On Tuesday FDJ-Suez announced the signing of the current GC leader at DSM Firmenich-PostNL, Juliette Labous, with another high-profile signing rumoured to be on the way. But the new additions to the team will only help the team’s current leader Évita Muzic grow, contends team manager Stephen Delcourt. And with months to go before those new riders even pull on an FDJ-Suez their current star is gearing up for the biggest race of her season, the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, where she and Delcourt both dream of a yellow jersey.
“Recruitment is how we can be better, how we can help also Évita to grow and recruit the best riders on earth, to push her to be better, to push her on the limit, and also to have a bigger value for the team,” Delcourt said of Labous coming to the team next season.
Muzic first made her mark on women’s cycling when she took a surprise victory during the final stage of the Giro d’Italia in 2020. That was a surprise perhaps to viewers, but not to her FDJ-Suez team, who knew the then-21-year-old’s talents. Four years later she will line up at the Tour, already a dream come true, but with an additional cherry on top for Muzic specifically: Alpe d’Huez.
“Now I live 40 minutes from Alpe d’Huez; for me it’s really special to [race] there, but also stages 6 and 7,” Muzic said. “In my dreams, I hope to win on the top of Alpe d’Huez. But we need to see how [Col du Glandon] is going because it’s also a hard one. Everyone spoke about Alpe d’Huez but maybe [Col du Glandon] is harder.”
In my dreams, I hope to win on the top of Alpe d’Huez.
Évita Muzic
The French rider and her French team are looking forward to the final three stages of the Tour de France this year. The race starts in Rotterdam, with half the stages in the Netherlands and Belgium. It isn’t until the fifth stage the Tour crosses into France. The reason is understandable: the Olympic Games have taken up a vast majority of France’s resources so when planning this year’s edition the ASO had to improvise. While Muzic and Delcourt might not be thrilled about the even split of French and non-French stages they do agree on one thing: the race finishing on Alpe d’Huez makes up for the early stages.
Delcourt has broken the eight-stage event into three blocks. The first is the initial three stages in Rotterdam, including the stage 3 time trial. While the time trial will be a big goal for FDJ’s Grace Brown, who recently won the Olympic time trial in Paris, the main goal for the road stages will be to keep Muzic out of trouble.
“Personally, I prefer to not do the three first stages, but yeah, we need to have a bit of everything,” Muzic said of the Rotterdam stages. “I just will try to lose the least time possible and I think it will be really hard because it’s short stages and in a city with a lot of corners and furniture on the road, but all can happen.”
Muzic won a stage of the Vuelta a España Femenina earlier this season, beating the best climber in the peloton, Demi Vollering, who eventually went on to win the race overall. If not for a stage plagued with echelons Muzic may have finished next to Vollering on the podium. As it was she ended up fifth overall.
Delcourt’s second block of the race is the next three stages from Valkenburg to Morteau: stages 4, 5 and 6. All three stages offer a little something for other riders on the team, like Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig who will go into the race as a co-leader with Muzic. Uttrup won a punchy stage of the 2022 Tour and will be hoping to net another one, and both the fourth and sixth stages look promising. The team’s goal, according to Delcourt, will be to stay at the front for these stages, keep an eye out for opportunities and be ambitious, a word he also uses to describe the future of the team.
When FDJ-Suez signed Uttrup in 2020 it was a turning point for the French outfit. The team had spent a few years moving away from its roots as a French development squad, but the signing of Uttrup catapulted them into the conversation of future teams to watch. And while Uttrup and other foreign signings like Brown and Italian Marta Cavalli have gotten the team some major wins, as they look ahead to the rest of the 2024 season and beyond, it’s Muzic who they are hoping to raise to the top level. Brown will retire at the end of the season, and neither Cavalli nor Uttrup are currently signed with the team past this year.
“We want to win all three Grand Tours and win the six Classics, Strade [Bianche], [Tour of] Flanders, Amstel [Gold Race], La Fleche [Wallonne], and Liege [Bastogne-Liege],” Delcourt said of his goals for the future. “OK, we won Amstel, Fleche and Liege but we [have] never worn a Grand Tour jersey. It’s good to have high ambitions but don’t forget we have never worn a leader’s jersey.”
As quickly as FDJ grows and transforms, Delcourt sounded a note of warning about the speed of the transformation in women’s road racing, in particular talk of the Tour de France Femmes expanding past its current length to 10 or more days. “We can add gravel stages, we can image all now [the riders] are so professional, they are ready for that. But there is another stakeholder, the team,” he said.
“I think that many teams can’t follow if we improve so fast; we can lose a lot of teams, especially with [Lifeplus-Wahoo folding] which is a big sign women’s cycling is growing fast, but we need to structure and mature. We need to be clever and wait so everything can grow step by step. We need to think about all the women’s cycling pyramid and not only the five or six [teams] that we have because we need to continue to work on the desire to inspire the new generation.”
Muzic has been at the center of FDJ’s efforts to grow sustainably, long before that Giro stage win in 2020. She first joined the team in 2018 at the age of 19 and hasn’t shown any sign of leaving. “We need to have highly ambitious goals, but to continue to work out, continue to build the best team for the human part first, to add riders with human values so they can work together and for that, Évita is the centre of the product because if you analyze the improvement of Évita and the improvement of the team, we are better every season,” said Delcourt.
The final block of this year’s Tour route – stages 7 and 8 – is for Muzic. Two stages thick with climbing, the second ending with Alpe d’Huez.
When Muzic wasn’t selected for the French Olympic team for Paris she turned her attention to the Tour, with Alpe d’Huez and the eighth stage at the forefront of her mind. Maybe, she said, the Olympic snub was for the better. She was able to spend the majority of the summer preparing for the Tour with nothing else on the calendar, no other goals or dreams to distract her.
The Tour de France will be the biggest race of her year and career to date. Sure, she went into the 2023 Tour as a co-leader on the team, with an eye on the queen stage finishing atop the Col du Tourmalet, but she left the race on stage 5 before she had a chance to show herself on the big climbs. This year her improvement is clear, with her results at the Vuelta, and second overall at the Vuelta a Burgos, Muzic and FDJ-Suez are hoping for more; they are dreaming of Alpe d’Huez and a yellow jersey that has eluded them for the last two years.
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