The lead of the Tor des Geants changed hands for the first time on Monday night, and it changed hands inside a building rather than on a mountain. Jiaju Zhao reached the Gressoney life base at 21:42, 203km into the 330km loop of the Aosta Valley, with a 34-minute advantage over Jonathan Schindler. He then spent close to fifty minutes there: a meal, a massage, a short sleep, a change of kit. Schindler arrived at 22:15, ate quickly, and left at 22:20. By the time Zhao walked back out at 22:32, the Swiss runner was in front by twelve minutes, 36 hours and 20 minutes into the race.
It is the clearest illustration yet of how differently the two men are running the same course. Zhao, little known outside China before this week, went out hard from Courmayeur on Sunday morning and built a margin that at one stage had him roughly fifty minutes inside the course record set last year by Victor Richard, who is not defending his title and instead entered the shorter TOR130. That cushion has been spent. By Niel-La Gruba on Monday evening, reached in 33:04:41, Zhao had drifted back to roughly level with record pace, worn down by the day's heat and by Schindler's steady recovery of ground across the long traverse down from the Colle della Vecchia.
Schindler's own position is less comfortable than the timing sheet suggests. He has been climbing well and resting barely at all, and the four passes above 2,700 metres between Gressoney and Valtournenche, beginning with the Col Pinter, are the section of the course where accumulated sleep debt tends to be settled rather than deferred. Zhao restarts that climb behind but rested. Xingzhi Bai, the second of the leading Chinese pair, remains close enough to the front two that a bad night for either would bring him back into the argument.
The women's race has been a procession from the opening hours, and a fast one. Katharina Hartmuth, who won here in 2024 and set the course record in doing so, led from La Thuile within the first two hours and has extended her advantage at every checkpoint since. At La Sassa she was three hours inside her own record splits. She came into Gressoney at 22:53, left at 23:02 after a meal and a brief conversation with her crew about kit changes and the humidity, and remains third overall. Barring a collapse, the only genuine question left in her race is the size of the margin and the state of the record when she reaches Courmayeur.
Behind her the podium places have already been reshuffled twice. The American Mika Thewes, second for much of the first night, faded during the dark hours and was overtaken by China's Huiping Zhang, who reached the Donnas life base at 14:21 roughly four hours down on the leader. Sabrina Verjee, the 2022 champion and runner-up to Hartmuth in 2024, is out, abandoning at Champorcher on a day that also claimed Simone Corsini, Lisa Borzani, Christian Meier and Ales Frlic. Of the 1,100 who started on Sunday, attrition is running at the rate this race has always demanded, and the leaders are expected back in Courmayeur from Tuesday evening.