While Elisa Longo Borghini dominated the final stage of the UAE Tour, winning on Jebel Hafeet for the third time, the day's unexpected result was Femke de Vries's third place, just 17 seconds behind the victorious UAE Team ADQ rider.
As the peloton thinned on the lower slopes of the Jebel Hafeet climb, De Vries's bright yellow Visma-Lease a Bike jersey was ever present, maintaining her position close to the front. Even when the attacks started flying, she held firm, emerging as one of only four women at the front of the race.
Even when that group shattered under the pressure of Longo Borghini's repeated moves, she held on, though she was eventually dropped by Monica Trinca Colonel (Liv-AlUla-Jayco) just inside the final kilometre.
"This is the best result I had to now," De Vries said of her stage placing, which matched her final general classification.
"I still cannot believe that it's really happened. We made a plan after the off-season that I would be good here, and I was a bit doubting, it's so early in the season. I made so many choices to be good here, and I'm so happy that I could really show myself. The whole three days went good for me, then they say I could just go all out on the climb and see how far I would get.
"I was on Kasia's wheel and she just rode at a rally hard pace, I was like, if I look right, I will see Longo Borghini go and she went, I should have anticipated that a bit," De Vries explained. "I was ahead of Monica, then she closed in on me, and we passed Kasia, I was like, whoa, I passed a Kasia, that's crazy!
"Then Monica just accelerated a little bit, I couldn't follow, she looked back and then she accelerated more. I should stay in the wheels but I could not close it."
Though she raced for club teams before turning pro, De Vries is flowering later in life than many. Now 31, she signed her first professional contract as recently as 2022, joining the Continental level GT Krush Tunap team, spending just over two years there, before joining Visma-Lease a Bike halfway through the 2024 season.
De Vries is yet to win a race, something she intends to change in the near future, but has a series of top 10 finishes to her name, including another WorldTour stage third place, at the 2024 Tour de Suisse, just days after joining the team.
Whatever, Sunday's result is certainly the product of a period of unprecedented dedication for her, changing her training routine over the winter, when she and the team agreed to target the GC.
"What do we change? I think we did everything a little bit more, a little bit more training, a little bit more resting, a little bit watching the food and yeah, being more serious. I was in Spain all winter, so that also really helped that I didn't have a lot of distractions."
De Vries will return to Europe and prepare for the one day Classics where she expects to support team leaders Marianne Vos and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, before heading to the Vuelta España Feminina, where she'll ride for herself again.
