Demi Vollering the proudest woman on Piazza del Campo: “No matter how bad my day was, this is brilliant”

Vollering crossed the line in 20th place, more than six minutes behind her Swiss teammate. Still, she arrived in Siena’s Piazza del Campo with a huge smile on her face. “First and third!” she shouted across the Italian square. After handing out plenty of hugs to her teammates and team boss Stephen Delcourt, she then stopped to speak to the press.

“Ask away, I’ve had plenty of time to think because I took it easy,” she joked. “I’m so happy for Elise, this genuinely makes me emotional. Elise is someone who really deserves this, and we rode such a good race as a team. It all went exactly according to plan,” she said of the FDJ-SUEZ squad.

It was not a perfect day, largely because of Vollering’s bad luck. “That happened at the worst possible moment. I really wanted to get back to the girls, because they had fought so hard for it. But then we were sent the wrong way, and that was the end of it for us. That’s also where our heads dropped.”

What exactly happened there? “My first thought was: huh, we definitely didn’t have a road this bad during the recon. It had rough, big stones. Something wasn’t right, I realised immediately. Then I looked at my Garmin and saw we weren’t on the correct route. But yes, when there’s a motorbike in front of you, you follow it.”

That only made things more tense for the Dutchwoman, who knew Franziska Koch and Chabbey were still up front. “I heard on the radio that they were in the fight for the win... I didn’t catch everything, so I don’t know exactly what happened, and I really want to watch it back, but I was already enjoying the team radio updates. I tried to say something every now and then as well, though I don’t think they could hear me.”

“It was so exciting to experience it like that,” Vollering continued. “And in the end, they didn’t need me, because they did an incredible job. All of them. If you saw what Amber Kraak and Léa Curinier did on the front all day, they were on another planet, they were flying, and the same goes for the rest.”

“That just shows once again that cycling really is a team sport,” Vollering concluded in Siena. “No matter how bad my day was, those girls still turned it into a brilliant day. I’m so proud of all of them. I spent the whole day at the front thanks to them, I didn’t see the race from the back for a single moment. Not until my puncture, anyway. It was almost too perfect to be true.”

How will FDJ-SUEZ celebrate the win? “We’re going to Pisa, because we’ve got a very early flight to Tenerife on Sunday morning,” said the Dutchwoman, who will prepare there for the targets still to come, including Milan-San Remo and the Flemish and Ardennes classics. “So maybe we should just party all night!”