In the end, Demi Vollering (Team SD Worx) could celebrate overall victory at the Tour de Romandie Féminin, but it was a hard-fought one. The Dutch super-team had to fend off a flurry of attacks in the last 25 kilometres, lost Niamh Fisher-Black’s white jersey and missed out on the stage win.
“I knew that it would be a battle. I looked at the roadbook and saw that it would be quite a hard stage, and that a lot of girls can handle this kind of stage pretty well. Then you know that you have even more girls to watch out for, and that’s really hard because you want to defend the GC. We did very well, I think, but it was a hard job,” Vollering said after the stage.
After winning the stage 2 summit finish in Torgon, Vollering had taken the overall lead six seconds ahead of Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM) and 12 seconds ahead of her own teammate, Swiss champion Marlen Reusser. Juliette Labous (Team dsm-firmenich) was fourth on GC at 27 seconds, with Fisher-Black 37 seconds back in fifth place.
Vollering had said in Torgon that she would like to help Reusser to win the final stage and maybe even the race overall as long as the yellow jersey stayed in the team.
“So much could still happen. If Juliette Labous or someone else in the GC rides away and you cannot close it, then you still can lose the GC, so you need to be alert the whole day.
"Luckily, I had the whole team around me who helped me in this. The beginning of the race was a really good situation for us because we had three of our riders in the first group, that was perfect for us,” Vollering looked back at the first part of the stage.
The break of 11 that included Fisher-Black, Mischa Bredewold, and Anna Shackley was reeled in with 50 km to go. Attacks on the climb to Le Molard led to a front group of 30 riders with Vollering and teammates Reusser, Shackley and Fisher-Black.
However, Fisher-Black soon lost contact and ultimately lost the white jersey, dropping to fourth place in the U25 classification. Shackley and Vollering herself had their hands more than full in responding to the many attacks, including from Niewiadoma and Labous. When Ricarda Bauernfeind (Canyon-SRAM) went away, Reusser also had to join the chase to bring back the German.
In the sprint, the Swiss champion was well-positioned but narrowly lost out on third place to Silvia Persico (UAE Team ADQ) – but the sprint finish meant that Vollering won the general classification.
“This is even more special because I really like Switzerland, so it’s really nice that I have such a nice race on my palmarès,” Vollering who herself lives in Basel-Land, further north in the Alpine country, was happy to win the yellow jersey.
