Demi Vollering battled nerves to secure ‘incredible’ Stage 7 win on Col du Tourmalet at Tour de France Femmes

Demi Vollering has admitted she overcame a bout of nerves to blow the Tour de France Femmes apart and move to the brink of GC glory.

The SD Worx rider arrived in France as many people’s co-favourite alongside defending champion Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar).

But it turned out to be a one-sided demonstration of power climbing from Vollering, as she jumped away from Van Vleuten with six kilometres remaining.

With Van Vleuten unable to respond, Vollering bridged across to Canyon-Sram’s Kasia Niewiadoma, before roaring on to claim victory at the summit of a fog-shrouded mountain.

“I was a bit nervous this morning,” Vollering said. “My team kept on saying to me, ‘It doesn’t matter, you will set it all right on the Tourmalet.’ Sometimes, I said back to them, ‘I also need to do it. It’s nice that you say it, but in the end I need to do it.’

“That made me a little bit nervous, but I know they were saying this because they truly believed in me.”

Despite the nerves, Vollering was thinking clearly and spoke about how she picked her moment to attack.

“At one point, Anna [van der Breggen, SD Worx sports director] said, ‘OK Demi, keep drinking and make yourself ready to go.’ And then I thought, ‘OK, I go now, because it’s a feed zone and some girls have bidons in their hands.’

“It was so foggy there that I knew that if I made it there fast, they could not see me anymore.”

Reflecting on her effort in the post-race press conference, Vollering said: “I don’t know how I do it. It’s incredible.”

At one stage on the descent off the Col d’Aspin, Vollering and Van Vleuten had risked giving the race away as they went for a road equivalent of a track stand, with neither prepared to do the work to chase down Niewiadoma.

But at the finish, while despondent at seeing her chances of defending the Tour disappear, Van Vleuten had words of praise for her superior opponent.

“I’m here to win the Tour de France, and to come second, third or maybe fourth, to be honest, is super beautiful,” she said. “But after winning last year, you know that you only want to win, and it’s obvious that Demi Vollering was on another level today.”

Looking back on the antics on the descent of the Col d’Aspin, Van Vleuten said: “She didn’t want to ride. I was like, ‘If you don’t want to ride, I also don’t ride.’ But yeah, she also had a point, she had two team-mates behind her.”

That view tallied with Vollering’s assessment, as she said: “[Van Vleuten] said, ‘either we ride together, or we don’t ride together and then we both lose.’ I said, ‘OK that’s fine, I race for my team’. Luckily, my team-mates came back pretty fast.”

Sunday’s final stage sees the riders take on a 22.6km individual time trial around Pau.