Elisa Balsamo

Balsamo comes from Cuneo, in Piedmont, and arrived in cycling through her father, an amateur racer, after spells in skiing, biathlon and swimming. She rode road and track together through her teens, winning junior world titles on the boards. At Doha in 2016 she took the junior world road race from a sprint of roughly fifty riders, then turned elite with Valcar, the team she had ridden for as a junior.

Her first professional wins came at Omloop van Borsele and the Gran Premio Bruno Beghelli in 2018, and in 2020 she won the European under-23 road title at Plouay. At Leuven in 2021, at the end of 157.7km from Antwerp, she beat Marianne Vos in the sprint from a reduced bunch to take the world road title, the first Italian woman to win it since Giorgia Bronzini in 2011. Katarzyna Niewiadoma was third.

In 2022, wearing the rainbow jersey, she won Trofeo Alfredo Binda, Classic Brugge-De Panne and Gent-Wevelgem across a single spring, added the Italian road title in June, and took the opening road stage and stage four of the Giro d'Italia Donne. On the track that year she rode in the Italian quartet that won the team pursuit world title at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

At Paris-Roubaix in 2024 she made the six-rider group that reached the velodrome, with Ellen van Dijk lifting the pace for her, and lost the photo finish to Lotte Kopecky. Binda came back to her in 2024 and 2025, and she won Brugge-De Panne again in 2024. Her wins come from groups a hard race has already thinned more often than from full bunch gallops.

Lorena Wiebes had won all four previous editions of the women's Scheldeprijs before Balsamo took it in 2025. Her Tour de France Femmes that July ended on stage five, when crashes through the peloton also put Kristen Faulkner out.