Demi Vollering wanted to lay the foundation for her second overall victory in the Tour de France Femmes on Saturday. But on the Col de la Madeleine, the Dutch rider had to deeply bow to Pauline Ferrand-Prévot. And that hurt a lot.
Lars Boom briefly places his hand on Vollering’s right shoulder at exactly 2,000 meters altitude. “Well done,” says the FDJ-SUEZ team leader to his leading rider.
Vollering barely registers the comforting gesture. The South Holland rider leans on her bike. With her head down, she tries to catch her breath again. She receives a red towel around her neck and a warming vest from her caregiver. “Close your jacket,” Boom advises. It’s not even 10 degrees at the top of the Col de la Madeleine.
After about five minutes, Vollering has recovered enough to answer five questions. “I don’t really know what my story is today,” she says after a deep sigh. “I didn’t feel as good as I had hoped. I lacked the power. And then cycling is very simple.”
The eighth stage of the Tour was the most important day of this season for Vollering. The course of the queen stage was made for her. On long climbs like the Madeleine (18.6 kilometers at 8.1 percent), she has almost always been the best in recent years. But now she lost more than three minutes to an unleashed Ferrand-Prévot.
The Frenchwoman is the new wearer of the yellow jersey thanks to her stage victory. Vollering is third at 3.18 minutes. With one stage to go, a podium finish seems the highest achievable. “I am very disappointed in myself,” says Vollering. She straightens the towel around her neck and zips up her jacket. “But it is what it is.”
Ferrand-Prévot solos to Tour victory
‘Maybe it was a bad day for Demi’
Vollering lost the Tour last year by four seconds to Kasia Niewiadoma. That third edition of the French tour was far from flawless. Vollering crashed in the fifth stage, lost the yellow jersey there and could not always count on the full support of her then team SD Worx.
This season Vollering switched to FDJ-SUEZ. The French team put everything on their Dutch leading rider in this Tour, but again there was a setback for Vollering. She crashed in the third stage, after which a war of words arose between her team and Visma-Lease a Bike, the team of Ferrand-Prévot.
“We will never know if that crash and that fuss have had an impact on today,” says team boss Stephen Delcourt of FDJ-SUEZ. “Maybe it was just a bad day for Demi. Of course, that crash was not easy for Demi. But we have always continued to believe in our leading rider. And in our plan.”
The plan of FDJ-SUEZ in the key stage of the Tour was to send Évita Muzic and Elise Chabbey in the leading group, in the hope that they could help Vollering on the Madeleine.
That only partially succeeded. Muzic stayed more than a minute ahead of Vollering for a long time. In the last 5 kilometers, the Frenchwoman did ensure with a turn at the front that her leading rider reconnected with a group with Niewiadoma, but that was already far behind Ferrand-Prévot. “It didn’t work out as we wanted,” says Chabbey. “But we did try.”
Vollering says afterwards that she was more than satisfied with the support of her team. “I told Évita that she had to keep going, because maybe she could keep turning at the front. Then it would be a shame if she waited for me. In the end, she did wait and brought me to Kasia. I was very happy with that.”
In the final kilometer, Vollering herself rode 23 seconds away from Niewiadoma with a final effort. As a result, she climbed over the Polish rider in the standings, to third place. “That was the only thing I could save, a podium finish. There wasn’t much more in that last kilometer, but it was enough to drop Kasia.”
On Sunday in the final stage, a tough mountain stage to the Châtel ski resort, that will most likely be the battle for Vollering: to retain her podium place. She doesn’t want to think about that yet on top of the cold Col de la Madeleine. “I’m pretty ruined at the moment,” she says. “First recover, then I’ll think about tomorrow.”