Swiss road-race champion Noemi Rüegg came to bike racing through her family. At first, her goal was simply to keep up with her brother who is five years older than her. Their dad was involved with a local cycling club and Noemi slowly grew more and more curious. When she was 13, she finished her first cyclocross race and was hooked.

She turned professional on the road as a 19-year-old, leaving her full-time job caring for disabled people in a home. She is a two-time Under-23 Swiss time trial national champion but her heart belongs to the classics. Noemi loves a punchy course, the more chaotic, the better. She is not afraid to be aggressive in the peloton and loves the excitement and energy of a hectic race.

Noemi is only 22 and still discovering her path in the sport. In 2024, she will focus on learning from races and her teammates. Her ultimate goals are to podium in one of the classics and to develop as a stage racer.

Lizzie Stannard is forever on the move. Lizzie was born in Sydney, Australia, but grew up in New Zealand, where her mom, a civil engineer, and her dad, a professor of human performance, moved to and opened a café when she was a child.

From the start, sports have been a constant in Lizzie’s life. Her parents had met cycling in Australia and always encouraged her and her brothers to go play outdoors. That often meant ripping around on bikes. Lizzie had a hard time choosing just one sport however. In high school, she took up triathlon and was soon racing world cups. Training to be world-class in three sports while studying political science at university got to be too much.

Lizzie decided to focus on cycling, because it was the most fun. She and a friend went on a massive road trip to North America and raced everywhere they could. After that trip, Lizzie was hooked. When she got home, she passed up opportunities to pursue careers in academia and business and moved to Melbourne to race with a small Australian team. She did well there and was soon off to Europe, first to Italy and then to Girona, to try to make it in the big leagues.

Coming to Girona is one of the best decisions Lizzie has ever made. In the Catalan cycling mecca, she has made great friends. She loves riding with them through the hills and mountains near the city. All that riding has shown in her performances. In 2022, Lizzie won the Euganissima Flandres and finished seventh overall at the Giro Toscana Internazionale Femminile. In 2023, she finished second on a stage at the Vuelta Andalucia Ruta del Sol and tenth overall at the ReVolta, while riding the second most race days of any rider in the women’s peloton. Lizzie is determined to keep getting faster and keep learning.

If she weren’t a racer, she would probably be doing a PhD. For now, she will stick to reading every book she can and being a student of her sport.

Riding bikes is almost a requirement to be in the Borghesi family. Letizia and her younger sister grew up hearing stories from her dad about his wins as a U23 racer and Letizia thought to herself, “I could do that.” She started racing as a 12-year-old and hasn’t looked back. Her parents still ride and you’ll often find them at Letizia’s races, having driven their camper van from their home in the mountains of northern Italy to support their daughter.

In 2022, Letizia earned a pair of top ten finishes in the spring classics. She continued her growth the following season with top ten results in both one-day and stage races. Letizia has raced the Giro-Tour double for the last two years, enjoying demands of back-to-back stage races. Her biggest result to date is her 2019 stage win at the Giro d’Italia where she spent the day in the breakaway before sprinting to the stage win.

Growing up in the mountains of northern Italy, Letizia is happiest when she is outside. She adores her home region of Trentino and you can often find her hiking to the nearby lakes when she’s not training on the road. She earned the silver medal in the 2022 Italian gravel national championships, her first ever gravel race, and has since also raced the gravel world championships. In the off season, Letizia enjoys competing in the local cyclocross races. Given her experience in cyclocross, it’s not a surprise that her favorite races are the cobbled classics because she loves the steep climbs and is used to the harsh weather conditions.

Letizia completed her bachelor’s degree in sports science and she is currently studying for her master’s degree in biology/nutrition.

Clara Koppenburg brings strength, experience, and her ever curious, energetic mind to EF Education-Cannondale. The 28-year-old German has been a pro for a decade and still loves to learn about her sport.

In 2014, she was offered her first professional contract just a few months after she had ridden her first races. Her athletic background helped. When she was a kid, Clara rode horses, played tennis and basketball, and skied, both alpine and cross-country. A talented runner, who raced all the distance events on the track, she studied sports science, which she loved, because she could earn half her credits by sailing or rowing or doing other outdoor activities with her friends from class. Although her dad worked for a professional cycling team, Clara never considered riding bikes herself.

Then, she went on a trip with him to a race in Colorado and realized that cycling was a lot more intense than the off-road jaunts to cafés and ice cream shops that she’d done with him. Inspired, she decided to start training and was soon off to the races.

She just loved pushing herself to her limits. She has since won the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana - Vuelta Comunitat and finished second at the Tour Cycliste Féminin International de l’Ardèche. In 2023, she was second at the ReVolta.

Clara is a talented climber, who wants to focus on stage racing for the coming seasons. She lives in her beloved Black Forest, just outside of Basel, and enjoys spending time on the wooded climbs that she knows so well, spending evenings swimming down the Rhine with friends all the way to Basel’s city center, and trying out some difficult new recipes in the kitchen. She is already famous for her vegan banana bread, which is one of her favorite pre-ride snacks.

Magdeleine was about eight-years-old when she learned to ride a bike without training wheels. That Christmas, she got a new bike and the following summer her dad took her on a nine-day, 1,000 kilometer bikepacking trip. She credits her dad – and that trip – with creating her passion for cycling that has guided her life ever since.

Growing up in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Magdeleine rode with her local club. She raced mountain bikes, cyclocross, and road bikes as a teenager. She also learned how to track stand and to this day cannot resist the urge to track stand when she waits at red lights. As much as she loved racing in Quebec, Magdeleine soon realized that if she wanted to continue to compete and grow as a rider, she needed to go to Europe. She earned a spot with the UCI’s World Cycling Center program where she spent two seasons soaking up every opportunity she encountered.

At just 22-years-old, Magdeleine has already raced big stage races like the Vuelta a España Femenina, the Giro d’Italia Women, and the Tour de France Femmes, and one-day races like Strade Biance and Amstel Gold. She is still learning where her strengths lie but it’s clear that her enthusiasm for cycling will help her go far.