As SD Worx-Protime’s Lorena Wiebes hunched over her bars and tried to break down a chaotic day on the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, an apt or perhaps ironic motto looked back up at her. The words “The show must go on” are emblazoned on her cockpit, an ethos held by the Dutch sprinter and her team, and which possibly goes some of the way to explaining why the race leaders both won and lost on stage 5.
Recouping after the line in a swelteringly hot Amnéville, it’s fair to say SD Worx had a day of extremes. The good news: their Hungarian star Blanka Vas took a huge victory, outsprinting some of the best riders in the world on a tough finish.
The bad: behind Vas’ moment in the sun, the team watched the yellow jersey taken from their grasp, as Demi Vollering crashed in the final 6 km and then faced a long, mainly unsupported push to try to limit her losses, eventually losing 1:47 on the stage and tumbling down to ninth on the general classification.
A day like this throws up many more questions than answers. Why did Vollering crash? Was it fair for her rivals to push on ahead? Will she take yellow back? But perhaps the biggest question of all on Thursday evening was this: where were her teammates?
“It was really confusing,” Mischa Bredewold explained at the finish, the only rider from SD Worx-Protime who ever joined Vollering to try to help her back on.
When the yellow jersey is in trouble after an issue, we’re used to seeing a quick rally of support, a swarm of teammates around their leader, trying to drag them back towards the front. On Thursday, at least three teammates were with Vollering at the time of the crash – Bredewold, Vas and Wiebes – but only one dropped back to help. One sprinted to the eighth, and the other won the stage. Not exactly all-for-one teamwork.
“Blanka was in the front group so she for sure always has to keep going. We were also going for the stage win today, and it’s so short until the finish that it’s useless to drop back with six girls; we would not have a benefit for that,” Bredewold said in defense of the lack of support around Vollering.
However, as it turned out, it wasn’t wholly a tactical choice to not call back teammates or still go for the stage once Vollering had crashed.
“My radio was not working so I didn’t know what happened,” Vas revealed after the stage.” I just saw nobody is there anymore from the team, so I did not know there was a crash.”
As well as Vas not knowing what had happened just behind her, the team did not know where she was until several kilometres after the crash. It wasn’t so much that the team tried to give her the go ahead – which she wouldn’t have heard through her broken radio – but they didn’t have much time to consider the situation at all.
“Actually we found out in the last kilometre that Blanka was there,” sports director Danny Stam said. “We were more focused on the crash from Demi and to coach her back as good as possible, and then we heard that the breakaway was with Blanka.”
Bredewold was also late to the news of what was going on, with communication not just poor between the various parts of the SD Worx team, but perhaps not really happening at all.
“Once I heard that Demi crashed – it also took a while before I understood that it was her that crashed – I dropped back, and it was very difficult to see where she was riding,” she explained. “I didn’t know if she was in a group or if she was alone, so I really had to pay attention that she did not pass me. I think in the end it was good that I could pull.”
Stam added that the chaos of the late race compounded the issue because it simply didn’t leave enough time to effectively respond. “It’s not so difficult to communicate, but you must understand when the crash is there before the girls know and there are one and a half kilometres further [ahead], then it takes three minutes before they’re there,” he said. “The crash was at five and a half [kilometres to go] and I think Mischa arrived at three and a half, so I think that’s pretty quick.”
In the end, whatever help Bredewold could give did not change all that much. Vollering lost a significant amount of time, and a significant amount of skin from road rash, and of course the yellow jersey. However, with plenty of this race still to go, the defending champion has far from lost everything.
“Losing the yellow jersey might not even be such a bad thing, you know?” Bredewold said. “We were all like ‘Whoa, pretty early to have all the control.’ I think Demi will be a bit sad about it but I don’t think losing the yellow jersey is the biggest [tragedy] probably. We have to get a minute back but I’m also not too worried about that.”
Whilst it remains to be seen how a slightly bruised Vollering will feel in the morning, Bredewold is right: a 1:19 deficit on GC is really nothing given the tough stages coming up, and there are plenty of chances for a rider as strong as Vollering to take that time and more over her rivals.
“I think the most important thing is that we see what’s going on with Demi and how she feels and what the rest of the team feels. I think tomorrow is not a day for us, but we still have two days that are really hard,” was Stam’s estimation.
As for whether it was fair that the other teams pushed on and made the most of Vollering’s misfortune, there were some mixed views within the team.
“No, I think that’s just the sport. When it’s at 50 km maybe you can expect [teams to wait], but not at 4 km,” said Stam, but Bredewold was somewhat less breezy. “That’s one up for debate I’d say,” were her carefully chosen words.
It’s never nice to be the victim or a crash, or to see your teammate up the road winning whilst you struggle for support behind, but to use SD Worx’s own mantra against them: the show must go on. They’ll just be hoping they’re back to being the main characters soon.
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