Most riders have if not a few months then at least a few weeks to prepare for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. Team selections aren’t always nailed down until the week before, but the big hitters will know they’re going well in advance, and many plan their whole season around it. To take on the difficulty of this race, you need to be prepared.
That is, unless you’re Justine Ghekiere, it seems. Rolling across the finish line of stage 7 to take victory, already resplendent in the polka dot jersey, the 28-year-old looked like she’d been training for this moment for a long time, such was the way she executed a plan and paced her efforts to perfection.
In reality, though, Ghekiere wasn’t even meant to be in Le Grand-Bornand today, having only found out she would be racing the Tour three days before the Grand Départ.
“At first I wasn’t supposed to race here this week, so doing this now, three times already on the podium, it’s really amazing. I can’t believe I’ve done this,” a still-overwhelmed Ghekiere said after the stage. “Winning a stage in this beautiful polka jersey is really amazing. It’s just a dream.”
The lack of warning that she’d be doing this race certainly didn’t prove to be an issue for the Belgian, who is having one of her best seasons yet, after also taking home the mountains jersey at the Giro d’Italia Women. In fact, the last-minute call up and slightly unconventional run-in to the race – she’s just come back from the Paris Olympics, with some added fun – may have been what made the difference for Ghekiere.
“Ashleigh [Moolman Pasio] was supposed to ride, but with the back injury she has it wasn’t possible, so we called Justine. I asked her on Thursday,” AG Insurance-Soudal DS Jolien D’hoore explained to Escape Collective.
“She said straight away ‘Of course, why not? I did the Olympics, I was in a good shape. I had a few nights out at the Olympics’, but I said that’s perfect, that’s what you need. I think she came in fresh and in a good mental state as well, she’s flying at the moment.”
Flying she definitely was, but just as she wasn’t meant to come to this race, she wasn’t necessarily meant to win the stage either. The plan was to get in a move and secure points, with the idea of a stage victory only coming later down the line.
“It was definitely not the plan to go for the win, it was first to defend this jersey,” Ghekiere said. “The plan was to go in the breakaway and the team did really a good job. I really want to thank Julie [Van De Velde] especially because she was really amazing in the breakaway, she did such great work to keep the breakaway away and to give us a time gap of [over] five minutes. Then it was my job to make it off on the climbs to take all the points.”
After successfully securing the points, the opportunity arose for Ghekiere to push on alone, but with the GC group looming behind, she still didn’t believe that she might win her maiden Tour stage until right at the end.
“On the second-last climb, just before the final climb, I had a time gap of two and a half minutes and Jolien said ‘Just go your own pace and we will see’. When I heard the gap was almost the whole time the same, I thought ‘Okay, that looks good’. When I went into the last kilometre, then I was thinking ‘Maybe I can win the stage’ and I just went full and gave everything I had left because I was dying, I was dying so much.”
As well as being a supremely impressive ride from someone that D’hoore dubbed “like a pitbull”, Saturday’s win was the result of committed and aggressive teamwork from AG Insurance-Soudal, not just on stage 7 but all week too. The team only took their first WorldTour win this January, and now they’re taking victory on the biggest stage in front of the sport’s biggest stars.
“It’s hard to put it into words, but the team atmosphere we have is really incredible,” D’hoore said about why the team is going so well this week. “I’ve been a rider myself in a few different teams, and I’ve never seen this. The click they have, they’re just all friends, it just works and it’s just fun to work in this team, also with the staff, we really have a good team.”
The particular MVP for Ghekiere was Julie Van de Velde, who herself came so close to a stage win in last year’s Tour, but shall certainly be taking some of this one as her own having done so much to help her compatriot.
“The two of them together are like a golden duo,” D’hoore said of the Belgian pair. “They understand each other and they believe in each other and that’s what happened today, it just clicked.”
In any other scenario, a stage win at the Tour would be job well done for AG Insurance, but they’re within reach of another huge achievement in this race: securing the polka dot jersey. It’s certainly possible for Ghekiere to pull it off, but it will be a challenge.
“I didn’t look exactly at the stage for tomorrow in detail, but [I’ll be] trying to defend this beautiful jersey of course and then I will see what I have left in my legs, because it was already a really hard week for me,” Ghekiere said, exercising some caution.
First up is celebrating, and the team are keen to enjoy this win for what it is, but they’ll be ready to give it everything on Sunday.
“Riding as they are now, I think it’s possible,” D’hoore concluded. “I think we have to believe in it. It’s one team, one goal, all in tomorrow again.”
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