The Setmana Ciclista Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana
And 101 other stories
We ask of the stars, and they provide.
The biggest names in the women’s peloton kicked off their season this week, all for their new teams: Demi Vollering for FDJ-Suez and Anna van der Breggen for SD Worx at (checks notes) (takes a deep breath) the Setmana Ciclista Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana1. And Elisa Longo Borghini for UAE Team ADQ at the women’s UAE Tour.
I’ll start with Longo Borghini, because her race is 1) over and 2) pretty straightforward.
The UAE Tour features a bunch of flat stages across the desert with one or two (usually just one for the women) stages with a climb up Jebel Hafeet or Jebel Jais. I guess that’s what they’ve got out there—multi-lane highways over glass-flat desert moonscape, and bigass mountains.
I’m usually bored to the point of total indifference by flat stages, but one fun thing can happen on a flat parcours, and that happened in Stage 2 of the Women’s UAE Tour: Crosswinds.
Remember: Cyclists aren’t people, they’re birds. And once you start blowing the flock all over the road, the unexpected has a tendency to happen.
In this case, splits in the peloton. A couple of them. The first one was one of the craziest breakaways I’ve ever heard of, and I’m still not completely sure how it happened. Five riders: Lorena Wiebes, the best sprinter in the world; Longo Borghini, the heavy, heavy GC favorite; two of Longo Borghini’s teammates; and American track cycling star Lily Williams.
With this group composition, there is absolutely none of the normal poker table bullshit you’ll usually find in a break. Everyone’s going to work together, with the UAE domestiques—Karlijn Swinkels and Lara Gillespie—doing the lion’s share of the work. If the group comes to the line together, Wiebes is going to win the stage no matter what, and Longo Borghini is going to take a huge head start on GC in advance of the Jebel Hafeet stage, no matter what. The only person in this group for whom that’s not the explicit goal is Williams, and what the hell is she even going to do about it?
If she attacks, she’ll get closed down. If she can even find a place to attack on a flat course—this stage actually featured minus-90 meters of net climbing—that doesn’t even have any corners in the second half of the stage. The only thing that could sink them would be great cooperation and effort from a peloton that got blown into even smaller chunks behind.
This quartet picked up almost a minute and a half on the next group, and more than two minutes on most of the competition. The GC was decided before the Jebel Hafeet stage even started.
Not that she needed the help. In contrast to previous UAE Women’s Tours, there were no other serious GC contenders here. No Niewiadoma, no Vollering, no Realini, no Bradbury, no van der Breggen. Longo Borghini’s closest competitors ended up being her own teammates, along with riders like Mavi García and Kim Le Court, who’d be stage hunters in a more serious field. Longo Borghini attacked from a select group with three kilometers left to go on Jebel Hafeet, and put 30-plus seconds into them by the summit.
I would be surprised if she wins an easier mountain stage or World Tour GC title for the rest of her career.
Why was the field so thin? Because most of the big guns I mentioned were in Spain for the aforementioned Setmana Ciclista Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana.2
This race is still ongoing, but Stage 1 was the first race for van der Breggen’s comeback, along with Vollering’s debut in FDJ colors. Another star who left SD Worx this offseason, Marlen Reusser, was also in the field for her new team, Movistar.
Though Reusser already had a few days of racing in her legs for her new team; it’s Spanish semi-classics season, so obviously Movistar wanted to show out on home turf, and that meant breaking the glass on their big signing early. I do kind of like this about cycling, that each team has unique priorities based on geography and sponsorship. No doubt that factored into Longo Borghini racing the UAE Tour while all her big rivals remained in Europe.
All four stages of the Setmana Ciclista Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana3 are hilly to some extent or another; the first stage not so much. Three categorized climbs, the last two back-to-back. The Alto de Barxeta, followed by the second-category Alto de Barx.4 Not that big a drag in the grand scheme of things—just 4.6 kilometers at 5.7 percent—but this is Vollering Country.
Sure enough, she hit the gas with 20 kilometers to go and dropped van der Breggen around the QOM marker, 18 kilometers from the finish. From there, she soloed down the back side of the hill and to the finish. Reusser was able to reel van der Breggen back in and beat her to the line, but by that point Vollering had already been done for 30 seconds.
That’s a big gap in a one-week stage race, even one with so much climbing remaining. I liked that van der Breggen managed expectations after the race—oh, it’s been such a long layoff, I’m just happy I was able to keep up for as long as I did, and so forth. Vollering seemed absolutely thrilled.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I remember how Vollering looked last spring: Miserable. No support from her team, winless until race day 13—which was all the way out on May 2—no contract for 2025. Now, she’s got a new home, a team that’s built around her, and she just beat seven shades of shit out of her replacement to win on the very first day of the season.
Anyone would be smiling in those circumstances.
I’m guessing “Alto de Barxeta” is like a diminutive
Amazing what a change of scenery can do. Last year Vollering seemed portrayed as a disgruntled star/diva rider who was being difficult, but now looking like she’s had a weight lifted from her shoulders and really enjoying the racing