Demi Vollering collapses on the hot tarmac. Grasping at her helmet strap, she wrestles to free her steaming head, as her FDJ United-Suez soigneur pours cold water over her shoulders. “Demi, you’re amazing,” a fan shouts through the melee of TV cameras. Vollering’s sports director then appears from out of a team car and brandishes a double thumbs-up to the sprawled-out Dutchwoman. She musters her last reserves of energy to smile back.
Stage four’s time trial went about as perfectly as it could have for Vollering. So much so, that anyone passing by the scene beyond the finish line in Dijon might have thought she had won. Instead, she finished third, 18 seconds behind the stage winner Marlen Reusser (Movistar) but, crucially, almost two minutes ahead of the defending champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike).
The result puts Vollering in a cosy position in the GC. Approaching the race’s midway point, she has an advantage over everyone but Reusser, who she trails by just 14 seconds. Her other GC rivals – Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE Team L’IMAD), Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-Sram), Paula Blasi (UAE Team L’IMAD) and Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) – are all around a minute back. Ferrand-Prévot, meanwhile, has sunk to 14th place, and faces the tall order of overhauling two minutes and 13 seconds.
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“I’m really happy about the TT,” Vollering said outside her FDJ bus afterwards. In the background, her team staff hugged and high-fived. “I knew that today was really a TT for the TT specialists, for the big powerhouses. I prepared myself mentally that it was possible to lose some time here on riders like Marlen, for example, but that I was so close makes me happy.”
There was a long wait for reporters to speak to Vollering after the stage. Her post-race protocol, the press officer said, had to come first. Vollering began by spinning her legs quickly on the turbo trainer to flush out the lactic acid. She then clambered into an ice bath, before returning, a towel around her waist, to pen a few autographs; for one young boy, she pulled a bottle out of the cage of her bike, signed it, and placed it in his hands.
Some fans, it’s clear, believed they were looking at this race’s winner-elect. Vollering’s entourage were careful not to get ahead of themselves.
“It’s like a boxing match – we still have five rounds to go,” said Stephen Delcourt, FDJ team manager. “Today we knew it was an individual effort, and for us, it was important to put pressure on the others and make a gap. I think Demi made a gap with the other five contenders, but we still have Marlen. Marlen is a few seconds ahead of Demi, and we don’t expect Marlen to explode.”
Reusser, in a way, is the wild card of this year’s Tour. While her Grand Tour pedigree has already been proved – she finished second at both the Giro d’Italia Women and the Vuelta Femenina – this is her first time leading a team against all of the peloton’s top riders, and it’s hard to know how she’ll stack up.
“I think every race in my life I am underestimated,” the Swiss rider, a former domestique for Vollering at SD Worx-Protime, said in a press conference the day before the race began. After her victory on day four, she made clear her “Project Dijon” – her plan to win the stage and take the yellow jersey – has now turned into “Project Nice”.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
“I’m super happy that I’m here in yellow,” Reusser said. “If I stand in Nice in yellow, I’m even happier, but you don’t know. We’ve seen it in so many stage races; so many things can happen, it can change. I’m not at all like, ‘I have yellow, I’ve got to have it in Nice,’ but I think it’s possible.”
Ferrand-Prévot and her Visma-Lease a Bike team, likewise, are far from ruling out their chances of winning. “This year is not lost,” sports director Jos van Emden said. “Everything is still possible.”
If Reusser is the unknown entity, then Ferrand-Prévot is the sure bet. Vollering will only need to think back 12 months to remember what it’s like to be mercilessly dropped by the Frenchwoman; in just the final 9km of the Col de la Madeleine last year, Ferrand-Prévot put over three minutes into the Dutchwoman. It’s a fact that makes her current two-minute deficit seem a lot less significant.
“This year, we have Ventoux, which is a long climb, too,” Ferrand-Prévot teased after her time trial losses. “It’s good now to not be the favourite. It’s like, ‘Ok, I need to catch them.’ It’s also something I like.”
To return to FDJ boss Delcourt’s boxing analogy, Vollering’s sparring well, but she mustn’t drop her guard – a knockout blow could come at any time. The next two rounds are set up like one-day Classics, with eight and six categorised climbs apiece, plenty of launchpads for attacks.
“We have only one goal,” said Delcourt. “I repeat: we have only one goal, and it’s the yellow [jersey].
“We know that Demi is in super shape. We want to take care of her. We know that a crash can arrive at any second on any corner. Now we want to be positive to search for another step on the total group for tomorrow to be close to Demi to protect her and put pressure on the others.”
There’s still plenty of road to race yet.
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