British rider Robyn Clay pushed her persistence to new limits last week, when she battled through illness in the searing heat to make it to the finish of her first Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
The 22-year-old, a first-year pro with Picnic PostNL, described her debut in the nine-day race as “really, really hard”.
“I just got emotional at the finish because I think I’m just relieved that it’s finished, but also it’s such a crazy experience,” she told Cycling Weekly after the closing stage in Nice on Sunday. “It all just kind of hit me at the end.”
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Clay placed 114th overall on her debut, second-last ahead of her team-mate Mia Griffin, and almost three hours behind the winner Demi Vollering (FDJ United-Suez).
At one point, though, she doubted whether she would finish the race at all, after she fell victim to the 35°C heatwave that stifled the opening weekend in Switzerland.
“The first couple of days I was throwing up every 20 minutes and getting dropped,” Clay said. “I was the only person getting dropped straight away, so that was really a tough pill to swallow.
“My boyfriend was wanting to book to come to Nice [for the final two stages], but I told him, ‘Don’t bother, just in case I don’t make it there.’
“But as it went on, I adapted a bit better to the heat, so it was OK.”
Clay (second left) with her Picnic PostNL team-mates at the start of the Tour in Lausanne.
(Image credit: A.S.O/Gaetan Flamme)
Thirty-two riders did not finish this year’s Tour de France Femmes, mostly due to illness or missing the time cut.
Reflecting on her debut as a whole, Clay said she was taken aback by the scale of the race, which only its fifth year is already the calendar’s marquee event. “Everything’s just bigger,” the Briton said. “There’s more people, more media, more staff, more everything. It’s just like a normal race, but on a massive scale.”
Clay was named Cycling Weekly’s domestic rider of the year for 2025, having won both the National Road and National Circuit Series titles with British Continental team DAS-Hutchinson.
Since joining Picnic PostNL in January, she has started some of the biggest races in the world, including the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, the Giro d’Italia Women, and now, the Tour de France Femmes.
Asked for her favourite thing about her Tour debut, Clay said it was “just being here and seeing all the crowds”. Conversely, she “hated” scaling Mont Ventoux, the barren, 1,910m-tall mountain that made up the finish of stage seven.
“It was well windy, but I heard that Ventoux means windy mountain, so it makes sense,” she said. “I’d like to come again.”
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