"From The 2026 Milan-Cortina Speed Skating Oval To The Mur De Huy In Eleven Weeks" — Sandrine Tas, Two-Time Winter Olympian And Two-Time Inline Skating World Champion, Makes Her Women's WorldTour Debut At Flèche Wallonne Femmes For Lotto-Intermarché Ladies
Wednesday 22 April 2026, the Huy start village on the Quai Dautrebande. Among the 162 riders signing on for the 2026 Flèche Wallonne Femmes is a dossard that carries the single most unusual athlete-transition story in the 2026 Women's WorldTour: Sandrine Tas, the 30-year-old Belgian two-time Winter Olympian — PyeongChang 2018 and Beijing 2022 on the long-track speed skating oval — and two-time inline skating World Champion, making her Women's WorldTour debut on the Mur de Huy eleven weeks after her final competitive run at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. It is the fastest Winter-Olympian-to-WorldTour transition in the recorded history of women's professional road cycling.
The Lotto-Intermarché Ladies signing, confirmed on Friday 31 January 2026 — the day after Tas's Milan-Cortina 1500m programme ended — framed the move as a one-year, development-route contract with a built-in Belgian National Championships and Tour de France Femmes aspirational window. The team's sports director Steven de Jongh told the Wednesday morning Huy mixed zone that Tas's two-year cross-training cycling programme had been running inside the Belgian Olympic Committee's long-track speed-skating cycle since 2024, with Tas winning the Belgian national time trial championship in the WE2 category that summer and finishing eighth in the elite women's road race at the 2025 Belgian Nationals while still on the full speed-skating programme. "Sandrine is not a project rider learning to race," de Jongh said. "She is an Olympic engine learning a different skill grammar. The racing calendar is the steepest possible learning curve for the grammar."
Tas's Wednesday morning sign-on interview at Huy was the interview of an athlete who has taken three separate career peaks in three disciplines and is looking squarely at a fourth. "Over the past weeks I have been training hard and fortunately everything has gone well," Tas said. "I have been on the bike every day of the past eleven weeks, apart from the four days I took after Milano-Cortina closed. The team has given me the best possible programme — Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in March was a learning race, Dwars door Vlaanderen was a learning race, the Brabantse Pijl last Wednesday was the first race where I felt I belonged in the peloton. Today I am here not to finish top ten but to finish. That is my first objective — finish the 142 kilometres and be there on the climb."
The Tas palmarès is the most unusual in the 2026 Women's WorldTour. A junior speed skater who won the 2015 Junior World Allround Championship; a senior speed skater who qualified for PyeongChang 2018 at 22 and Beijing 2022 at 26, placing sixth in the 1500m at the 2023 European Championships; an inline skating crossover who won the 2021 and 2022 Inline Skating World Championships in the marathon discipline; and a late-career cycling crossover who, at 30 years old, has already won a Belgian national title in cycling before making her WorldTour debut. The comparable cross-discipline trajectories — Rebecca Romero's 2008 Olympic rowing-to-cycling Olympic gold swap, Heather Armitage's 2011 track-to-road transition, Lotte Kopecky's own 2020 track-road consolidation — all either took longer to reach WorldTour level or came via the junior ranks.
The Lotto-Intermarché Ladies line-up for Wednesday's race is a seven-rider squad built around Lotte Kopecky substitute leader Maxx van der Meijden, with Tas assigned a "learn-the-race" role in the front portion of the peloton through the opening 80 kilometres. Team sports director De Jongh confirmed Tas's race instructions as "ride the first four ascents of the Côte de Bohissau in the front 40 riders, roll off the Ereffe descent with the domestique group, and sit in on the final loop as a learning exercise". The team's Liège-Bastogne-Liège squad four days later will see Tas make her first Ardennes Monument start — before an April 29 Tour de Romandie Féminin opening stage completes her two-week Monument baptism.
The 2026 Women's WorldTour's cross-discipline arrivals have shifted upwards since the UCI's 2024 Women's WorldTour minimum-salary regulations took effect — a rule change that has made it easier for teams to commit contract depth to Olympic-level athletes arriving late. Tas joins three other 2026 Women's WorldTour debutants over the age of 28: the former Dutch triathlete Maya Kingma at DSM-Firmenich-PostNL, the French ultra-endurance record holder Lael Wilcox at Liv AlUla Jayco, and the American track endurance rider Jennifer Valente at Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto. It is, on UCI records, the largest single-season arrival of cross-discipline debutants over 28 in the Women's WorldTour's history.
Tas's Wednesday afternoon flag drop at 13:40 from Huy will be the first 142.9-kilometre race of her competitive career; the Mur de Huy itself will be the first sub-two-kilometre climb she has ascended at race pace on a road bike. Her finishing projection on the Lotto-Intermarché internal board is "inside the time cut, inside the top 120 finishers" — deliberately conservative. "What Sandrine brings to this team," De Jongh concluded, "is not a result target in her first Flèche Wallonne. It is a five-year curve. The curve starts today."