Welcome to daily coverage of the 2026 Giro d'Italia Women by the cycling podcast Feminna.

Today, Rose Manly and Lizzie Banks will take you through stage two, Brancade to Caourle.

Cozeste she'll see her, cocece vichin'en. 2 Bruncade to Kaorle. Well, hello and welcome to our second episode in our Jiro d'Italia women coverage.

It is Rosemannely. My voice is on its way out. That wasn't from partying too much in Calais last night, I assure you.

Well, yesterday for Stage 1, we had, of course, Lorna Vibas fan club president, Rebecca Chaltern, so she seemed like the perfect pick for today. Stage two on our daily coverage from Roncarde to Keioli, we have, I mean, this doesn't get much better, a two-time Giro Detalia stage winner, Lizzie Banks. You don't get that pedigree on the men's podcast,

are you, Lizzie? You just don't. Oh, Rose. Thank you. You're really boosting my ego. What a welcome.

Lovely to be here. My absolute favourite race. Best race of the year. One of the most prestigious

races of the year always was the most prestigious race until the Tour de France came along

and steamrolled it out of the way. But what a beautiful race, beautiful country, beautiful food.

Very, very happy to be here to talk about the Juryd Italia. But also, we should say, actually,

your first win, I think it was in 2019. Lizzie was in this region, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was. The race started in Vittorio Veneto and finished in Maniago, which is actually famous for knife making.

And I was telling you Rose earlier and Denny and Becker that I was presented with a sword on the podium,

which is actually a champagne opening sword.

I only actually tried once to open a bottle of champagne with it. And I failed because I hadn't properly frozen the neck of the champagne bottle. So on one of my weekly champagne tastings, I'll have to give that a try again, because, yeah, it's a very, very cool memento to have of my first world tour win. But can I just say, I mean, you say like champagne opening sword. It's actually called a

sommelier's sword. It's absolutely, it looks like a pirate sword in my. Yeah, we used to, we used to have it on display in the spare bedroom, doing a renovation at the moment. Not threatening at all. We don't have a bedroom bedroom, so it's just on display in the living room instead. You never know, you never know when the mood will take you to need to open a bottle of champagne with a sword.

Oh, well, I'm glad you went that way, Lizzie. I was going to say when the mood will take you to suddenly grab the sword that sits in your lounge. I was going to, what did the customs officers say? Surely you had to get that. It was in my hold luggage, thankfully, because I always used to pack a bag so full with

snacks that by the end of the Jero, there was a lot of space for swords, Astoria, bottles and

various other memorabilia. Not memorabilia, trophies. Trophies. Some of trophies. There's always

room for more trophies. Lizzie, I mean, we obviously went through the start town of your win today, even, didn't we, off the back of the climb today in stage two.

It was predicted to be a sprint, but why do you tell us the tale of the tapper, please, about what went down?

Because we had that huge bombshell yesterday, and we kind of left the listeners also on a bit of a bombshell

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