The team buses left Le Chinaillon – the small mountain town where stage 7 of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift finished – in a hurry, riders rushing to their hotels for massage, dinner, and a good night’s sleep.
For months, team directors have been planning how to tackle the final stage of the Tour, with the historic Alpe d’Huez determining who will wear the final yellow jersey of this year’s race. But this final climb isn’t the only beast the riders will have to summit. The Col du Glandon looms as well. The back-to-back HC climbs that will wrap up the 2024 Tour de France Femmes.
Two deceptively challenging days on stages 5 and 6 of the Tour meant the seventh stage was raced on the conservative side, and with an extremely challenging stage coming up on Sunday, the race is still wide open. Right now, Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma are leading the pack, with Niewiadoma in yellow and Vollering a favourite to take the final stage, but a handful of riders sit within 90 seconds of the podium. It may look like a two-horse race, but one look around the corner of the barn and you’ll see a whole herd coming to play.
Stage 7 could have been harder had SD Worx-Protime or Canyon-SRAM wanted it to be, but no one wanted to waste energy before Alpe d’Huez.
“It wasn’t steep enough. It was a long, boring day that crawls into your legs,” Vollering said of the seventh stage.
But still, the defending champion managed to gain four seconds on her rival Niewiadoma.
“I lost four seconds and that’s nothing,” Niewiadoma said of the loss.
On the final climb to Le Chinaillon, a surprisingly large group remained intact. Led at first by FDJ-Suez, momentarily by Lucinda Brand of Lidl-Trek, the second-category climb simply wasn’t hard enough to make the stage a GC day. Vollering gave a little dig at one point but didn’t get any gap. In the end, it was Niewiadoma who was able to get some distance from the group but she couldn’t shake Vollering.
“I chose the wheel of Kasia,” Vollering explained after the race. “If you take the lead, everyone’s able to profit from your efforts. I didn’t want to do that today. I wanted to make Kasia nervous and I think I did. She was nervously watching over her shoulder all the time.”
Vollering sprinted around Niewiadoma on the line, securing four bonus seconds in the process.
“I feel like she was scared for me to attack her,” said Vollering. “That felt nice. That I was able to create a small gap in the end feels nice as well.”
Both SD Worx-Protime and Canyon-SRAM are out of their comfort zones. The Dutch team is used to wearing leaders’ jerseys and controlling the race, and Canyon-SRAM is used to attacking, being the ones who shake things up. Take Tour de Suisse for example, when Niewiadoma and Neve Bradbury went 1-2 on stage 3 after being in a day-long breakaway.
While it would have put their leader in a comfort zone of sorts, SD Worx-Protime wasn’t expecting Vollering to take the lead of the race on stage 7 with the gradual nature of the final climb.
“Today was what we expected,” said Danny Stam, Sports Director for the team. “We know the last climb was not extremely hard so we also knew it should be difficult to make the distance. I think it was not up to us in the beginning to carry the chase, but in the end, we took responsibility together with [Canyon-SRAM]. Demi tried a couple of times, but not really, we also knew it was not steep enough.”
“She had until 4 km to the finish to try to make the difference maybe because after [that point] it’s only dragging so if you’re in the wheels it’s pretty easy,” added Christine Majerus, long-time member of SD Worx-Protime and domestique extraordinaire. “That breakaway was how it was, we tried to come as close as possible, it was not up to us to start riding, we’re not in the yellow jersey but we still did. I think we can be happy.”
Niewiadoma, even with the four-second loss, looked good at the finish. The Polish rider and her team are keen to keep yellow, of course. They’ve made it clear the whole team is behind Niewiadoma. “I am very happy with how the legs felt at the end especially,” she said at the finish.
Both Vollering and Niewiadoma agree that the stage on Saturday was only a warm-up for the real thing. Sunday’s Alpe d’Huez stage is going to be where the race is decided, and riders are nervous about the nearly 4,000 meters of climbing they will have to take on.
“I think we [will] see tomorrow, but I think tomorrow is a completely different stage,” Stam said. “Tomorrow is an extremely hard day and I think tomorrow you will see who is the strongest.
“It’s really hard with the Glandon, then we have the valley to Alpe d’Huez and it depends a little bit on how is the wind there. That has a lot of influence in the race, and also the weather is [expected to be] bad tomorrow, so I think tomorrow we are going to have a very hard day.”
“I think everyone is afraid of tomorrow,” Majerus said. “Tomorrow there will be five to ten girls and the rest will do grupetto straight from Glandon. Tomorrow is definitely a different climbing stage from today.”
While Vollering and Niewidoma sit at the top of everyone’s list, the general classification is as wide open on the penultimate stage as it’s ever been. After stage 7 in 2023, Vollering led the race by 1:50 over Niewiadoma with only a time trial remaining. It was safe to say the race was over then, Vollering being the stronger time trialist.
In 2022 when Annemiek van Vleuten won the Tour, she took the jersey on stage 7 and led the race by 3:14 over Vollering.
Niewiadoma now leads with a 27-second gap over Puck Pieterse, 37 seconds over stage 6-winner Cédrine Kerbaol, 1:01 over Juliette Labous, 1:13 of Pauliena Rooijakkers, 1:15 over Vollering, and 1:25 over Evita Muzic. Almost every one of those riders is still targeting an overall podium finish, and for Vollering to win she will have to pass not only Niewiadoma but all the others as well.
“To be honest I don’t focus on Demi only, I see other good riders in the peloton,” Niewiadoma said. “Every team has someone who can play a good card in tomorrow’s stage.”
Pieterse, closest to Niewiadoma on general classification, is probably the biggest unknown of the group. She’s already won a stage, but that was her first road win and this is her first ever stage race. There’s no telling how she will climb with seven days of racing in the legs. What’s more, no one really knows how she can climb against the best in the world on the hardest climbs she will ever have raced. Pieterse was phenomenal in the early season racing and has been a standout rider all Tour, but she’s never done anything like this final stage before.
Kerbaol is also a threat to the podium. The Ceratizit-WNT rider won the Youth Classification last year and has been performing at a high level all season. She admitted after stage 7 that she took her eye off GC for a moment, and she may tumble down the rankings tomorrow, but it’s also unwise to assume she can’t hold onto the wheels.
Earlier in the year Labous wouldn’t have been as much of a worry, but she is riding at the top of her game in this Tour, and she’s French, the national champion no less. The race means something more to her. She is a fantastic climber, she won the Queen Stage of the Giro and finished fifth at the Tour last year. If Labous were to finish on the podium it would be massive, and she knows that. She feels it. She will be riding with the strength of France on Sunday.
Rooijakkers is one that can’t be discounted but will be impacted by the weather more than the rest. Not the best at going downhill, a wet descent between the Glandon and Alpe d’Huez will hinder her drastically. She’s improved heaps, but maybe not enough to stay with the front group. If she does make it down with the leaders, she will undoubtedly show that she is one of the best climbers in the race, as she displayed at the Giro in July.
Like Labous, Muzic will be riding for France on Sunday. The FDJ-Suez rider is in the best position of her life to take a major result. She’s the only rider to beat Vollering on a major climb in a Grand Tour this year, at the Vuelta España Femenina, and she’s been targeting this race and this race alone for months. While other riders prepare for the Olympics, Muzic has been grinding away getting ready for this specific stage.
Vollering has proven she is the best climber in the peloton, but that doesn’t mean she is guaranteed to take this race on the Alpe d’Huez. The presence of other climbers like Muzic and Labous will help her during stage 8, and no doubt they will attack and keep the pace high.
“My hopes are for tomorrow, now,” Vollering said after stage 7. “Than we get more real climbs and that will hopefully be enough for me.
“The tension is still on, anyway. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.”
And tension there will be. According to Niewiadoma, it’s at the pinnacle of her career. So, no pressure.
“It’s going to be [the most] important day of my career, of my team’s existence, but we’re ready for it,” she said. “Everyone is very motivated and we’re here to pursue our dreams.”
“The last climb is going to be a very personal effort, everyone will have to dig deep because it’s very steep and long. I just want to make sure I arrive at the bottom of Alpe d’Huez very fresh so I can give my best.”
Vollering, after the seventh stage, was feeling confident in her chances to take the lead. With four fewer seconds needed on Sunday, the legs and the head are both feeling good.
“I have a good feeling about it,” Vollering said of the final stage. “It has been a hard Tour until now. We go fast, everyone feels it in their legs. It’s going to be about eating well, and drinking well as well. Because we [have] never done such long stages before, it’s new for all of us and we have to watch ourselves and our recoveries very carefully. I hope I’ll make the start of tomorrow’s stage a little bit fresh.”
It will be the hardest stage of the Tour that the women have ever raced, harder than Col du Tourmalet in 2023, harder than anything the race threw at the riders in 2022. The stage is long, it’s a heck of a lot of climbing, and there’s no telling who will be the strongest when the dust settles. The bookies may favour Vollering, but every rider in the top 9 has a chance at glory, they can all smell the yellow jersey and see it hanging on their wall at home. Years of dreaming for every one of these women will finally reach a boiling point on Sunday on the Col du Glandon and L’Alpe d’Huez.
Will the defending champion come from behind to win another Tour, or will the people’s champion Niewiadoma secure the biggest result of her career? Will a Frenchwoman be able to set her home country aflame for the second time this week? The list of questions are long, and only Sunday will provide the answers.
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