As the remainder of the peloton trickled through the finish line on the summit of Mont Ventoux, Marlen Reusser (Movistar) stood barefoot against the Movistar team car, arms crossed, about 500 metres down the other side of the mountain.
The race lead and the yellow jersey conceded to Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-SRAM). She made no attempt to disguise how much that hurt.
“I’m just very disappointed,” Reusser said. “I really hoped that I could win the stage or keep the yellow. That’s a hard pill to swallow.
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“I think it was not possible. Kasia did really, really good. Congratulations to her, really, chapeau. And, yeah, I’m sad. I’m just sad.”
The iconic Ventoux ascent came down to a battle of the three GC favourites. Starting the stage, Reusser was in yellow with a mere 12-second lead over Demi Vollering (FDJ-Suez) and 1:17 on Niewiadoma-Phinney. Vollering tried to test her rivals early with small accelerations on the bends through the forest, but the others were quick to respond.
Taking advantage of the caginess between Vollering and Reusser, Niewiadoma-Phinney Next attacked with 9.7 kilometres to go.
Neither Reusser nor Vollering responded. They had a little time gap to play with but a sthey looked at one another Niewiadoma-Phinney powered off. Soon the gap was 20 seconds, then 45, then 1:15. She had ridden herself into the virtual yellow jersey and still, the others continued to look at each other.
“Honestly, I didn’t understand fully,” Reusser said. “I think the problem was that Demi and me, we were marking each other too much. Really stupid for both of us.”
“Demi kept attacking super hard, and I kept telling her, ‘Don’t do this. Let’s just ride.’ Because we had Kasia well in sight. We could for sure close it.”
The constant marking and attacking did little more than increase the lactic acid in their legs, Reusser pointed out.
But Reusser had little choice but to follow Vollering’s accelerations. Letting the Dutchwoman ride away could have been just as damaging to her Tour ambitions. But every attack and counterattack also played into the hands of Niewiadoma, already alone up the road and able to ride her own pace.
“It was not too good from us and very good from Kasia,” Reusser admitted.
“Neither of us wanted to ride crazy with the other in the wheel, knowing there are following attacks,” Reusser explained.
Movistar had gone into the stage expecting Vollering to be the principal threat. The team’s plan, according to Reusser’s sports director Kelvin Dekker, had been straightforward: keep their leader out of trouble for as long as possible, deliver her into the decisive section and then “follow, follow, follow,” with particular attention paid to Vollering.
The difficulty came when Niewiadoma went instead.
“Then a game start[ed] where Demi attacks a few times more, and I think Marlen realised quite quickly that what Kasia was doing was quite strong. But she also couldn’t drop from Demi, so you have to follow those attacks. And that smoked her a bit,” Dekker said.
Eventually, the tactical game turned into mere survival. The matches had been burned and all the while Niewiadoma-Phinney was growing her lead.
“All those tactical stories, you can throw them out of the window in the moment that someone else is just quite a bit stronger,” Dekker said. “Then it’s just riding full gas to the finish and hoping you’re still close enough.”
Dekker admitted Niewiadoma-Phinney winning both the physical and tactical battle had not been the scenario Movistar considered most likely, even if they had discussed the possibility of her attacking.
“I think for sure she’s underestimated,” he said. “Kasia is an incredible rider. She’s been on every Tour podium. She’s won one.”
But “if you would have asked me about this scenario, I would have said this was the less likely scenario to happen. But it did happen.”
Niewiadoma-Phinney reached the summit solo with a comfortable margin. Vollering tried to minimise the damage at the end with one more attack on Reusser and finished in second place, 1:16 after Niewiadoma-Phinney.
When asked what had gone through her mind when Vollering attacked that final time, Reusser had a simple, explicit comment: “F*** it.”
Reusser, completely spent, got passed by Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek) and had to settle for fourth place on the stage, 1:42 down from Niewiadoma-Phinney.
For Reusser, the only consolation lay in knowing she had given it her all.
“I was really smoked,” she said. “I am not so happy, but I gave everything.”
But the race is far from over. There are two more stages left in the 2026 Tour de France avec Zwift and the current GC top three is as follows:
- Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney in yellow
- Demi Vollering +15 seconds
- Marlen Reusser +39 seconds
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