Demi Vollering arrives in Lausanne on Saturday as the pragmatic favorite for the 2025 Tour de France Femmes, carrying the kind of record that makes the label hard to argue with. She won the race in 2023, then finished second in 2024 and again in 2025, enough to make her the rider everyone else measures against before the first pedal stroke.
The search for a Tour de France jersey is also about timing, and Vollering has timed this one around a cleaner build than last year. She did not race in the Tour of Switzerland or her national championships before the Tour de France Femmes, and Stephen Delcourt said the team used a three-week training camp in Tignes so she could arrive with a fresh mind and fresh body and focus on the main goal.
That preparation matters because Vollering is not just the defending benchmark; she is also the leader of FDJ United-Suez and the first €1m athlete in women’s racing, which means every result is watched with more weight than usual. She already completed a grand slam of all three of Europe’s Grand Tours this year, so the question is less whether she belongs in the front group and more whether she can turn that status into another title.
She has also had to carry criticism back home in the Netherlands after comments and weight-related suggestions swirled around her second place in 2024, when Kasia Niewiadoma beat her by four seconds after the final stage to Alpe d’Huez. Vollering said she was careful with her words because young girls are watching, and because she did not want to undermine Pauline-Ferrand Prévot’s performance, a reminder that the debate around her has not always stayed on the road.
The route gives her another chance to settle it there. The Tour de France Femmes will visit Mont Ventoux for the first time, with the key mountain stage coming three days before the finish, and Vollering knows the climb from when she was a teenager and saw what she called her first real mountain. She said she went up with a van trip and camping, was amazed by the scale of it, and took pride in passing men who were suffering as she rode by. That memory now meets a race that starts in Lausanne and a favorite who has already proven she can live with the pressure. The missing piece is whether this version of Vollering, built more carefully and carrying less racing load, can finally turn being the choice into being the winner again.
