she can ride to power and strangle the race.
- Time trialling: historically one of the best among the GC contenders; a 21 km ITT is long enough to prise open real gaps.
- Stage‑race rhythm: she stacks consistent days better than almost anyone; it’s how she’s banked back‑to‑back Vueltas and Itzulias.
FDJ–SUEZ have signalled that everything else is secondary. The program is trimmed slightly, the altitude camps longer, the support riders more tightly selected for July. Expect fewer “bonus” one‑day wins and more long blocks of quiet training.
The upside is obvious: a fresher Vollering at the Tour, with a squad drilled around her. The downsides are subtler:
- Pressure concentration. When your whole season is built around nine days in August, there’s less room for error, illness or a bad crash.
- Racing sharpness. Vollering has admitted in the past that she races herself into peak form; fewer race days puts more weight on her training environment.
Even with those caveats, she starts 2026 as at worst co‑favourite for yellow. On the route as advertised, Ferrand‑Prévot probably needs to match her in the mountains and survive the TT without conceding more than half a minute. That’s a narrow lane to thread.
Pauline Ferrand‑Prévot: defending champion, part‑time roadie?
Ferrand‑Prévot is the anomaly in this trio. She’s the reigning Tour de France Femmes champion and a Roubaix winner – and yet she still thinks of herself as a multi‑discipline rider rather than a full‑time road pro.
Visma–Lease a Bike have accepted that reality and built a selective calendar around it:
- Primary goal: defend the TdFF title she won in 2025 with aggressive climbing and opportunistic racing.
- Secondary targets: one or two Monuments – likely Flanders and an Ardennes Classic – rather than a full Classics campaign.
- Ongoing MTB/XCO commitments, both for personal motivation and to keep the Olympic pathway open.
On the road, the 2025 version of PFP was brutally effective:
- Technically superb on cobbles and descents – a product of years of XCO.
- Happy to attack from distance rather than playing watts‑per‑kg chess.
- Robust enough to back up big efforts on consecutive days when the route suited.
The 2026 puzzle is whether she can repeat that with two added complications:
- An ankle surgery at the end of 2025 that slightly shortens the runway into spring.
- A Tour route that includes a meaningful ITT, her least natural discipline.
We know Visma will throw resources at the TT problem – equipment, pacing, position work – but turning a relative weakness into a neutral in one off‑season is ambitious. The flip side is that she’s rarely raced a Tour with this level of premeditated TT focus.
If the surgery rehab stays on schedule, expect Ferrand‑Prévot to race a lighter spring than Kopecky, hit a couple of Monuments at full gas, then disappear to altitude before July. Her best shot at yellow again probably involves attacking Vollering in the mountains hard enough that the TT becomes damage limitation rather than the decisive blow.
Where they collide – and what could upset the script
Line their programs up and two flashpoints are obvious.
Spring: Kopecky vs. Ferrand‑Prévot (with Vollering as an occasional disruptor)
Flanders and Roubaix are the cleanest overlap between Kopecky and PFP.
- In Flanders‑style races, Kopecky’s repeat acceleration and finishing speed usually give her the upper hand if they arrive together.
- On a brutal day like Roubaix, where selection happens earlier and the finish is more attritional, Ferrand‑Prévot’s MTB‑honed handling and willingness to go long even up the odds.
Vollering will appear at some of these races – we’ve already seen her win Strade Bianche – but with the team’s Tour‑first stance, it’s unlikely she’ll be as razor‑sharp or as tactically aggressive as the other two in April. For her, a Classics victory in 2026 would be a bonus rather than the metric of the season.
Summer: Vollering vs. Ferrand‑Prévot, with Kopecky on stage‑hunt duty
With Kopecky parked on stage wins and green‑jersey raids rather than GC, the TdFF becomes a cleaner duel between FDJ–SUEZ and Visma.
The likely pattern:
- Flat and rolling stages: Wiebes and the sprinters fight for wins; Kopecky goes after the days that are too hard for them but too soft to decide GC.
- Ventoux and the high mountains: Vollering and PFP mark each other closely, with time won or lost in the final kilometres of summit finishes.
- The ITT: Vollering leans on her aero and pacing advantage to create or reinforce a buffer.
That doesn’t mean the script is fixed. Several variables could blow it apart:
- Health roll‑down: if Kopecky’s back flares again or Ferrand‑Prévot’s ankle rehab stalls, entire parts of this scenario collapse.
- Team depth: a key domestique injury at FDJ–SUEZ or Visma could flip the balance in the mountains more than any single rider’s form swing.
- Emerging talents: the likes of emerging U23 climbers and all‑rounders aren’t going to politely wait their turn. One big ride in April or July could reshuffle pecking orders on the road, even if the long‑term hierarchy holds.
So what does 2026 really look like?
Barring injury, the broad outline is clear:
- Kopecky reclaims centre stage in the cobbled and punchy Classics, using a simplified calendar to turn March and April into a personal hunting ground.
- Vollering spends the year walking a tightrope between reduced race days and the need for sharpness, all aimed at one outcome: yellow on the final podium in August.
- Ferrand‑Prévot tries to square the circle of multi‑discipline life, betting that targeted peaks and improved time trialling can keep her in range of Vollering despite a busier overall load.
For fans, sponsors and rivals, that clarity is the real win. You know roughly where to look:
- Early spring for Kopecky vs. PFP on the cobbles.
- High summer for Vollering vs. PFP on the climbs and in the wind tunnels.
- All year for the moments when those plans fray – when a crosswind splits the bunch, a mechanical hits at the wrong time, or a young rider refuses to respect the script.
The women’s peloton has its big three now. 2026 will tell us whether anyone else is ready to make it a big four – or whether, for another season at least, everything that isn’t a pure sprint still has to go through Kopecky, Vollering and Ferrand‑Prévot.
