Petra Stiasny had imagined the Angliru long before she ever raced it. The gradients, the mythology, the ghosts of cycling history, for a rider who defines herself by climbing, this was never just another mountain stage. It was the climb.
So when she crossed the line solo, the raw emotion was palpable. Open-jawed, the 24-year-old could scarcely believe what she had just achieved, taking a famous victory on stage 7 of the Vuelta España Femenina.
Days later, with it all finally sinking in, we caught up with Stiasny to reflect on the stage.
“I watched it back in the evening. I was sweating so much I had to have a shower again before I went to bed, and take another T-shirt,” she laughs. “This is something, when you see it from the outside, it’s different.”
Before the stage, ex-Human Powered Health rider turned broadcaster, Audrey Cordon-Ragot, had picked Stiasny out as one to watch, interviewing her as she warmed up on a Wahoo KICKR. That interview was then shown mid-broadcast, with the online audience marveling at how Stiasny described this brutal climb as “beautiful,” a feeling that never left her that day.
“I felt free,” Stiasny says now. “I felt like the only thing I was feeling was joy and freedom during the climb. Because it’s exactly my thing. The climb, the type of climb I love the most. I was not suffering. For me, it was more like a dance on the climb.”
Her dreams of the Angliru began well before the stage.
“The evening before, I couldn’t sleep because I was super excited for the stage,” she recalls. “But the morning itself was super weird because I was not nervous. I felt so relaxed. At the team presentation, in the warm-up, everything felt totally different. I was really looking forward to just enjoying the day.”
During a long lead-in to the final climb, beneath the lightness, anticipation was building kilometer by kilometer.
“I kept looking at the distance and thinking, ‘Okay, now only 100 kilometers until the Angliru.’ Then 60. Then suddenly we were getting close to the bottom. ‘Oh, we’re getting closer, we’re getting closer.’ I was just excited the whole day.”
The Angliru changes riders. It strips racing down to instinct, pacing and belief. Stiasny knew exactly what effort she could sustain there, and she refused to abandon it, even as attacks exploded around her.
“When they accelerated, I tried to follow at first,” she says. “But after a few pedal strokes, I knew if I kept going like that, I would blow up later. There were still three kilometers to go, but three kilometers on the Angliru is like 20 minutes. So I thought, ‘They can play their games, but I play my game.’”
That discipline became decisive. As she clawed her way back toward the lone leader, Paula Blasi, the race transformed into one of those rare cycling images that feels instantly timeless, one rider alone on impossible gradients, hunting another.
“When you climb back to somebody, it attracts you like a magnet,” Stiasny explains. “I could see she was suffering, and I felt like I was getting faster. Then I thought, ‘I have to kill her mentally.’ That’s why I took the inside of the corner when I passed.”
She knew the steepest ramps were still ahead. She knew that was where the race had to be won.
“And there, for the first time, I really started believing I could do it.”
Still, even as the finish approached, disbelief lingered. Stiasny had never won a professional bike race before. She had never experienced the strange isolation of leading alone.
“It was such a weird situation to have only the motorbike in front of me,” she says. “I didn’t know that feeling. I thought she was on my wheel the whole time because suddenly it was so silent. I could only hear the chain, so I thought this was her right behind me. When I reached the top of the steep section, I went full gas because I thought she would overtake me any second.”
Inside the final kilometer, the gradients finally relented, and Stiasny began counting down the distance markers. The dream was getting closer. There was no early celebration. No glance behind. No release until the line itself.
“I just wanted to win,” she says about soloing to victory. “I had this wave of emotion, and this feeling that my heart was standing still for a second. Disbelief. Because it was such a big dream.”
What followed at the summit may have meant even more. Teammates arrived one by one, and staff members sprinted into hugs.
“What was so special was seeing the emotions of the others,” Stiasny says. “We all hugged each other and screamed at each other because it was something we achieved together.”
The team achievement is something she now holds on to, building confidence for the program as it heads into a busy summer of racing. It had all begun back in October of 2025 when Stiasny first joined her new team at the Human Powered Health Performance Lab in Wellesley, MA.
“The support from the Performance Labs helped me so much,” she says. “Not only physically, but also in believing in what kind of rider I could become. You feel that people are fully invested in helping you improve, and that gives you confidence when moments like the Angliru come.”
For climbers, the Angliru occupies sacred territory. To join that history still feels surreal.
“It’s not just any climb,” she says. “One of my big idols is Alberto Contador, and he won his last race there. For climbers, this is such a special place. To become the first woman to win there, that’s really special.”
And perhaps that confidence is what people will remember most, not simply that Stiasny was the first woman to win atop one of cycling’s most feared climbs, but the way she rode it.
That calmness, support and simple joy you get from riding a bike. An athlete dancing uphill into history.
Photos: GettySport and HPHCycling
