Is road cycling a team sport or is it an individual fitness contest? Trick question: It is both, always, though the degree to which collective or individual strength is determinative is never a fixed quantity in any given race. Sometimes you play every card right and win on tactical genius, and sometimes you just ride away and win. The negotiation of this tension is among the most fascinating aspects of the sport. Viewed through that prism, the 2024 Tour de France Femmes was as fascinating as racing gets.
Polish rider Kasia Niewiadoma won the race by four tiny seconds over Demi Vollering, wrapping up the win this past Sunday on the Alpe d'Huez. When organizers crafted eight days of increasingly difficult racing, capped off by a soirée up the famously staggering climb, they were hoping the race would be decided on the final day, but even they could not have dreamt of a scenario as dramatic as that which played out. Vollering attacked and rode away from Niewiadoma on the Col du Glandon, and each woman had to race up Alpe d'Huez without any teammates. The scenario was clear: The Polish rider had to stay within 1:15 of the Dutchwoman, factoring in bonus seconds, and she would win the Tour.
What followed was an incredibly tense duel. Vollering, typically the picture of calm on the bike, was rocking back and forth as she tried to will her legs to turn over faster. She had Pauliena Rooijakkers for company, though the Fenix rider wasn't doing any work for the defending champion. Niewiadoma was part of a slightly larger group, and though Lidl-Trek's Lucinda Brand put in a shift in the interclimb flat section to keep Gaia Realini in contention, Niewiadoma had to fight Vollering on her own up the climb. And Vollering hit the climb with real determination, prying open a gap of over one minute as she charged upward. It swelled up to 70 seconds with about seven kilometers left to go, and Vollering seemed as though she would ride away with the win. After all, she won the 2023 Tour by beating Niewiadoma by two minutes on the hardest mountain stage. What's five more seconds over 20 more minutes of racing to come?
Instead of wilting, Niewiadoma fought harder, pushing a huge gear at a low cadence and churning her way back toward Vollering. The Dutch rider took the stage, collapsing to the ground shortly after crossing the line, waiting for Niewiadoma to finish. Vollering earned 10 bonus seconds by winning the stage, and Evita Muzic denied Niewiadoma any bonus seconds by winning the sprint for third. But Niewiadoma was only 1:01 behind Vollering, giving her a four-second buffer and an incredible victory. She was challenged on the most demanding roads of the Tour by the best stage racer of her generation, and she alone did the work to match her and win the Tour.
Vollering was the stronger rider on the day and probably throughout the race, so why did she lose? Partially because the margin by which she was better than Niewiadoma wasn't sufficient, but mostly because her team completely failed her. Perhaps the most important stage of the race was its fifth, a difficult but theoretically innocuous rolling stage that Blanka Vas won in a uphill sprint. With six kilometers left to race, Vollering got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, crashing as the road bent and contracted and the peloton had to funnel into a too-small space right as the big teams were putting down major power to keep their star riders up at the front. This was a crisis at the worst possible moment, and a major stress test for SD Worx. The moment demanded teamwork, cohesion, and above all, decisiveness. They needed to send riders back to support Vollering, to protect her from the wind and drive a furious pace to the line for a few short minutes to keep her from ceding a huge gap to Niewiadoma and the other general classification contenders.
They failed, horrifically, and Vollering lost the Tour. Only Mischa Bredewold went back to help her, despite the team car passing her as she was getting back on her bike. Blanka Vas said her radio wasn't working, while team management contradicted themselves on when they knew Vollering went down and what they said to her teammates. Lorena Wiebes, whom Vollering was working for both on the day and at the Olympics, was particularly useless. She was right next to Vollering when she crashed, and she rode on ahead to pursue the stage win, finishing eighth. "I was very lucky that I stayed on my bike," she said. "When I looked back, I saw something yellow on the ground. That really sucks."
Vollering defended her teammate afterward, though she did so on the grounds that Wiebes had lost the first two sprint stages to Charlotte Kool and was frustrated. Even if you take everyone at their word, it's shameful. Wiebes was too frustrated by her losses to keep from doing her job as a teammate of the yellow jersey. One wonders if she would have been helpful had she won, or if Vollering wasn't leaving the team after the season.
Whatever the reason, SD Worx blew it. An easy mistake to make here would be reading this as handing an illegitimate win to Niewiadoma. This line of thinking would posit that Niewiadoma only won because SD Worx couldn't get out of their own way, and that she got lucky. In other words, that tactics and teamwork are unimportant baubles. But nobody gave Niewiadoma the Tour. She was there for eight stages, fighting Vollering every day and keeping her from outclimbing her by too gaudy a margin. Her team supported her while Vollering's failed her, which is part of bike racing. I don't think we will ever see as close of a Tour, nor as spectacular a final day as we saw this year. Niewiadoma's win was as cool as it gets.
