In the end, Team SD Worx had it all their own way as the European time trial champion, Marlen Reusser, completed a memorable weekend for the Dutch team, adding time trial victory in Pau to Demi Vollering’s emphatic overall victory in the Tour de France Femmes.

The weekend double for SD Worx capped a race in which they been the dominant force throughout even though at times they had been under attack, both from their rivals and from race officials. None of that, however, could prevent Vollering asserting herself in the climbs of the Pyrenees on Saturday afternoon, her star now rising as fast as that of her rival and compatriot Annemiek van Vleuten begins to fade.

The key moment in the race came 5km from the finish of stage seven, as thick mist shrouded the Pyrenees. On the steepest section of the Col du Tourmalet, Vollering accelerated from the remnants of an elite selection and almost before her rivals could react vanished up the climb into the gloom.

“It was so foggy there that I knew if I made it fast they could not see me any more,” she said afterwards. Nor could they catch her and she won the stage by just under two minutes from the Polish rider Katarzyna Niewiadoma of Canyon SRAM.

The waiting game between Vollering and Van Vleuten, leader of the Movistar team, was finally over. The SD Worx rider exorcised the defeat in the Tour last year and this time it was Van Vleuten, champion a year ago, who was left hunched and sobbing beyond the finish line.

“It’s obvious that Demi Vollering was on another level today,” Van Vleuten said on Saturday evening. In fact, the same could be said of her team, who filled the top three positions in the final time trial on Sunday, Vollering ending second and Lotte Kopecky third.

SD Worx retained their focus throughout the week of racing despite a spat with the race commissaires which led to Vollering being penalised 20 seconds and her sports director, Danny Stam, being kicked off the race for “dangerous behaviour”. The team also held the yellow jersey throughout, following Kopecky’s victory on stage one in Clermont Ferrand, won four stages from eight and could celebrate Kopecky finishing second overall in addition to Vollering’s triumph. SD Worx also won the team classification.

It was an anticlimax for the evergreen Van Vleuten, winner of this year’s Vuelta Femenina and Giro Donne, who lost crucial time in the 22.6km “race of truth” around Pau and her place on the podium, Niewiadoma ending up third.

In some ways, it is no surprise that others have labelled SD Worx “arrogant”. Yet the team remain defiant. “I’d be frustrated too if I wasn’t on the team that’s winning all the time,” SD Worx’s sports director, Anna van der Breggen, said during the race.

Van Vleuten and Vollering will now convert from rivals to teammates, racing for the Netherlands in the World Road Championships in Glasgow. There is unlikely to be any thaw in relations between the pair, however, and their antipathy spilled over on the descent from the Col d’Aspin on Saturday, when they refused to work together.

“The Dutch team is not really a team,” Van Vleuten said before the Tour started.

Despite the domination of SD Worx there is no doubt the strength in depth of the women’s peloton is growing. In the 2022 Tour, Van Vleuten beat Vollering by almost four minutes with Niewiadoma third overall, more than six and a half minutes in arrears. Of the 144 starters, 109 finished the race. This year, 123 of 154 riders contested the final time trial, while the top five finished within five minutes of each other and 10 riders were within 10 minutes of Vollering. There is no doubt, too, that the race promoter, ASO, is fully committed to the development of the event.

Last year, after a long battle for recognition, the peloton had seemed a little overwhelmed by the chance to finally ride a reinvented women’s Tour de France. Much of the media coverage focused on the breakthrough moment that the race represented, rather than the quality of the racing.

There has been little of that this July with the competition itself, not the polemics around it, deservedly taking all the attention.