How Kasia Niewiadoma Trains (and How She Won on Mont Ventoux)

On 7 August 2026, Kasia Niewiadoma rode away from the two best climbers in the race and soloed to the summit of Mont Ventoux, taking the stage and the yellow jersey at the Tour de France Femmes. She attacked with 9.5 kilometres still to climb, dropped Demi Vollering and Marlen Reusser, and crossed the line 1 minute 16 seconds clear. The most instructive part for a normal cyclist is not the raw power it took. It is that she had already ridden this climb, pictured this exact win for two months, and knew precisely where on the mountain to make her move. She won Ventoux twice: once in her head, on a recon ride, and once for real.

A climb she had already ridden in her head

Niewiadoma did not arrive at Ventoux and improvise. She had gone there to reconnoitre the climb months earlier, and she was open about how deliberate that was. "I came here to recon it with my friends and my husband, and we had so much fun together," she said afterwards, her husband being the former professional Taylor Phinney. The visualisation that followed was just as concrete: "I've been trying to picture this for the last two months, so I definitely had this in my head," and, most tellingly, "When I stood on top of Ventoux after the recon, I knew I wanted to win here." Before the Tour even started she had told reporters, "I'm ready to break the KOM on Mont Ventoux."

That is course knowledge turned into a weapon, and it is the single most transferable idea in this post. Knowing exactly where a climb ramps up and where it eases, where the wind will help or hurt, and where a gap becomes unbridgeable is preparation that costs nothing but time on the road. It is available to any amateur riding a local hill-climb or a target sportive, and almost nobody does it as seriously as they should.

Knowing where to spend the effort

The attack itself was a piece of course-reading, not a berserk lunge. Niewiadoma explained the logic plainly: "I knew I had to go away before 6ks to go because then it was kind of not flat, but less steep. And I knew that if I had a gap there, then in the back they would gamble because we had a headwind." Once clear, she rode to the conditions rather than to her ego: "So I knew with the wind and the lesser gradients, I had to be small and just maintain the gap." She spent her hardest effort on the steepest section, where an attack does the most damage, then defended it aerodynamically where the mountain gave a little back.

This is where the physiology meets the map. A climb like Ventoux, well over an hour of sustained effort for the front of the race, is essentially a test of the power you can hold at threshold, and the first thing you need to know is your own number:

Your FTP, functional threshold power, is roughly the power you can sustain for about an hour, which is exactly the demand of a long mountain finish. Estimate it from a test effort here, and it becomes the anchor for all of your training zones and your pacing on a climb: hold near it on the sustained grades, and know that going above it, the way Niewiadoma did on the steep pitch, is a match you can only burn a few times.

Why climbers are ruled by watts per kilogram

On the flat, raw watts win. On a mountain, what matters is power relative to body weight, because you are lifting yourself against gravity for over an hour. That ratio, watts per kilogram, is why climbers like Niewiadoma are lean and why a rider who is not the most powerful in absolute terms can still be first to a summit. Take your FTP, divide it by your weight in kilograms, and you have the number that actually predicts how fast you go uphill:

Our watts-per-kg guide does that maths and shows you where your figure sits, and because a climb is a long, steady effort rather than a series of surges, critical power is the companion concept for understanding how long you can hold a given intensity. This is the same power-to-weight story that runs through the Vingegaard and Pogačar posts, and it is exactly the terrain where Niewiadoma dropped Vollering, whose own measured, critical-power-driven approach she has now beaten on the biggest mountain of the race.

Payback, and the long game

Niewiadoma is not a sudden arrival. She won the 2024 Tour de France Femmes by four seconds over Vollering, the closest overall finish in the race's history, and before that had stood on the final podium of the race three separate times without winning it, in 2022, 2023 and 2025. She has a Flèche Wallonne, an Amstel Gold Race and even a gravel world title to her name, and she is known as an attacking climber who races on instinct and emotion as much as on numbers. So when she said on Ventoux, "this is payback for all the second and third places I've had in my life," it was the voice of a rider whose career has been a long, patient accumulation, the same durability-over-flash lesson that shows up again and again in this series.

The Ventoux ride put her in the yellow jersey, but she could not hold it to the finish: Demi Vollering clawed the lead back in the final days and rode away on the Col d'Èze above Nice to take the 2026 Tour de France Femmes overall, with Niewiadoma second. That takes nothing away from the day on Ventoux, which stands on its own as a clinic in turning preparation into a result.

What you can actually steal from it

• Recon your key climb. Ride your target hill or race route beforehand and learn where it ramps, eases and turns into the wind. Course knowledge is free speed.
• Know your FTP. A long climb is an hour-plus threshold effort. Estimate your FTP and let it anchor your zones and your pacing.
• Train your power-to-weight, not just your power. Uphill, watts per kilogram is the number that matters. That is why climbers are lean and why the ratio, not raw watts, wins mountains.
• Attack the steep, defend the shallow. Niewiadoma spent her hardest effort where it hurt her rivals most, then rode small and aero where the gradient eased. Spend your matches where they buy the most time.
• Visualise the specific win. She had pictured this exact victory for two months. Concrete mental rehearsal of a real course beats vague ambition.

Niewiadoma's Ventoux was not a bolt from the blue. It was a climb she had ridden, studied and imagined winning, executed with a clear read of where the effort had to go. The engine underneath it is power-to-weight built over a long career, but the margin on the day came from preparation any rider can copy: know the mountain, know your number, and know exactly where to spend everything you have.

More in this series: Demi Vollering, her rival on the climb, plus Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, Mathieu van der Poel and the fast age-grouper on eight hours a week.

Sources

official Tour de France Femmes site, Cyclingnews, IDL Pro Cycling, road.cc, Wikipedia profile.

Cover photo by Hugo LUC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.