The Eneco Tour Women 2026 runs from October 13 to 18, on the same days and in the same towns as the men’s Eneco Tour. Lorena Wiebes, who won the race and five of its six stages in 2025, when it was the Simac Ladies Tour, does not start. Dutch champion Lieke Nooijen has number 1 on the provisional start list published by WielerFlits.
Why Lorena Wiebes is not defending her title
Wiebes’s next race is the scratch at the track world championships on October 14, the day of the first road stage. Last year she won stages 1 to 4 and stage 6, and took the overall by 54 seconds from Elisa Balsamo, with Megan Jastrab third at 1:01. Zoe Bäckstedt won the one stage Wiebes did not, the time trial, and finished fourth.
None of those four is on the start list. Lotte Kopecky, who won in 2024 by two seconds after taking the last stage, is not on it either. The highest finishers of 2025 who come back were fifth, sixth and seventh. Fifteen teams of six riders start, six of them Women’s WorldTeams.
Lieke Nooijen races to the VAM-berg in her own province
Nooijen, who is 25, comes from Coevorden in Drenthe. Saturday’s stage goes from Hoogeveen to the VAM-berg in the same province: 114.1 kilometers, with eight laps of the circuit over the hill and the finish at the top. She was seventh in this race last year, 1:25 behind Wiebes. This year she was second in the time trial of the Tour de France Femmes and tenth in the European championship time trial on October 7.
Her Visma-Lease a Bike team has two more riders for the classification: Femke de Vries and Margaux Vigié. De Vries was second in the Dutch time trial championship, 12th in the Tour de France Femmes and fifth in the Tour of Britain. Vigié was fifth here a year ago at 1:06.
Vinke and Schweinberger in the Tilburg time trial
The race opens on Tuesday evening with a 3.1-kilometer prologue in The Hague, where women and men start in turn, and Thursday’s time trial in Tilburg is 13.6 kilometers. Nienke Vinke of SD Worx-Protime won the European under-23 time trial title on October 7. She was 11th in the Tour de France Femmes and has not won a professional race yet. Christina Schweinberger of Fenix-Premier Tech is the Austrian time trial champion and was sixth here last year at 1:07, one second behind Vigié.
Charlotte Kool and the sprint stages in Ede and Arnhem
Charlotte Kool, Schweinberger’s teammate, has six wins this season and was second in Binche-Chimay-Binche on October 6. Wednesday’s stage at Ede is two laps of the Veluwe circuit, 79.5 kilometers, and Sunday’s in Arnhem is nine laps of a short circuit, 70.1 kilometers. In Arnhem women and men start as one group and ride three kilometers together before their routes split. Friday’s stage in Limburg, four laps from Sittard to Watersley over 87.8 kilometers, and the VAM-berg a day later are harder for a sprinter. Kool finished outside the time limit on the Mont Ventoux stage of the Tour de France Femmes.
Why the race left the Women’s WorldTour
The Simac Ladies Tour was a Women’s WorldTour race in September. As the Eneco Tour Women it is in October and has dropped to UCI class 2.1, because the new dates overlap with WorldTour races in China. “The ambition is to have both races on the WorldTour calendar within three years,” Thijs Rondhuis of the organization told NOS, in a quote translated from Dutch by WatchCycling. “The women deserve a Tour of the Netherlands just as the men do,” race director Roxane Knetemann told WielerFlits in May, also translated from Dutch.
Marianne Vos has won the race four times, from 2009 to 2012, more than anyone. Where to watch in your country is on our watch page.