Time and again during her winner's press conference, Demi Vollering paid tribute to her FDJ United-Suez teammates for playing a crucial role in her first-ever victory in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday.
Vollering's own contribution to her latest triumph was hardly a small one, of course, outsprinting Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto) with a powerful sprint from the front on the uphill drag to Ninove.
But as she said later, as she starts her second season at FDJ, the much-improved level of collaboration and comprehension between herself and her teammates has now given her an extra card to play in races.
She even jokingly said that "It's like our minds are all connected," given that at training camps in the evenings, the team like to play a guessing game involving numbers, where the ability to 'read' whatever number her teammates were thinking of was crucial for winning. Her unusual victory salute, stretching her arms out in a 'Zen-like' way, was to express that heightened connectivity, she said.
As for more practical kinds of assistance, she said that one of the great things was that "even when one rider wasn't able to do their job today for whatever reason, others were ready to step up without being told to do so, and that's really important in cycling for a team to be able to succeed."
"If something happens during the race, we can respond better. Getting to know each other inside and out helps enormously, and I notice that in the race as well."
"We were on the front all day. Elise Chabbey was in the leading group, and Franzi Koch did a perfect lead-out for the Muur for me. She rode so hard I felt like I hardly had to do anything. You can see that we're starting to understand each other."
Her second year had already started very well at the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana, with stage victories on stage 1 and stage 4 bookending absolute domination throughout.
"But this is a very different kind of race here in Omloop," she added. "I did well in Spain but the racing here in a Classic has very little to do with it. So I felt good, but I didn't know what to expect."
Cue yet more praise for her team and thanks for how they were able to ensure she was put in the perfect position to go for the win.
"It's my second year on the team now, and if our plan changes, everyone knows what's expected," she added. "Everyone accepts responsibility and does their job."
The crunch finale, though, came down to a battle between her and Niewiadoma, but with three teammates in the group behind her, she knew she had an advantage, Vollering said.
"She didn't do so many turns early on, it took her a while to start to work with me," Vollering said. "But I knew if we were caught, she wouldn't be at an advantage and I had that support behind. So we could have started to challenge for the race again. In that way, my position was much better than hers."
The drawn-out sprint at the finale was taken by Vollering, but she had already won the final four-way sprint in the last stage of the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana by simply doing her own sprint and not worrying too much about her rivals, and she applied the same tactic on the grinding uphill straight in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad.
"You don't want to go too early, because if you do that then you risk cracking and here there's no room for recovery," Vollering said.
But by calculating her sprint to perfection, after six previous participations with a second in 2022 and a third in 2025 as her best results to date, finally in 2026 she could stand on the highest step of all - but never forgetting, either, how much her teammates had contributed to making the near-misses a triumph at last.
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