It was supposed to be the day things came full circle for Demi Vollering. A decade ago, on the slopes of Mont Ventoux, the then teenager scaled her first mountain by bike on a trip away with her speed skating team-mates. It was the moment she realised she had something special. She then transitioned to cycling, powered to the top of the sport, and, on Friday, returned to the limestone giant where it all began, this time within touching distance of the yellow jersey at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
The script was written. The finale scene would be uplifting: Vollering standing at the summit, applauded by the crowds, a tear in her eye. Instead, she couldn’t get away from the climb sooner.
The FDJ United-Suez rider spent the afternoon trying, and failing, to chase down the stage winner Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-Sram) with Marlen Reusser (Movisar). She started the day 12 seconds off Reusser’s yellow jersey, and ended it 15 off Niewiadoma-Phinney’s.
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A few hundred metres beyond the finish line, Vollering ground to a halt in a huddle of TV cameras. She downed a bottle of water, calmly put on a jacket, and then pierced through the crowd to descend 6km down to her team bus. She said nothing. The only sound the microphones captured was the roaring of the wind.
“I didn’t see her after the finish. So I don’t know exactly how she feels,” Nicolas Maire, Vollering’s sports director at FDJ, told Cyclingnews half an hour later.
Asked for his thoughts on how the stage panned out, Maire’s verdict was simple. “That was not the plan,” he said. “But at least we pushed her to fight until the line and to still believe that it’s possible on the next day.
“For sure, it is not what we expected. We were looking for a stage win, but I think Kasia was really, really strong, and she showed it. We will see what we can do in the next few days.”
So what went wrong on the Ventoux? Though chased by two of the peloton’s finest climbers, Niewiadoma-Phinney managed to build a minute’s gap barely 3km into her 10km solo. Another 4km later, and the Canyon-Sram rider’s advantage had doubled, making her the virtual yellow jersey on the road, an honour she took for real at the summit. Surely a duo as strong as Vollering and Reusser could have caught her?
For Lars Boom, another of FDJ United-Suez’s sports directors, the problem stemmed from the pair “looking at each other too much”.
“You always know that Kasia will be there,” he said. “And you obviously know that you are a minute and five seconds ahead of her in the standings, but you also know that you can’t let her ride too far alone. That’s not only on us, but that’s also on Marlen to control that, I think. But she’s playing more with her [yellow] jersey.
“We did take initiative to make the race hard at the start, which suits Demi, but Marlen just let it go. She looked very quickly to Demi, and that is sometimes not so smart.”
Reusser later agreed that she and Vollering had been “stupid” with her tactics.
The Swiss rider, however, also pointed the finger at her old SD Worx team-mate, who she felt could have co-operated better. “Demi kept attacking super hard, and I kept telling her, ‘Don’t do this. Let’s just ride’,” Reusser said. “We had Kasia well in sight. We could for sure close the time.”
Instead, she said, she and Vollering got a “nice portion of lactic acid again and again in the legs”, and Niewiadoma-Phinney rode away.
It was only when Vollering had begun her warm down outside her team bus that she felt ready to speak to the media. Dutch broadcaster NOS was on hand to ask her about her day.
“I launched an attack, and then Kasia very cleverly went straight over the top of it. And then, well, I really should have closed the gap straight away,” Vollering rued.
“Afterwards, you always start to wonder a bit whether you really couldn’t do it, or whether that’s just what you thought at the time. But yes, that’s mainly where the disappointment lies.
“I hoped to be able to break away with Marlen and then catch up with Kasia, but, unfortunately, that didn’t work out.”
Another chance might come in the future for Vollering to close the loop on her Mont Ventoux tale. But on Friday, in pursuit with Reusser against Niewiadoma-Phinney dogged ride, she seemed to play her cards wrong.
Rather than winning the stage, her deficit in the GC grew by three seconds. “Until the finish line in Nice, all is possible,” FDJ sports director Maire said.
“I think Kasia took a good advantage today, but we’ll try to fight in the next few days, and see what Demi’s feeling is after this stage to see what we can do.”
With two stages remaining, this Tour de France Femmes is far from over.
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