Sarah Gigante will return to racing at the Faun Tour Femmes on Thursday, ending a 403-day absence that began only weeks after the strongest run of her professional career.
The 25-year-old Australian has not raced since finishing sixth overall at the 2025 Tour de France Femmes. A training crash later that month left her with a fractured femur, beginning a rehabilitation that became far more complicated than first expected and ultimately required a second operation this summer.
AG Insurance-Soudal have deliberately placed no performance expectations on Gigante for the four-day French stage race. The immediate objective is to rediscover the rhythm of racing, become comfortable in a peloton again and see how her leg responds after more than a year away.
“It’s been a long road back for her, and this is an important milestone in her recovery, so it’s only normal that she will start the race without any pressure,” sports director Dani Christmas said.
For Gigante, reaching the start line is significant enough.
A broken femur stopped Gigante at the height of her form
The timing of the August 2025 crash made the injury particularly difficult.
Gigante had only completed the Tour de France Femmes on 3 August after producing one of the strongest climbing performances of the race.
She went into the final stage second overall following a superb ride on the Col de la Madeleine, where she finished second behind Pauline Ferrand-Prévot. ProCyclingUK covered how Gigante climbed into second overall with the help of Justine Ghekiere and Kim Le Court-Pienaar before the final day changed the classification again.
Her podium challenge eventually unravelled on the descent from the Col de Joux Plane. Gigante became isolated, lost several minutes and slipped from second to sixth overall, a result covered in our look at how her Tour podium bid disappeared on the final stage.
Sixth was still her best Tour de France Femmes result and followed an even stronger Giro d’Italia Women.
Then came the training crash.
Gigante fractured her femur in mid-August, ending a season in which she had finally been able to show consistently what had long been obvious in shorter bursts.
Our original report on Gigante’s broken femur and the sudden end to her 2025 season came less than two weeks after she had finished the Tour.
She has not raced since.
Her 2025 Giro had established Gigante among the best climbers in the world
The femur injury followed a Giro d’Italia Women in which Gigante had produced the best stage-racing performance of her career.
She won twice in the mountains.
Her first victory came on Stage 4 at Pianezze, where she attacked with 1.7km remaining and immediately distanced Elisa Longo Borghini and Marlen Reusser. The performance gave Gigante her first Giro stage victory and moved her firmly into the GC fight.
ProCyclingUK’s Stage 4 report from Pianezze captured what was effectively her arrival as a genuine Grand Tour contender.
Three days later she did it again.
On Monte Nerone, Gigante attacked the favourites with six kilometres remaining, caught Longo Borghini and then rode away on the steepest part of the climb to win by 45 seconds.
The Monte Nerone victory lifted her to third overall, a position she retained through the final stage.
Gigante left the Giro with two stage wins, third in the general classification and the mountains jersey.
It was the clearest evidence yet that, when healthy, she could compete with the best climbers in women’s cycling across an entire stage race rather than simply on one exceptional day.
The comeback was originally supposed to happen months ago
The first months after the femur fracture appeared encouraging.
Gigante returned to indoor training and gradually rebuilt volume before getting back onto the road. By January she was again riding the climbs around Bright in Victoria and talking about a possible return to competition in March.
At the time, ProCyclingUK covered Gigante’s return to mountain training and her original March comeback target.
That date eventually proved far too optimistic.
Although Gigante could complete long endurance rides, harder efforts continued to cause significant pain. The problem became particularly apparent once training moved beyond steady mileage and towards the intensity needed to race.
A planned spring comeback disappeared.
La Vuelta Femenina passed without her.
The Giro d’Italia Women, where she would have returned as the previous year’s third-place finisher and double stage winner, also came too soon.
By then, the recovery had moved beyond simply waiting for the fracture to heal.
A second operation was needed after months of persistent pain
Further investigation eventually established that the femur itself was no longer the main problem.
The surgical nail inserted after the fracture was causing irritation, particularly when Gigante attempted harder efforts.
That explained why she had been capable of building substantial endurance volume but could not progress properly towards race intensity.
She underwent a second operation in June.
It was another delay in a rehabilitation that had already stretched far beyond the initial expectations, but it finally addressed the issue that had prevented her from moving forward.
The consequence was that any realistic chance of riding the 2026 Giro or Tour de France Femmes disappeared.
For a rider who had entered 2026 hoping to build on a Grand Tour podium, much of the season instead became another period of physiotherapy, gym work and carefully controlled training.
Thursday will be the first time that work is tested in an actual race.
This is not Gigante’s first long road back
The latest comeback fits a broader pattern in Gigante’s career.
Few riders of her age have already had to rebuild from so many significant interruptions.
In 2021, during her first European spring with TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank, Gigante crashed heavily at La Flèche Wallonne and broke her collarbone, fibula and elbow.
Remarkably, she initially got back on the bike and chased for almost 10km before the pain forced her to stop.
ProCyclingUK covered the extent of Gigante’s injuries after that Flèche Wallonne crash as she began another rehabilitation.
She recovered quickly enough to make her Olympic debut in Tokyo and finished 11th in the individual time trial.
Later that year another problem arrived when severe chest pain led to a diagnosis of myopericarditis, bringing her season to an early end.
In 2022 she returned with Movistar and produced a 30km solo victory at the Emakumeen Nafarroako Women’s Elite Classics, covered in our report on Gigante’s first European win for Movistar.
A concussion then disrupted that season as well.
Her career has repeatedly followed the same frustrating rhythm: signs of a breakthrough, a major setback, then another long recovery.
Iliac artery surgery preceded her 2025 breakthrough
The year before the femur fracture had already contained another significant medical problem.
During 2024, Gigante struggled with symptoms eventually traced to iliac artery endofibrosis, a condition that restricts blood flow during exercise and has affected a growing number of professional cyclists.
She underwent surgery in December 2024.
ProCyclingUK reported on Gigante’s iliac artery operation and the relief of finally having an explanation for the problems that had been limiting her.
The operation forced her to miss the Australian summer, but when she eventually returned at the Tour of Norway in May 2025, the difference became obvious quickly.
Our report on Gigante’s 2025 return to racing came only six weeks before she started winning mountain stages at the Giro.
That progression is why the femur injury felt especially cruel.
Gigante had already completed one major rehabilitation, returned to racing and reached a higher level than before.
Within weeks, she was starting again.
Willunga Hill had already shown her comeback ability
Gigante’s ability to rebuild is not based only on 2025.
When she joined AG Insurance-Soudal in 2024, one of her first races for the team ended with a statement victory on Willunga Hill.
She attacked on the final climb, won the stage and secured the Tour Down Under overall classification.
ProCyclingUK’s 2024 Tour Down Under report described a victory that carried particular weight after the interruptions of the previous seasons.
She followed that with seventh overall at the 2024 Tour de France Femmes.
By the end of 2025, Gigante had progressed again, adding the Giro podium, two mountain stage victories and sixth at the Tour.
The recurring problem has never been finding evidence of her ability.
It has been keeping her healthy long enough to build on it.
Faun Tour is about racing again, not the result sheet
The Faun Tour provides a demanding place to restart.
Across four stages, the race contains more than 7,000 metres of climbing, terrain that would ordinarily make Gigante one of the most interesting riders on the start list.
That is not the expectation this week.
AG Insurance-Soudal are treating the race as part of her rehabilitation rather than the start of an immediate results campaign.
Gigante needs to experience the repeated accelerations of a peloton again, practise positioning, descend in a group and find out how her body responds when the effort is no longer dictated by a training plan.
There is no useful benchmark involving finishing position.
Completing a stage comfortably would matter more than being 20th or 40th. Completing all four would provide another step towards being able to plan a conventional race programme again.
Christmas made the team’s approach clear.
“We are excited to welcome Megan to the team in her first race with AG Insurance-Soudal, and also to give a very warm welcome to Sarah, who is returning to competition after all this time.”
Gigante will start alongside Megan Arens, Lore De Schepper, Justine Ghekiere, Emma Siegers and Urška Žigart.
For most of that group, the Faun Tour is a race in which results matter.
For Gigante, the important number is already 403.
That is how many days will have passed since she last raced when she rolls away on Thursday.
After a fractured femur, two operations and another season largely spent rebuilding, simply getting back into the peloton is the result she has been waiting for.
