Over the years SD Worx-Protime have remained at the top of the leaderboard when it comes to victories, with Lidl-Trek chasing behind, but next year a new super team will be hot on both team’s heels. FDJ-Suez, with an eye on the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in particular, has picked up not one but two top general classification contenders in Demi Vollering and Juliette Labous, while already touting Évita Muzic as the team’s future star. In addition to the GC riders, they’ve also added Elise Chabbey to the roster, and although the Swisswoman doesn’t have any aspirations of winning a “Grand Tour”, she does want to go for victories more in the future.
The reason behind their staggering new signings is clear: they want to win the yellow jersey at the Tour de France Femmes. As a French team, it is the highest priority to take home the top race in the world and the pride of France. The team’s manager, Stephen Delcourt, was clear before the 2024 Tour that the leader’s jersey of his home tour was the ultimate goal. The closest they’ve gotten was this year with Muzic, who finished fourth overall.
“Is it better to have Demi as a teammate than to ride against Demi? The answer is easy,” FDJ manager Stephen Delcourt said in an interview with Cyclingnews. “We want to ride aggressively at the front together but with more cards.” Delcourt said with Vollering’s addition, FDJ is now one of the best teams in the sport on paper.
He’s not wrong. And who wouldn’t want to see a French team win the Tour de France yellow jersey? But in their haste to fortify their team, FDJ-Suez may have shot themselves in the foot by combining four superstars with one goal.
From humble beginnings
If any team has done a good job building their program sustainably it’s FDJ-Suez. They started as a small French development team back in 2006. It wasn’t until 2017 that they started to seriously consider stepping up their game after Australian Shara Marche finished fifth in the one-day La Course by the Tour de France. After that they started to bolster their roster with more international riders like Lauren Kitchen in 2018, Emilia Fahlin in 2019, and Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig and Brodie Chapman in 2020.
Uttrup’s signing rocketed the team into conversations with a second place at La Flèche Wallonne and fourth overall at the Giro d’Italia, along with a stage victory for Muzic at the Giro. Uttrup continued to be the top rider through 2021, but by 2022 Marta Cavalli had stepped into the spotlight.
In 2022 the team won more races than the previous three years combined, including eight WorldTour events. Cavalli’s Amstel Gold Race and La Flèche Wallonne back-to-back was the start, followed by a stage of the Tour de France Femmes and a stage and overall at the Tour of Scandinavia by Uttrup, and a stage of the Vuelta España Femenina by Grace Brown. After 2022 FDJ-Suez was looking like the next top team to challenge SD Worx-Protime.
One year later Brown, Uttrup, and new signing Loes Adegest netted WorldTour wins for the team, but a GC victory was still out of reach. In 2024 the team’s top riders suffered injuries and illness, and by the time the Tour started all the pressure was on Muzic.
The Frenchwoman performed admirably, and the team put everything behind her, riding the front of the race when it should have been another team’s responsibility just to display how much they believed in Muzic. That’s still the case, according to Delcourt.
“The project of the team is still around Évita, but not alone, she has been on the team since she is 17 years old and we can push her to be better and to support her, with the best riders around her and with her,” he told Cyclingnews.
Putting together the puzzle
Delcourt definitely meant the best riders part. By the Tour, FDJ had already announced Labous as a new addition to the 2025 roster, and rumours of Vollering’s signing had been circulating for months.
Muzic’s fourth overall at the Tour is the closest the team has ever gotten to winning the French race. Previously, Uttrup had been the team’s top GC rider, finishing seventh at both 2022 and 2023 Tours, and in the top 10 of multiple Giros.
Adding Labous to the team increases their odds of landing on the podium of a Grand Tour, especially the Giro. Labous finished 5th at the 2023 Tour and fourth in 2022. She was runner-up to Annemiek van Vleuten in the 2023 Giro and fifth there in 2022.
Now, of course, the addition of Vollering means they will be in every pre-race conversation come the 2025 season. Vollering’s win at this year’s Vuelta and last year’s Tour, and her second place at the Tour this year, make her the top stage racer in the peloton post-Van Vleuten. When looking for a near-foolproof way to win a Grand Tour, look no further than Demi Vollering (as long as a crash or an ill-timed nature break doesn’t take her out).
However, signing all the superstars in the world won’t win races, especially if they aren’t willing to work together. It happens almost every time the Dutch national team lines up to an event, take the recent World Championships in Zurich for example. One of the reasons Vollering lost the Tour in 2024 was because her teammate Lorena Wiebes still had stage ambitions while Vollering was on the ground and didn’t want to wait for her teammate. Stacking the team with options could easily backfire on FDJ-Suez.
One saving grace is the departures of both Uttrup and Cavalli. The Danish rider is headed to Canyon-SRAM while Cavalli is supposedly riding for DSM Firmenich-PostNL next year. In a lot of ways, FDJ-Suez will be a completely different team in 2025.
The best way to deal with so many leaders vying for the same goals is to have management that can handle that much ambition: sports directors and upper management who can make promises, and follow through on them, in a way that keeps everyone happy. Sometimes riders won’t get what they want. Muzic will probably not be thrilled about any chance of a GC result at the Tour being handed to Vollering in 2025, and vice versa Vollering will not want to share leadership with the Frenchwoman. Labous will be able to maintain focus on a race like the Giro, but any hope of going for yellow at the Tour will go to Muzic and Vollering first and foremost. So, clearly laying out a long-term plan to manage leadership – what Delcourt called “the synergy of all the riders” – is key.
Vollering, Muzic and Labous will be thrilled to learn that Chabbey doesn’t want a piece of the Grand Tour pie. In an interview with Escape Collective Chabbey said one of the reasons the French team appealed to her was because they didn’t want her to go for general classification, but rather stage or one-day victories.
That role has similarities to the one Brown filled at FDJ before her recent retirement. Chabbey will be happy to play domestique at the big stage races, but when it comes to other races she has been clear about her goals. While at Canyon-SRAM she was in a mid-level role of being GC backup while also trying to win races, and it didn’t work for her. She wants to throw her arms in the air next year, which means sometimes leadership will be hers, or at least that is what she wants.
Vollering isn’t only going to target the Tour; she also loves the one-day races, especially the Ardennes Classics. There her and Chabbey’s ambitions might clash, as well as Muzic who finished fourth at La Flèche Wallonne only this year.
SD Worx-Protime has had multiple leaders before: think the 2021 Giro d’Italia when they went in with Anna van der Breggen, Ashleigh Moolman Pasio and Vollering. They swept the podium that year, with Van der Breggen winning two stages and Moolman Pasio one. But even the Dutch team has struggled with a multi-leader approach this year. Vollering, Lotte Kopecky and even Lorena Wiebes haven’t had the same dynamic the team had with Van der Breggen, Megan Guarnier and Lizzie Deignan circa 2016/2017.
Those conflicting priorities led to clashes and lost opportunities, and no example is more clear than stage 5 of this year’s Tour. When Vollering crashed, Wiebes didn’t wait because she was stage hunting and could smell a potential victory (which ultimately went to teammate Blanka Vas). There wasn’t clear enough leadership, and although the team got its stage win, Vollering lost the overall.
Only time will tell how FDJ-Suez manages their new super team, but for fans of the sport, the possibility of having a major rival with the potential to unseat SD Worx-Protime is exciting. When it comes to the one-day races, the Dutch team will likely still be on top, although the new Lidl-Trek team will give them a run for their money. But for the big stage races, if they can manage Labous, Vollering and Muzic, there’s no reason FDJ-Suez won’t win the Tour de France Femmes.
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