British rider Cat Ferguson will make her Giro d’Italia Women debut this weekend with her sights on taking first Grand Tour stage victory in the sprint finishes.
The 20-year-old, now in her second year with Movistar, will lead the Spanish team on the flat days, while her team-mate Marlen Reusser targets the general classification.
Held over nine stages, the race will be the longest of Ferguson’s young career. She made her Grand Tour debut at the seven-day Vuelta Femenina last May, where she scored two top-10 finishes.
Speaking to Cycling Weekly, the former double junior world champion said her personal goal for her Giro debut is to “look for stages”.
“The Giro is hard, but then there are a lot of opportunities for sprints. I will be trying to do my best on the sprint stages,” she said.
The first of those days is expected to come on stage one into Ravenna, with stages two and six also both likely to end in sprints. Ferguson will face competition in the bunch from the most dominant sprinter of her era, Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime), as well as former world champion Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek), Ally Wollaston (FDJ United-SUEZ) and Chiara Consonni (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto)
The 20-year-old is looking forward to the Giro’s three sprint days.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
In preparation for the Giro, Ferguson has spent the past month training out of Andorra, “focusing on the basics,” she said.
She will also take her learnings from last year’s Vuelta Femenina into the race, in particular regarding fuelling for longer stage races, which she found to be a “baptism of fire”. “It’s not just a one-day race, it’s 10 days of carb-loading, and it’s very different to a junior stage race,” she said. “If you don’t manage to get that pasta down you at dinner, then the next day you really feel it.”
Ferguson opened 2026 with victory in the Spanish one-day Trofeo Llucmajor. She then went on to win a stage of the Setmana Valenciana, before finishing fourth at Omloop Nieuwsblad, her best-ever result in a cobbled Classic.
The rest of Ferguson’s early season campaign, she said, brought “real disappointments”; she abandoned Paris-Roubaix after suffering from food poisoning, and “wanted a bit more” than her 21st place at In Flanders Fields-In Wevelgem.
“The Classics are just something else, and that’s what I’m continuing to learn,” she said. “Even having more of a physical ability doesn’t mean that it’s going to go right. I think a lot of the Classics is just positioning, and that’s something I’ve still not cracked.”
Following her Roubaix withdrawal, the 20-year-old returned to winning form at the Navarra Classic earlier this month, where she tallied her third victory of the year.
Ferguson has won the last two editions of the Navarra Classic.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
She now hopes she can continue that form into the Giro, and onwards to August’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. Ferguson is yet to make her Tour debut, but is on Movistar’s long list for the race this year.
“It will be [dependent on] how I’m going around the Tour,” she said. “If anything happens between now and then, if I’m injured or something, that’s why we have this long list. All the team on the long list will do altitude with the team, and then from then we get selected.
“I think it’s a good system. It makes us hungry, and it makes us more competitive in a healthy way, so we can be the best team and the fairest team that goes to the Tour.”
The Giro d’Italia Women begins this Saturday 30 June in Cesenatico, and runs until its finish in Saluzzo on 7 June. You can find a full preview of the race in this week’s Cycling Weekly magazine, out now.
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