The Monopoly Is Over
The Monopoly Is Over
Well, we finally know where Demi Vollering is going
We’ve got new information since the last edition of this newsletter.
Wout van Aert is indeed The Eekhoorn on the Belgian version of The Masked Singer. I don’t know if the Great Unmasking usually comes with a reprise of the character’s big hit, but apparently they just had Wout sing “Song 2” again? Come on, man, he couldn’t learn a second song?
Demi Vollering has a new team.
What does this mean?
To be honest, that question ended up pretty far down the queue for yours truly. Because first, that was a pretty sick intro video, and I say that as a total sucker for an player/rider intro video. You know what’s always a great aesthetic? Melancholy and alone on stage in an empty theater.1 Second, I knew Vollering liked to ride around with her (pretty big, tbh) dog in a backpack but I didn’t know she played the piano.2
And third, this means that Wout’s Masked Singer cameo isn’t even the most exciting musical performance by a Dutch-speaking cycling superstar this week. The man literally cannot win!
Anyway, this is the biggest transfer of the 2024-25 offseason, men’s or women’s. I don’t know if Vollering is the biggest star in the sport, in the sense that she gets the most eyeballs or pageviews or Instagram likes or whatever metric you want to use. But she’s the best puncheur in the world and the best stage racer in the world. She’s the rider who’s most capable of winning the biggest race out there: the Tour de France Femmes. Which matters for a French team like FDJ-Suez.
Vollering has finished on the podium in the last seven grand tours she’s entered. Since she joined SD Worx in 2021, Vollering has entered 22 stage races, won nine, podiumed 19, and finished in the top five 21 times. She hasn’t finished lower than second in a stage race in more than two years. On top of that, she’s won Liège–Bastogne–Liège twice and picked up a world championship silver medal in each of the past two seasons.
In 2024, she had a disappointing season. She only won the Vuelta, though she would’ve defended her title at the Tour de France Femmes had she not been screwed over by her team after an untimely crash.
You know this is a big deal because Vollering’s break with the best team in the sport, SD Worx, has completely overshadowed every other transfer out there. Including Elisa Longo Borghini—probably the best stage racer out there other than Vollering—breaking her own longstanding alliance with Lidl-Trek to move to UAE Team ADQ.
We’ve known for months that Vollering and SD Worx were on the outs—and if that hadn’t been confirmed before the Tour, it was sure as shit obvious afterward—but it was less clear where she was headed.
Back in April she posted a photo of herself signing something. A new contract? Well, not to race; this was a personal sponsorship deal with Nike. A new Insta post right after the end of the season contained no hints that a new contract was coming; she was just on vacation in Turkey.
But the suspense was worth it, because Vollering completely changes the outlook of FDJ. As she would for any team.
For the past few years, FDJ has been a good team but not a great one. They’ve hit double digit wins in each of the past three seasons, but they haven’t had a real GC threat that’s allowed them to hang with Lidl-Trek and SD Worx (or even Canyon-Sram or Movistar, at least before Annemiek van Vleuten retired) in the most prestigious races on the calendar. Évita Muzic is an exciting young French climber, and 23-year-old Italian Vittoria Guazzini has picked off a couple one-day race wins, but this team has been reliant mostly on two riders.
The first is Grace Brown; for the purposes of this newsletter Brown’s full legal name is “Grace Brown, who I can’t believe is retiring.” Brown accounted for six of FDJ’s 13 wins this season, including its most prestigious win, Liège–Bastogne–Liège. And that’s leaving aside Brown’s two biggest races of the season: Her dual time trial gold medals at the Olympics and world championships. But like I said, she’s retiring.
And Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig is leaving for Canyon-Sram next season. The quotable Danish climber has been trending downward for a couple seasons, some of which has to do with injuries. But she’s not the Tour de France-winning GC rider FDJ might’ve hoped she was. She’s a capable hilly classics rider, and a dangerous stage hunter, but she’s not on the level of a Longo Borghini or a Kasia Niewiadoma or, not to put too fine a point on it, Vollering.
Vollering is good enough to carry a team with only modest support. She hasn’t really enjoyed undivided leadership at SD Worx…ever, really. By the time she took over as the de facto lead rider upon Anna van der Breggen’s first retirement, the team was just as often riding for Lotte Kopecky had Lorena Wiebes as Vollering. Surely she would not have signed for a new team without assurances that their commitment to her as leader would be 100 percent ironclad and unambiguous. Especially given how the last year or so of her time at SD Worx went.
And in case you didn’t actually watch the announcement video, it includes the following line: “It all begins with a union, a team where every member shares the same values, the same flame.”
Feels pointed, doesn’t it?