Cyclist
Tour de France Femmes reflections: Winners, losers and future stars
Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM) won the Tour de France Femmes 2024 by just four seconds ahead of Demi Vollering (SD Worx-Protime) after a week of enthralling racing, with Pauliena Rooijakkers (Fenix-Deceuninck) completing the podium.
Niewiadoma held the yellow jersey since Stage 5 and, after a dramatic final day finishing atop Alpe d’Huez, became the first rider not from the Netherlands to win the race. It was the smallest winning margin in Tour de France history.
Here are our key takeaways from the captivating eight stages.
Runner-up no more
A win of this magnitude has been a long time coming for Kasia Niewiadoma. At some moments it felt as if she were destined to a life of second and third places on podiums, having picked up almost 30 of them since last winning a race. That all changed at this year’s La Flèche Wallonne.
The finale of the 2024 Tour de France Femmes on Alpe d’Huez echoed last year’s edition on the Tourmalet. Niewiadoma ahead – on the road in 2023 but on the general classification in 2024 – with Demi Vollering doing everything she could on a the race’s final climb to overcome her. This time things were different, however. In 2024, Niewiadoma rode in the maillot jaune, after it slipped out of Vollering’s hands following a crash on Stage 5, and was defending it with everything she had.
It was only a matter of time until Vollering attacked on the final stage. The decisive move came on the ascent of the Col du Glandon, 53km from the finish. She immediately built a gap alongside Rooijakkers as Niewiadoma remained without teammates yet surrounded by riders fighting for their own positions, including Lidl-Trek’s Gaia Realini and FDJ-Suez’s Évita Muzic, so their gap remained steady around one minute.
The two were night and day. Niewiadoma, struggling to hold on to the virtual maillot jaune with Vollering out in front and just one last ascent between her and a famous victory. It wasn’t going to be easy. Rooijakkers also knew how much was at stake and knew what Vollering was willing to give in the fight for yellow – everything. As such, the defending champion was left to do most of the work herself. Meanwhile Niewiadoma was able to rely on Lucinda Brand of Lidl-Trek, who was pushing hard to help her teammate.
It was a final day for the ages. Vollering distanced Rooijakkers in the last corner, winning the stage and taking ten bonus seconds. She had done all she could. Now a painful wait was on.
It was the ride of Niewiadoma’s life. She battled to the line, emptying herself in the process, and finished a minute behind Vollering, just missing out on the final bonus seconds. She had won the Tour de France Femmes by four seconds, the closest winning margin in Tour history. Her reaction to the confirmation that she’d done enough was priceless. Sat on the ground, she burst into tears, pain and joy coming out all at once.
SD Worx-Protime’s costly reaction
Tears fell for Vollering too. It was a painful second place for the defending champion. If you had to mark one pivotal point in the race, it would be the crash on Stage 5 to Amnéville and SD Worx-Protime’s reaction to it that contributed to the loss of the maillot jaune.
On that day, with 6.2km to the finish line, a crash coming out of a roundabout took down a lot of riders, crucially outside the 3km-to-go mark where times are neutralised. Those crashed included Vollering, Puck Pieterse and British road race champion Pfeiffer Georgi. Vollering got back up on her bike with road rash on her left hip, clearly in some pain. She was chasing on valiantly, but surprisingly had no teammates for support. There was an expectation – as you see all the time in cycling – that those ahead would drop back to help their leader. They didn’t.
Eventually she found herself with one teammate in Mischa Bredewold who, after the stage, admitted she hadn’t realised Vollering had crashed. Up ahead, teammate Blanka Vas won the stage and later said, ‘My radio was not working’. Lorena Wiebes finished eighth and admitted she ‘did see something yellow on the ground’. Bredewold, Niamh Fisher-Black and Christine Majerus all finished over four minutes back.
It must have been a hard pill to swallow. Vollering is set to depart SD Worx-Protime at the end of the season but this decision should not affect a team attempting to defend their title at the biggest race on the calendar. It left them looking chaotic, unprofessional even, and ultimately cost Vollering yellow.
She tried so hard, and fought through pain on the last stage only to fall short by just four seconds. Cycling can be so heartwarming, and in the same breath, so heartbreaking.
Puck Pieterse is phenomenal
Puck Pieterse’s abilities off-road are well documented, with victories and titles galore in cyclocross and mountain biking.
She rode her first couple of road races in 2023, but this year had an exceptional spring Classics season with a podium at Trofeo Alfredo Binda and sixth place at the Tour of Flanders. The latter was her last road race prior to the Tour de France Femmes and she showed up to the start line alongside her Fenix-Deceuninck teammates aiming to ‘leave a mark’ on the race, and boy did they.
Stage 4 was a 122km hilly day that combined the hardest parts of Amstel Gold Race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. The team were well represented at the head of the race with a trio of riders to the fore at the summit of the Cote de la Redoute. When Vollering and Niewiadoma began to ride away, only Pieterse and teammate Rooijakkers could stay with them. Rooijakkers was later dropped and the trio would contest the win.
Pieterse was at the back as Niewiadoma made her move early in the final kilometre and Vollering followed. She launched her sprint just as Vollering looked set for victory and the pair crossed the line within centimetres of each other. It was a lengthy wait for a photo finish but it was Pieterse who was finally confirmed as the winner for her first road victory on the biggest stage of them all.
Her impressive Tour de France Femmes campaign didn’t stop there. After a stint in the mountains jersey and by riding consistently on the climbs for the remaining stages, she held on to the white jersey for best young rider ahead of Lidl-Trek’s Shirin van Anrooij.
Cédrine Kerbaol and Justine Ghekiere impress
After a strong finish on Stage 5 that saw her climb to fourth overall, Cédrine Kerbaol claimed the remarkable achievement of being the first French rider to win a stage at the Tour de France Femmes with a brilliant victory on Stage 6. She attacked in the last 15km and drew out Rooijakkers, dropping her a few kilometres later and heading solo to the finish line in Morteau. The former French ITT Champion drew on all her time-trialling experience to keep away, soloing to a stage win at the Tour de France Femmes in entrancing fashion.
The same can be said for AG Insurance-Soudal’s Justine Ghekiere the next day. Resplendent in the polka dot jersey as Queen of the Mountains, she staged an attack from the breakaway on the penultimate climb of the Col de Saint-Jean-de-Sixt. While Vollering and Niewiadoma threw punches at one another behind, Ghekiere managed to eke out enough of a gap that she was able to ride to the finish in shock as she took the biggest victory of her career.
Like so many others, she collapsed to the ground at the finish line and sobbed. The wider team, soigneurs included, all came to celebrate with her. And she went on to win the mountains classification too.
2025: Anna van der Breggen and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot in the mix?
Two big names in cycling should, fingers crossed, be at the start line of the Tour de France Femmes next year. Anna van der Breggen is making a return to racing and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot returns to the road after a dominant few seasons off-road culminating in Olympic gold.
34-year-old Van der Breggen never got the chance to race the Tour de France Femmes with the race’s first edition coming the year after her retirement. But given how closely she has worked alongside Vollering in her role as DS, it shapes up to be an interesting concept. Van de Breggen is no stranger to stage race success as one of the best riders of her generation, having won four editions of the women’s Giro d’Italia.
Ferrand-Prévot is switching her focus back to the road for 2025 with an eye on the Tour de France Femmes. As an established winner, she has won World Championships in road, cyclocross, gravel and mountain biking and recently achieved her latest goal of a gold medal in the Olympics in the MTB. She’s embracing the new challenge with a three-year contract for Visma-Lease a Bike having previously raced for Rabobank and Canyon-SRAM.
Could it be an even better race next year? Surely not.
The post Tour de France Femmes reflections: Winners, losers and future stars appeared first on Cyclist.