Niewiadoma on the agony and ecstasy of her Tour win

Kasia Niewiadoma still can't believe she won the Tour de France.

- LAWRENCE OSTLERE

She knows she did because half of Poland has sent congratulatory messages, from famous footballers and the world's No 1 tennis player Iga Swiatek to the president Andrzej Duda. "I feel like someone special, for sure," she smiles. But the achievement is still sinking in.

“I have these realisations where I look at my husband and we just start laughing,” says Niewiadoma, who is one half of cycling’s power couple with American former rider Taylor Phinney. It is three days later and she is speaking from their home in Girona, Spain. “We’re like, what the heck?! We just cannot even comprehend it.”

It was a finish for the ages, a 950km race won by four seconds, about the length of time it takes to read this sentence. Niewiadoma had twice come third at the Tour before and her palmares told a tale of near misses. At 29, she wondered if her statement win would ever come. Yet here she was at the start of the final day, wearing the yellow jersey, being hunted by a pack of rivals that included the great defending champion Demi Vollering.

Vollering surged for home on the penultimate climb and a drained Niewiadoma couldn’t follow. “I felt like I had nothing to connect my body with,” she says. “I couldn’t find the right rhythm. I felt like I’d lost it.”

Vollering evaporated her overnight deficit of 1min 15sec but soon found herself stuck with another podium contender, Pauliena Rooijakkers, who refused to take turns pulling in the wind. Vollering got so frustrated she pushed Rooijakkers on the shoulder, as Niewiadoma cut some of the gap and replenished before the final climb: Alpe d’Huez and its 21 hairpin bends.

The finish line waited 1,580m above her in the clouds, at the end of 14km of steep mountain road, requiring an hour of agonising effort with no clue whether it would be worth anything at the end. Niewiadoma grimaces as she remembers the pain.