Demi Vollering‘s FDJ United-SUEZ team have announced the roster which will support the Dutch woman at the Tour de France Femmes avec Ziwft next week.
Vollering won the Tour when riding with SD Worx in 2023, and has finished second in each of the two editions since and both and the team will be desperate for her to win in Nice on August 9th.
Vollering will look to Juliette Berthet and Évits Muzic as her chief support riders for the hilly and mountainous days, while the increasingly versatile Paris-Roubaix winner, Franziska Koch will provide a steely backbone for the team.
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Recently crowned French champion, 20-year-old Célia Gery is fast improving and adaptable enough to help out on all terrains too, while Amber Kraak and Marie Le Net form the rest of the seven woman squad and are both certain to be seen on the front controlling.
The team has been around for 20 years but was little more than an also ran for many of those years. However, since Muzic won the team’s first World Tour race at the 2020 Giro Rosa, they have been on a tear and are now the best team in the women’s peloton.
However, they are yet to win their home race, the Tour de France Femmes, something manager Stephen Delcourt told Cycling Weekly before the first edition of the modern race in 2022 was their chief ambition. As the best rider in the world, Vollering is a huge part of making that ambition a reality and Delcourt has built the team around the 29-year-old Dutch woman.
“It’s really hard to choose the roster because we have a really, really amazing team, and we have only one goal, which is the yellow,” Delcourt told Cyclingnews earlier this month.
“For that, we want the best riders around Demi, and not just the seven best riders, because especially with this Tour de France, there are a lot of stages where we need to be really careful if we want to put pressure on the others.”
The team already has 19 wins this season, with Vollering bagging 10 of those, including two stages and the GC at the Giro d’Italia last month, and she is certain to be brimming with confidence on the start line in Lausanne next week. However, if she’s to win she will need to overcome last year’s victor, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot who will lead a strong Visma-Lease a Bike team. Ferrand-Prévot hasn’t had the best of seasons and hasn’t raced since early May, though she is notoriously brilliant at peaking for goals, as she did last year.
Other rivals include Movistar‘s time trial world champion, Marlen Reusser, who is sure to challenge, especially with the inclusion of a 21km TT on stage 4, and a resurgent Anna van der Breggen leading the SD Worx-Protime team.
The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift starts in Lausanne on August 1st with two stages in Switzerland, moving into south-east France for the seven remaining stagesrest of the race. A summit finish on Mont Ventoux is the queen stage of the event, which concludes in Nice on August 9th.
