Vollering wins final stage to clinch second Tour title

Demi Vollering showed her prowess on the final stage of the Tour de France Femmes to become the race's first two-time winner.

The Dutch FDJ-Suez rider won the penultimate stage to snatch the leader's yellow jersey from Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney and carry an eight-second lead into Sunday's finale.

The fifth edition of the race culminated with a 99.2km mountain stage, beginning and ending in Nice, which featured four ascents of the Col d'Eze and totalled 2,100m of climbing.

Niewiadoma-Phinney's British team-mate Zoe Backstedt pushed the pace in the early stages before former race leader Marlen Reusser crashed on the second descent of the Col d'Eze.

Reusser was third in general classification, 72 seconds behind Vollering, and although the Swiss rider could finish, she was unable to get back in contention.

That left previous race winners Vollering and Niewiadoma-Phinney to battle it out and, just as Vollering did on Saturday, she pulled clear of her Polish Canyon-SRAM rival just before cresting the final climb and stretched her lead on the descent.

The 29-year-old went on to finish more than a minute ahead of her rivals as she claimed her third stage win from nine in this year's race.

"I've never won wearing the yellow jersey before," said Vollering. "It's not only the dream to win in yellow here, to win a second Tour de France, but it's the dream to live this life, to work hard together with people with a lot of passion. I think that's the whole dream. It's incredible."

Niewiadoma-Phinney felt Vollering's team-mate Celia Gery delibrately blocked her during stage eight, so Vollering wanted to prove a point with Sunday's emphatic victory.

"I went alone because I wanted to make it clear that we didn't win because of an incident yesterday," she added.

"That's not what I believe, and I wanted to make it clear that we, as a team, deserve to win a beautiful Tour de France Femmes, with humility and pride."

Vollering and Niewiadoma-Phinney, 31, kept up their record of being on the podium in every edition of the race, while Italy's Elisa Longo Borghini, 34, claimed her first top-three finish.

This Tour de France Femmes has been a classic – thanks largely to some excellent course design by organisers ASO.

Each year race organisers have France - and various Grand Depart options elsewhere - as a blank canvas to work out which chateaus on which hills the peloton will wind its way around, which picturesque cities play host to time trials and which brutally steep mountain will be climbed and when.

And the race's first visit to Mont Ventoux in the women's event since its re-incarnation as a stage race in 2022 late in a nine-day race, set the scene for an epic effort by the likeable Niewiadoma-Phinney.

She beat new demons with every breath and grimace up to the iconic, moon-like dusty rock formations of a mountain which once tragically claimed the life of Briton Tom Simpson on the 1967 Tour.

It was enough to put the Pole into the yellow jersey, before, and just 24 hours later, she found herself yelling at one of Vollering's team-mates after having been ridden towards the crowd in what she felt was a dangerous attempt to unsettle her and allow Vollering to pull away.

Whether it was poor form or simply part-and-parcel of modern bike racing will be debated.

But, given Niewiadoma-Phinney more or less inherited the yellow jersey from favourite Vollering when she crashed in 2024, it may quell any broader sense of injustice.

Either way, the course, and the riders who suit that specific design, came together in the kind of thrill that men's cycling, at times, can only dream of in an exhaustingly uncompetitive Tadej Pogacar era.