We’ve known that Franziska ‘Franzi’ Koch was a rider to watch since last year’s edition of the Tour de France Femmes, but this weekend at Strade Bianche, she made it clear that she’s here to win. She finished third, but perhaps more importantly, helped her FDJ United Suez teammate Elise Chabbey take the win, giving them first and third places on the podium after a race where Koch lit up the front, never afraid to attack.
We’re excited to share an in-depth interview with her by cycling journalist Molly Hurford in our upcoming Magazine, but for now, enjoy this sneak peek:
Franziska ‘Franzi’ Koch has had a hell of a year. The 25-year-old racer may not have won a stage of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, but Koch made headlines by taking the combativity prize on stages one and four, thanks to the relentless attacks that she made day after day. Now, with a new team on the horizon – she just signed a two-year contract with heavy-hitters FDJ-Suez – she’s impatiently looking ahead to the coming season.
Patience, the German national champion admits, is not one of her virtues. She’s also not willing to sacrifice a life of adventure for the typical road-racer lifestyle that has carefully prescriptive training rides, as evidenced by the 2,800-kilometer bikepacking-style road trip she did with her partner, elite cyclist Riley Pickrell, along with fellow pros Maggie Coles-Lyster and Joe Laverick last year to kick off her base training.
“My trainer wasn’t so happy about it,” she laughs. “But I knew we wanted to do this road trip and I wanted to spend a lot of the days riding a lot. He’d try to get me to do only two or three hours on the bike, but I maybe ignored a little bit his plan for those 10 days. But that early in the season, you have to just enjoy riding, and that’s definitely what we did. It was so much fun.”
Clearly, the unconventional approach to base training paid off this year, in spades. But then again, Koch is no stranger to the unconventional. Cycling is in her DNA, but she wasn’t immediately drawn to the road. “I raced track, I raced road, I raced mountain bike,” she says. “But I got scouted to the road, and I knew if I wanted to make a living, that was the way to go. But I still love mountain biking a lot, and I still use it in training. Now, the mountain bike is just riding a bike, enjoying it, and then riding the road bike is still enjoying it, but it’s more about training.”
Choosing the road also meant she would follow in her mother’s footsteps: Her mom raced road in the early days of women’s racing, even taking part in one of the earliest iterations of the women’s Tour de France.
“It was quite cool, because in 2022, the Tour de France Femmes started on the Champs-Élysées in Paris,” Koch says. “I was racing it and I was 22 at the time – the same age that my mom was when she finished her women’s Tour on the Champs-Élysées. So we were the same age, racing at the same spot, which I thought was pretty incredible.”
But 2025, her seventh with Team Picnic PostNL, was truly her breakout season. “With the Tour this year, it’s a little strange,” Koch says. “I didn’t have a result that was outstanding. I had no top-10 or podium finish. But I did have an impressive performance. I really enjoyed racing aggressively, because our team didn’t have a General Classification rider so we had more freedom. I was really proud of how I was able to perform there.”
If you watched the Tour de France Femmes, you likely saw Koch on screen. Not a day went by where she wasn’t in a break or on a solo attack, and while she didn’t take a stage win, she definitely became a fan favorite for her willingness to relentlessly go, and then go again. The attacks, she says, weren’t always a planned team tactic. Sure, she knew the goal was to support her then-team-mate Nienke Vinke on the climbing stages, leading her out. But the attacks and breaks on the earlier flat stages? That was all her.
“No one would have pointed the finger at me and said, ‘Oh yeah, she’s able to do an attack like that. Not even me,” she admits.
THE FULL STORY IS COMING IN THE MAGAZINE SOON
