The orange jerseys of the powerful Dutch team will once again have a strong presence in the elite women's road race at the UCI Road World Championships in Kigali on Saturday.
One of the team's two co-leaders, former two-time world champion Anna van der Breggen, is expecting steep competition from nations with a full seven riders: Italy for Elisa Longo Borghini and France for Pauline Ferrand-Prévot.
"It matters. If you can play with the second row here, then of course it can give an advantage. They have seven, and we also have seven. These big teams are similar. That's not different than other years," said Van der Breggen, who believes that having strength in numbers will be a massive advantage for those three nations.
The Dutch national team will support co-leaders Van der Breggen and former Tour de France winner Vollering, and the team also includes Femke de Vries, Yara Kastelijn, Riejanne Markus, Pauliena Rooijakkers and Shirin van Anrooij.
It will be the first time that Van der Breggen and Vollering compete as teammates since 2021 with the trade team SD Worx. Van der Breggen, who won the road race world title in Innsbruck in 2018 and in Imola in 2020, then retired as the outgoing world champion racing in support of the Dutch team in Leuven in 2021.
She made the surprise announcement last summer that, after three years of working as a director for SD Worx-Protime, she would be returning to racing professionally in 2025.
Vollering now races for FDJ-Suez, and so the pair have been competing against one another at the biggest races on the calendar, but Van der Breggen said she's looking forward to the rare opportunity to be teammates again on the Dutch team at Worlds.
"It's different. If I were her coach, I would think in her way or the way she wanted it. But now it's a bit like it was before at the World Championships. I did something similar with Marianne [Vos] and Annemiek [Van Vleuten] in the past. When we had more riders who could do good," she said.
"This week was quite nice, preparing to be one team again instead of opponents. We know each other really well, but it's nice to have a team of orange girls again to ride together in a championship."
In her first year back, Van der Breggen has consistently risen to the top of her sport again; second at Strade Bianche, a stage win and third overall at the Vuelta a España, sixth overall at the Giro d'Italia, and 11th overall at the Tour de France Femmes.
In Kigali, she secured the silver medal in the individual time trial behind new world champion Marlen Reusser of Switzerland, and ahead of Vollering, who earned the bronze.
While many riders have struggled with the altitude, heat, and poor air quality, Van der Breggen said she felt relatively well during the time trial and has continued to adapt to the conditions over the next few days.
"Yeah, slowly I am getting better with the heart rate, which was not the case in the time trial yet. I hope it's a bit of an advantage for us to have arrived early, and for everyone who did the time trial. I can feel slowly that I'm adapting better and better," she said.
She said it's been a tough year on her body, especially having raced all three Grand Tours, but that she had plenty of time to recover after the Tour and then rebuild her form for the Rwanda Worlds.
"I came out of the Tour pretty good. The last day went well," she said. "The recovery took some time, but that was the same for everyone. It was a week of 28 hours of very hard racing, so I think that was a new highlight for me that I had not done before. You could see that in the numbers that it was a hard race, and you need some recovery time. I also did the Vuelta and the Giro, so I took my time after the Tour. I also had time; the team gave me some time to recover. It was nice."
Van der Breggen watched the under-23 women's race won by Célia Gery (France) from a two-rider sprint after the pair rode away from a small selection on the final climb.
The elite women's peloton competes in 11 laps of a 15.1km city circuit, totalling 164.4km. They will tackle 3,350 metres of elevation gain, with its highest point at 1,493 metres.
There are also two climbs on the circuit: the Côte de Kigali Golf climb, 800 metres at 8.1% elevation gain halfway around the local circuit, and the decisive Côte de Kimihurura climb, 1.3km at 6.3% on the circuit close to the finish at the Kigali Convention Centre.
But Van der Breggen believes there will be a much more tactical race of attrition in the elite women's race compared to the under-23 event.
"No I don't think so, you could see the bunch was already reduced. We have more teams and with more players," she said. "You can see it was a hard race, and the door was open at the back, I expect. I think we have more riders to try something and to try to make a breakaway. It will be a bit more attacking."
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