Hey Bro, Sorry I Left You For Dead and Cost You the Maillot Jaune

I'll get to the Vuelta preview when I get to it because the Tour de France Femmes is in chaos

My plan for today was to drop a brief recap of the Tour de France Femmes before moving to a preview of the Vuelta a España, which kicks off with a short time trial in Lisbon on Saturday. But the boys are going to have to wait.

Demi Vollering, the heavy pre-race favorite, became an even heavier favorite during Tuesday afternoon’s six-kilometer time trial through Rotterdam. Vollering is a good time trialist but by no means a favorite to win on flat roads against a field that included an in-form Chloe Dygert, Kristen Faulkner, Grace Brown, Juliette Labous, Anna Henderson, and so on and so forth.

But Vollering blitzed it. In just seven and a half minutes of racing, she beat Dygert by five seconds, put 15-20 seconds into anyone who could remotely be considered a GC rival, and left her main GC rivals even further in arrears: 30-odd seconds to Kasia Niewiadoma and Mavi García, more than 40 to Gaia Realini, more than 50 to Neve Bradbury. On Stage 4, the Stiège to Liège, she came second in a three-up sprint with Niewiadoma and Puck Pieterse, which is fine because Pieterse, 22, is a monster cyclocrosser who’s had a result like this coming for months.

And until the peloton hit a traffic circle some six kilometers from the finish line of Stage 5, it looked like we wouldn’t even have to bother watching the two mountain stages—Vollering had yellow in the bag. And she still might.

But it’s going to be interesting now.

Vollering was among a group of riders who hit the deck¹ coming out of that roundabout, and while it could have been worse—Pfeiffer Georgi and two others abandoned—Vollering got back up clearly worse for wear.

The actual reason the race leader wears yellow is so they’ll be easy to identify, and sure enough, there’s Vollering, holding her lower back and in obvious pain. When she does manage to get back on her bike, there’s a softball-size hole in the back of her bib shorts.² The race leader had clearly fallen down and broken her ass.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to ride a bike with a broken ass, but it hurts. You don’t go very quickly. Especially if your entire team leaves you to fend for yourself.

There are a lot of ironclad unwritten rules in road cycling, one of which is that if your team leader is in the yellow jersey at the Tour de France, and said leader goes down, you go back to help. SD Worx DS Danny Stam said it would’ve been pointless to go back and help—with so little of the stage left, Vollering wouldn’t have had the time to catch back up to the leaders.

And maybe that’s true to an extent. But she lost two minutes and goes into the mountains 1:19 behind Niewiadoma, the new race leader.

One of Vollering’s teammates, Blanka Vas, won the stage. Vas, who was the only member of the final four-rider group not to medal at the Olympic road race, didn’t let Faulkner get the drop on her this time. I don’t have a particular problem with that. With so many strong riders, SD Worx could have split strategies and let Vas ride for the stage while the others came back to help Vollering limit her losses.

But Mischa Bredewold and Lorena Wiebes also kept the hammer down, attempting to set Wiebes up for a sprint win. And the fun part is that what SD Worx, as a team, can’t agree on what happened. Bredewold and Stam both said the riders didn’t know about the crash, and it was pointless to drop back anyway, then Bredewold claimed that when she did pull over and wait for Vollering, she had a hard time picking out the rider in the bright yellow skinsuit. And also losing yellow isn’t the end of the world, said Bredewold. Vas said her radio was on the fritz.

And then there’s Wiebes, who said: “I did see something yellow on the ground, so that's really disappointing.” Yeah, too bad. Nothing to be done. Especially in the context of Wiebes pulling Lotte Kopecky uphill at the UAE Tour and Vollering trying to drag Wiebes back to the front group at the Olympics after they got caught behind Dygert’s Nelson Piquet Jr. incident.

Look, I’m not inside the SD Worx camp, and I know Vollering at the team are on the outs, but what’s the point in even bringing her to the biggest race of the year if they’re going to hang her out to dry like this? Futile or not, the entire team ignoring a stricken leader is like a football team just up and not blocking for their quarterback.

But after all that, I kind of think Bredewold is right. Vollering was so good in the time trial, and so good on the intermediate stages before her crash, that she’s still ninth on GC. And the only rider I’d actually worry about if I were her is Niewiadoma. Realini is behind her. García, Bradbury, and Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig are multiple minutes behind.

Unless Niewiadoma has the ride of her life this weekend, or unless Vollering has well and truly broken her ass, she is still probably going to roll back the 110ish seconds she lost in the crash over Glandon and Alpe d’Huez. She’s that much stronger than everyone else on these climbs.

And then good riddance to SD Worx, because absent one hell of an explanation, I’d have a hard time trusting my directors or teammates again if I were Vollering.