Lara Gillespie's first big season in the pro road scene in Europe is set to step up a notch next week with her debut appearance in the Tour de France. The Wicklow rider has been named in the UAE Team ADQ line-up for the nine-stage race.
Confirmation Gillespie will be in the Tour this year comes just after compatriots Mia Griffin (Roland) and Fiona Mangan (Winspace Orange Seal) were also named in their teams' line-ups for the French Grand Tour.
And that means while no Irish rider has ever ridden the women's Tour de France, Ireland will have three riders in the 2025 edition. That represents an incredible breakthrough for Irish cycling.
It comes a year after the Irish female team pursuiters rode the Olympic Games, becoming the first Irish pursuiters to qualify for a Games. Gillespie and Griffin were both on the team for Paris and now blaze the trail on the road, with Limerick's Mangan, into the Tour.
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The women's Tour de France has been run in two iterations down the years, both owned by ASO, which also owns the men's version of the race currently underway. Tour de France féminin was promoted from 1984 to 1993 and then the race was revived, as Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, in 2022.
Gillespie has enjoyed a really strong season so far and though she was always fancied for a Tour debut this year, especially after her Vuelta performance, a crash last month threw a spanner in the works that took some time to put right.
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However, she come back to racing last weekend, riding strong in La Périgord Ladies (1.1), in the breakaway, and then taking 9th place in La Picto-Charentaise (1.1) on Sunday after training in Mallorca to polish up her post-injury form.
Gillespie crashed in Elmos Dwars door het Hageland (1.1) in the Netherlands in mid June, and though she remounted and finished 12th, she suffered bone bruising - to the sacrum bone at the base of the spine. That forced her out of competition for a period, including missing the National Road Championships in Co Meath last month.
However, Gillespie has now had time to recover and build her condition, and also squeeze in a weekend of racing, all in time for the Tour de France, which gets underway in Vannes on Saturday.
Gillespie's team's general classification leader will be Italian national champion, Elisa Longo Borghini. She does into the event having already won the recent Giro d'Italia and also claimed victory in UAE Tour earlier in the year.
Ireland's Gillespie will not focus on the general classification at the Tour, as she is not a climber. However, her 4th place finished on the penultimate stage at the Vuelta in May shows where her best chance could come; a chaotic finish in a slightly uphill sprint from a group.
More to come.
