"Personally, I'm Also Here To Make Progress As A Stage Racer" — Visma | Lease a Bike Names Ferrand-Prévot, Vos and a Five-Rider Support Cast for Vuelta Femenina 2026, Stage-Win Brief Confirmed Ahead of Sunday's Marín Roll-Out
Saturday morning Eindhoven. Twenty-eight hours from the 12:25 flag drop on the Avenida do Concepción Arenal in Marín, Visma | Lease a Bike has confirmed the seven-rider squad it will line up at the 2026 Vuelta a España Femenina — and the squad's pre-race brief leaves no ambiguity on the Dutch team's Galicia-to-Asturias plan: stage wins first, GC second, the Angliru as a long-shot finale rather than a defended target.
The seven names: Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Marianne Vos, Sarah Van Dam, Lieke Nooijen, Marion Bunel, Maud Oudeman and Imogen Wolff. The defending Tour de France Femmes champion sits at the top of the team sheet but, in a rare in-season pivot for a team that almost always rides for outright GC, has been briefed to ride a developmental Vuelta — chase stage wins where the parcours offers them, work on her three-week stage-racing legs in advance of July, and decide on the Angliru only if the GC has come to her.
Ferrand-Prévot's framing at the Eindhoven pre-race press call earlier this week was as direct as the team brief: "Personally, I'm also here to make progress as a stage racer." The 33-year-old's late-career road conversion remains the project Visma have built the women's programme around, but with Demi Vollering at 4/9 outright off her record-equalling third Liège-Bastogne-Liège-Femmes win, and Anna van der Breggen back from retirement and racing her first Grand Tour for SD Worx-Protime, the Visma read of the GC book is that the eight-day classification has two riders capable of winning it before the team's own leader is in the conversation.
Vos is the second pillar of the brief. The 38-year-old Dutchwoman lines up chasing a seventh career stage at the Vuelta Femenina, a number that would draw her level with the modern-era record. Stage 1 to Salvaterra de Miño is not a Vos-shaped finish — the uncategorised 1km kicker inside the closing kilometre prices her behind Lorena Wiebes at 4/1 — but Stages 2 and 5, both flatter Galician finishes designed for a fast bunch, are days the Visma DSes have ringed in the operations brief as Vos's primary stage-win windows.
Van Dam joins the breakaway-and-stage-hunter cluster. The 24-year-old Canadian has built her 2026 spring around the Vuelta and was named in the brief as the protected card for the rolling Stage 4 between Cangas del Narcea and Avilés — 152km, three Cat-2 climbs, the kind of medium-hard day that has historically been won out of a 30-rider reduced bunch. Nooijen sits in the same cluster, with the explicit brief to launch the move on the second of the day's climbs if the bunch hasn't split organically by the descent of the third.
Bunel, Oudeman and Wolff make up the support cast. Oudeman, 24, is the Dutch climber Visma have used through Itzulia and the Ardennes block as Ferrand-Prévot's last-rider lead-in on summit finishes; she will ride the same role on the Angliru on Stage 7. Wolff, the 19-year-old British neo-pro the team signed off the back of her junior Worlds time-trial silver, makes her Grand Tour debut with no protected role and a developmental brief: ride the front of the bunch in the opening 50km of every flat stage, learn the rotation through the team car, finish.
Sport director Lieselot Decroix at the Friday-evening press centre frame: "We have come to the Vuelta to win stages. Pauline is here to keep building, not to defend a number on a board. Marianne is here for stage seven of her own — you do not bring Marianne Vos to a Grand Tour and tell her not to chase a record. Sarah and Lieke get the days they have been working towards. The Angliru will tell us if we have anything more to say on the GC. We are not making that promise before the race rolls."
The race rolls Sunday from Marín — the first time the Vuelta Femenina has opened in Galicia — with Vollering, Ferrand-Prévot, van der Breggen and the field all lining up on the Avenida do Concepción Arenal at 12:25 local. SD Worx-Protime in red as the defending team. Visma in yellow-and-black with a stage-win number written across the operations board and a quietly hopeful Angliru Plan B written underneath it in pencil.