The drama of this particular Tour de France Femmes is that it steadily gets harder throughout its eight-stage run, beginning with a pair of pancake-flat sprint stages before finishing atop the Alpe d'Huez, the single-most famed mountain in France. The point there was to keep time gaps small until the final weekend, though defending champ Demi Vollering was so strong through the opening half of the race that everything seemed to be on rails. That is, until a horrible bit of bad luck and confusing teamwork threw the race into chaos on Thursday.
Vollering's race started perfectly: She spent the first two flat stages working hard for Lorena Wiebes, SD Worx's star sprinter, and even with Wiebes losing both stages to Charlotte Kool, the team looked like the strongest in the peloton. Vollering then showed she was the strongest rider in the race on Stage 3, when the Dutchwoman smoked the field in the short time trial, putting five seconds into two-time world champion Chloe Dygert and even more into her general classification rivals.
Though Vollering lost the sprint at the end of Stage 4's thrilling Liège–Bastogne–Liège cover act, the racing was so demanding that she picked up serious time on almost all of her GC rivals, with only Kasia Niewiadoma and Juliete Labous within a minute of her. She was thrilled with the result, and why wouldn't she be? She'd picked up 29 seconds on a huge group of contenders like Labous and Shirin Van Anrooij, forcing them all to expend energy to limit their losses in the process. The chatter after that stage concerned who might finish second, who might win the other jerseys—not so much who would win yellow.
Not after Stage 5. Vollering was caught up in a big crash six kilometers from the finish line, which is basically the worst possible place for something like that to happen. Any closer to the line, and she would have either been within the safe zone, or within range to limit her losses. Any farther back, and her team could have sent riders back to ferry her up to the front. Vollering took about a minute to get back up on the bike, with blood showing through her ripped shorts, and she pedaled largely without teammates to the line, losing 1:47 and falling from first to ninth in the general classification.
You do not see the yellow jersey alone like this, ever. Vollering had to get back up to speed on her own, set her own pace, ride in the wind, and manage the pain without anyone else for several kilometers. Her teammate Blanka Vas won the sprint for stage honors, an insufficient balm for the disasterclass SD Worx put together. As I watched Wiebes win the bunch sprint for eighth, I remembered how much work Vollering has done for her, work that should have been repaid here, in the highest-stakes moment of SD Worx's season. Only Mischa Bredewold went backwards to help her leader after a few kilometers, while Niewiadoma rode into the yellow jersey after having Dygert slam the pace down on the run-in to the finish.
How could this have happened, and how big of a deal is it? Vas said her radio wasn't working, so she didn't know Vollering had even crashed until after she won. With her in such good position with such little road left to race on, I doubt the team would have sent her back anyway. For their part, the team say they didn't even know where Vas was. "Actually we found out in the last kilometer that Blanka was there," SD Worx's director Danny Stam said. "We were more focused on the crash from Demi and to coach her back as good as possible, and then we heard that the breakaway was with Blanka."
Bredewold, who trained with Vollering at altitude all summer and has been a great support rider for her for two years, said she had a hard time figuring out where Vollering was too, even though the team car stopped to briefly check on her right after the crash. It turns out a benefit of the yellow jersey is high visibility. "Once I heard that Demi crashed—it also took a while before I understood that it was her that crashed—I dropped back, and it was very difficult to see where she was riding," she said. "I didn’t know if she was in a group or if she was alone, so I really had to pay attention that she did not pass me." Ultimately it's great that Bredewold got back to Vollering at all; everyone in the peloton was going so fast to prepare for the sprint that few ahead of Vollering were even aware that anything bad had happened until afterward. Even then, you have to race your race.
"It’s not something that we celebrate or something that we’re proud of, but it’s also part of racing, unfortunately," Niewiadoma said, which is fair, but also, she should have owned it. Canyon went nuts in the front of the race to punish Vollering, which is their right.
Vollering is down 1:19 to the Polish rider. That is not an insignificant gap, though given how hard Stages 7 and 8 will be, not an insurmountable one either. After all, the Dutch rider won last year's big mountain stage by 1:58 over Niewiadoma. Bredewold and Wiebes both sounded fairly relaxed about Vollering's chances, given that she has been such a strong climber in stage races all year. But whatever margin SD Worx lathed out over the first half of the race is now totally gone, and also Vollering appeared to be in quite a bit of pain at the end of the stage. Her team will be in the unfamiliar position of having to chase, and given how tactically adept their rivals (especially Fenix and Canyon) have looked, it's not going to be straightforward.
