After missing the overall victory at last year's Tour de France Femmes, Dutch racer Demi Vollering heads back to the race this weekend as the top favourite for the yellow jersey once again.
She won the race in 2023 with a three-minute margin over then-teammate Lotte Kopecky (SD Worx-Protime). However, last summer saw her drop out of the lead following a crash 6.5km from the end of stage 5, turning a 22-second lead into a 1:19 deficit to Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto), from which she wouldn't recover.
Now racing for a new team, home favourites FDJ-Suez, Vollering is hoping to avoid disaster once again and take back the yellow jersey from the Pole, with whom she shared a stage at the pre-race press conference in Vannes on Friday.
Her most recent race before the Tour, the Dutch National Championships at the end of June, saw her day end with a crash. Luckily, she avoided any serious injury, and she'll aim to avoid any further spills during a trick opening weekend in Brittany filled with hills and tight roads.
"I think there's always danger involved, even if a stage is not super tricky," Vollering said of the Tour's Grand Départ on Saturday. "Last year, the stage was not super tricky, but I still crashed in a shit place, so you always need to keep your eyes open.
"I think the first two stages can be really exciting, but as soon as you don't have to look then, of course, it's not so nice. But I think they're two really exciting stages as well, a bit like the Ardennes. Normally, I like this kind of racing, so I also hope I can enjoy the first two stages as much as possible."
Vollering went on to lose last year's race by just four seconds from Niewiadoma-Phinney, despite racing to a famous victory atop L'Alpe d'Huez to close out the race. She insisted that she's not looking back at last year's touch of misfortune to motivate her for this year's race, however.
"I don't know if it's a motivation, really, but of course, it's something which can help me if I'm really suffering this year," Vollering said. "I never suffered as much as last year with a broken back.
"I can always think back to that – it can always be worse. I think I can get some motivation or strength out of it, but like Kasia says, I'm more living in the now, in the moment. That's something I want to do and not think so much."
The GC action, and with it, more suffering, could well begin with the first stage of the race, a hilly 78.8km run from Vannes to Plumelec.
The stage concludes with a 1.7km hill to the line, which averages 6.2%, the finish borrowed from the GP Morbihan won by Eleonora Gasparrini back in May.
The biggest tests of the race, including major climbs of the Col du Beal, Col du Granier, Col de la Madeleine, Col de Joux-Plane, and Châtel, will all come in the second half of the nine-day race, however.
Unlike several other Tour contenders, who competed at the Giro d'Italia earlier this month, Vollering once again opted to skip the Italian Grand Tour (she hasn't raced there since taking third place in 2021), instead heading to altitude for a more controlled preparation at a team training camp.
"I've done it like this the previous years as well, so I decided I wanted to do it this year again," Vollering said.
"In previous years, I was in a really good form in the Tour de France like this. So, I just really like to have a big block of training where you really focus on your training, your recovery, how you eat, and how you sleep.
"You can control everything in that moment, and when you're racing, you're not really in control, and maybe you have long travel. So, I just really like to have a really big block of training where I can train super hard and really suffer to make sure I'm in the best form possible."
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