A Wonderful Reason to Miss a Home Tour: Chabbey Announces Pregnancy and Ends Her 2026 Season
Elise Chabbey has revealed the happiest possible explanation for her absence from the peloton: the Swiss star is expecting her first child and has confirmed that her 2026 season is over. The 33-year-old, who has not raced since April, announced that she and her partner Antoine Robin are expecting their baby in January 2027.
The news means Chabbey will miss the Tour de France Femmes — a particularly poignant absence given that this year's race departs from Lausanne, offering the Geneva native the rare chance of a Grand Départ on home Swiss roads. As last year's winner of the race's mountains classification, she would have started as one of the host nation's headline attractions.
FDJ-SUEZ will feel the sporting loss keenly. Chabbey had been pencilled in as a key mountain lieutenant for Demi Vollering, who arrives at the Tour fresh from her crushing overall victory at the Giro d'Italia Women and will now tackle the biggest objective of her season with one fewer trusted climber at her side. Few riders in the bunch combine Chabbey's engine, positioning and selflessness in the high mountains.
It caps a year that had already delivered the finest result of Chabbey's career. In March she conquered the white gravel roads of Tuscany to win Strade Bianche, a victory built on trademark aggression and one that confirmed her evolution from super-domestique into a winner in her own right. That win now stands as the emphatic full stop on her season rather than its springboard.
Chabbey follows a growing list of top professionals who have started families mid-career and returned to the highest level, a path normalised in recent seasons by riders such as Lizzie Deignan. Maternity protections in the Women's WorldTour mean her contract is safeguarded while she is away from racing, and she has given every indication that she intends to pin on a number again in 2027.
Before turning fully to road cycling, Chabbey competed for Switzerland in canoe slalom at the 2016 Olympics and qualified as a medical doctor — a reminder that few athletes in the sport pack as much into a career. The peloton will be poorer without her attacking instincts this summer, but the sport's warmest congratulations travel with her towards January.