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Demi Vollering finished second on GC at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift – but she finished first in the list of most-talked about riders.
The Dutchwoman was the center of attention for most of the nine days, partly due to her riding for the leading French team – FDJ-Suez – but also due to events on-and-off the bike.
Vollering, who won the 2023 Femmes, crashed on stage three, and initially there were concerns that she would not continue in the race. She allayed those fears, though, by bouncing back strongly to finish runner-up to Pauline Ferrand-Prévot.
But before the mountains arrived, her team manager Stephen Delcourt was involved in a heated multi-day war of words with Ferrand-Prévot’s sports director Jos van Emden.
The latter accused Vollering of being in a “gilded cage” after Delcourt said the peloton doesn’t respect his star rider, to which Delcourt responded by calling Van Emden “a stupid man”.
Vollering addressed the topic for the first time in her post-race press conference, saying that “I’ve been hunted for this a little bit.”
She expanded: “Especially in the Netherlands, I have the feeling that I have this stigma around me that I am a little bit of a drama queen, or however you want to put it.
“But in the end, if you ask my teammates, they will always say something different. Someone who doesn’t know me [like Vam Emden] says something like this. I cannot blame him because he doesn’t me. He can say that from the outside.”
At the start of stage four, Vollering complained of neck pain, the result of her fall from the previous day. But as the race got tougher and the categorized climbs appeared on the menu, she showed no lingering effects of the crash.
“In the end I don’t suffer too much from the crash anymore,” she said. “But of course a crash on stage three takes energy from you, and your body needs to recover from that.
“At the same time the body also needs to recover from the stage, so I think for sure it cost energy from the body that you’d want to use for recovery in the legs.
“Of course it’s never nice to crash in a stage race and it costs a lot of energy, but I’m not sure if it has something to do with this weekend.”
‘I came really close to a stage victory’
Vollering finished second at the race for the third time (Photo: Getty)
Vollering moved from third to second on stage 9, with Sarah Gigante of AG Insurance-Soudal dropping out of the podium spots. It means that Vollering has finished in the top-two in each of the four editions of the Femmes since it was relaunched in 2022.
Asked how she can claim a second yellow jersey in the future and dislodge Ferrand-Prévot, she had a few ideas. “If in next year’s Tour de France there are some echelons days, that would be good for me, because then my ‘heavy’ weight would profit from that,” she said.
“It depends on what Tour de France they lay down. A time trial would also be good for me. Today you saw Sarah Gigante lose a lot of time [on the descents], so not only being a good climber is what makes you a good rider.
“You have to have every kind of skill. This Tour de France was maybe a bit more for the pure pure climbers. I don’t know what’s next year – never say never. We will recover, rest, go back to the drawing board and see what we can do in the coming years.”
Vollering’s reaction to coming second at Châtel was in stark contrast to the scenes 12 months ago, when Kasia Niewiadoma beat her to the top spot by just four seconds.
The 28-year-old admitted that her feelings this time around “are a bit different for sure”. She added: “I am happier now because I know we fought every day for everything we could do.
“After yesterday [on the Col du la Madeleine] I was pretty sure that there was not much possibility anymore of moving to yellow, but I really wanted to move up on GC and also go for the stage victory, as that is what I was missing from this Tour de France.
“I came really close a few times, but there was no stage victory this year. How we fought as a team this whole Tour de France, I am really proud of that. With a new team, everything went really well, and this makes me very happy.”