Demi Vollering of the Netherlands staked her claim to take back‑to-back Tour de France Femmes titles with an emphatic time-trial win in front of home crowds in Rotterdam, which took her into the race leader’s yellow jersey.
“I really didn’t see this coming,” a tearful Vollering, of the SD Worx Protime team, said after taking the race lead on stage three. “I had no idea that I could do this today.”
Vollering, whose win in the race last year was founded on her climbing prowess, overwhelmed her main rivals in the short, flat time trial, to win by five seconds from the Paris Olympic team pursuit gold medallist Chloé Dygert, of Canyon‑SRAM Racing.
On a rare day for the Tour de France, the racing was split into two stages – a short, flat road stage in the morning, in which the stage one winner Charlotte Kool, racing for Team DSM-Firmenich PostNL, again got the better of Vollering’s teammate Lorena Wiebes and Marianne Vos, of Visma Lease-a-bike – and a time trial in the afternoon.
But after a hasty turnaround, from morning road racing to afternoon time-trialling, Vollering asserted her superiority and established herself as the rider to beat.
“These first days were just days to survive and I wanted to really enjoy them. I had no expectations at all,” Vollering said. “After the race [in the morning] I had two power naps, I was so relaxed.”
In such a short time trial, the gaps between riders were always going to be minimal, but Vollering’s margin of victory suggests that she is once again in her best form. “It’s up to the other teams to take the yellow jersey from us now,” Vollering said.
“We will try our best to defend it to the very end, but actually the plan was to take it a little bit later in the week.”
The opportunity to consolidate her lead will come on Wednesday in the Ardennes stage, between Valkenburg and Liège, which features numerous short, steep climbs, familiar from April’s classic race, Liège–Bastogne–Liège.
In the 6.3km race against the clock, the Olympic time-trial winner Grace Brown’s hopes were dashed when the Australian required a bike change. Over such a short distance, there was no opportunity for the FDJ-Suez rider to make up the lost time.
Two American contenders, the EF-Oatly-Cannondale rider Kristen Faulkner, gold medallist in the women’s road race and in the team pursuit in Paris, and the world time-trial champion, Dygert, another of the triumphant pursuiters from the Olympic velodrome, ultimately fell short of Vollering’s mark.
Vos’s teammate Anna Henderson, silver medallist for Team GB in the Olympic women’s time trial, took a solid 10th place and is 11th overall.
At the other end of the race, however, there has been an incredulous reaction to the performance of the Tashkent City team, from Uzbekistan, who have endured a catastrophic start to the Tour.
On Monday, four of the team abandoned the race after a first stage in which they were clearly out of their depth. Their team manager told the media that it was “for sure, the legs and speed”.
On Tuesday, the team’s remaining three riders survived, but were languishing at the bottom of the standings. There has also long been intrigue over the 2023 Uzbek national championships, in which Tashkent City riders occupied the top 10 places, thus boosting their world ranking and qualifying them for World Tour races.
In the 2024 women’s Giro, only one rider finished the race, while in the Tour of Switzerland six riders finished outside the time limit on stage two. It remains to be seen how the team’s remaining three riders will cope with the more mountainous stages to come.
Their wildcard invitation came at the expense of more experienced teams, including the British team Lifeplus‑Wahoo, who have now announced that they will fold at the end of 2024.
The team raced in the rebooted Tour Femmes in 2022 and 2023, with Ella Wyllie finishing 16th overall in ithe race last year.
