Lotte Kopecky has recognised that her 2025 season was an exceptionally tough one, but the SD Worx-Protime star and former double World Champion is adamant that she can find her way back to consistently strong performances in 2026.
For some riders a Tour of Flanders title, taken by Kopecky for a third time in four editions last April, would be enough to make an entire season a success.
However, as Kopecky said in an extensive interview with Sporza.be, the rollercoaster nature of the rest of the year, coupled with multiple injuries, other setbacks and subsequent non-participations in both the Road or Track World Championships, made it hard to look back at 2025 with full satisfaction.
Rather than aim at GCs in Grand Tours, the 2023 Tour de France runner-up said, a project which is shelved at least for now, the initial main overall goal is to hit the ground running and be in top shape for the Classics, without singling out a specific proejct.
"It's not that I haven't worked this past year, but I worked in a different way," she told Sporza.be
"I don't want the new, but I do want to go back to the old. Of course, I want to tick off races like Amstel, Liège, or Sanremo, but I want to be ready from Omloop onwards and I want to win those races again. I want to take whatever comes and I'm not really setting a single goal."
After runaway success in 2024 culminating in a second World Championships title, Kopecky started her 2025 season later than usual at Milan-San Remo, partly to give her more time to recover from an injury at the end of the 2024 season and to allow her the freedom to focus on specific races.
Given there were some high points like Flanders, Kopecky recognised that 2025 had not been all bad. But globally, the challenges and below-expectations results she also faced made it impossible to call the season a success.
"In some areas it was fantastic, in other areas it wasn't good," she said.
"This spring there was absolutely no surplus, but I can still learn a lot from it."
"Four days before that Tour [of Flanders], I had the worst feeling I could have on the bike in Dwars door Vlaanderen. But even then, you have to keep believing you can win. I'll definitely take that with me."
"Purely professionally, it was simply much less than I had wanted and than what people had expected."
As she told Sporza, a series of factors, ranging from a lingering knee injury through to a different diet and mental fatigue after the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France, had all taken their toll throughout the year. A broken vertebra in a crash in September put paid to her final possible targets, the Europeans and the Track World Championships.
Regarding the Tour, "I worked with a dietitian and listened to people who wanted to get me in the best possible shape at the starting line, but I haven't felt this bad in years."
"After that, I took a break and went back to work as usual. I arrived at the Tour de l'Ardèche and immediately won the first stage."
“That gave me the confirmation: if I want to do it, I'll do it my way.”
Four months onwards, boosted both by a new relationship off the bike and renewed focus on 2026, as she enters her fourth decade, Kopecky is raring to go for the next season. As she put it, "I'm now 30 and have life experience and stability. In many areas, it's only just beginning."
