Van Der Breggen Escapes Serious Injury After A Pair Of Wet Crashes Tear Through The Astorga Final Kilometre, Stays On Time As GC Window Opens For Les Praeres
Anna van der Breggen has escaped what could have been a season-defining injury after a pair of crashes ripped through the closing kilometres of Vuelta Femenina Stage 5 in Astorga on Wednesday. The 2021 Olympic road race champion was caught up in the larger of the two incidents, a touch of wheels in the middle of the rain-soaked peloton with 1.4 kilometres to go that took down several riders and disrupted what had until that point been a textbook SD Worx-Protime sprint train.
Sport director Danny Stam confirmed late on Wednesday evening that Van der Breggen had walked into the team bus in Astorga without complaint and would line up for Stage 6 to Les Praeres. "Anna felt quite good after the crash and doesn't have any complaints," Stam told reporters at the start village in León on Thursday morning. "She got back up quickly. The bigger picture is the GC, and the GC is still where we want it to be." Van der Breggen finished 1:36 down on stage winner and teammate Mischa Bredewold, but was credited with the time of the peloton because the crashes occurred inside the final five kilometres — the standard Vuelta Femenina rule for late incidents.
The protected time meant Van der Breggen retained her place inside the top ten on GC heading into the queen stage, and continued to operate as the second-card protected rider behind Lotte Kopecky's red jersey. SD Worx-Protime's depth this week has allowed the team to play three different cards across five stages: Bredewold's win in Astorga, Kopecky's defence of the leader's jersey, and Van der Breggen's status as a credible top-ten GC option for the second week.
The wet finish at Astorga has, more broadly, changed the tone of the closing 36 hours into Les Praeres. With Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto losing one of their domestiques in the same crash and Lidl-Trek picking up two minor abrasions inside the closing kilometre, the GC reading has tightened by attrition rather than by attack. Kopecky's twelve-second lead over Franziska Koch at the start of Friday morning is the smallest pre-queen-stage GC margin a Vuelta Femenina red jersey has carried into a sub-five-kilometre summit since the race acquired Grand Tour status in 2023.
For Van der Breggen, who came out of retirement at the start of the 2025 season, the closing detail of the Astorga crash — that she rode through it without going down hard — is a meaningful one. The Dutch rider's return has been built around clean racing days and consistent stage-race finishes; an injury at the closing edge of a wet 200-metre uphill drag would have, on the worst possible reading, ended a 2026 calendar that still has the Tour de France Femmes and the world championships left on it.
The five-rider closing-gradient game on Les Praeres now reads as a pure climbers' brief: Puck Pieterse at the front of the bookmakers' card, Kasia Niewiadoma as the steady second-card option, Pauline Ferrand-Prévôt the breakthrough wildcard. Van der Breggen, on the longest reading, is a closing-week opportunist on the closing Angliru profile rather than a Les Praeres card. But she rides into Friday afternoon's Asturian wall on time, on her bike and with a GC line still intact — which, twenty-four hours after the closing Astorga 200-metre touch of wheels, is the better outcome than seemed possible at the time.