Four years ago, Demi Vollering was widely regarded as the obvious successor to her compatriots Annemiek van Vleuten and Anna van der Breggen, stage racing specialists coming towards the end of their careers, whilst Vollering just started hers.
She was being mentored by Van der Breggen at SD Worx, was about to finish second behind Van Vleuten at the inaugural Tour de France Femmes, and showed all the signs of stepping into their shoes.
Over her career, Van Vleuten won one Tour de France, four editions of the Giro d'Italia Women, and three editions of the (albeit shorter at that time) Vuelta Femenina. Van der Breggen also won four editions of the Giro – and multiple other huge races – with her high-level climbing skills. These were the kinds of palmarès that Vollering was expected to replicate.
But since then, the Grand Tour domination that we saw from her older Dutch role models has not come as readily for Vollering. She won the Tour in 2023, but then was beaten in both 2024 and 2025, and her two wins at La Vuelta contrast with zero starts in the Giro since 2021, let alone wins.
For all that Vollering was meant to be the next Dutch star of women's cycling – and in many ways, she absolutely is – her career has also coincided with a huge transformation of the sport. The Tour de France arrived, budgets went up, and training methods accelerated. There are no longer just a few ultra-strong, full-time or professional riders; there's a peloton full of them. The average level is higher, and the competition is fiercer. Which makes it a much, much tougher ask to win a single Grand Tour four times, or blow your rivals away multiple times a year.
Of course, there are contradictions when it comes to Demi Vollering, because she can and often does absolutely trounce her opposition. Her two Vuelta wins came at a gallop, for example, and she's won practically every stage race on the calendar with apparent ease. This year, she's also been the dominant Classics rider, winning Omloop, Flanders, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
And yet, it's also true that her Grand Tour record, especially when compared with her successes in the rest of the calendar, feels comparatively light. Her dominance has not transferred there, particularly at the Tour, the most important race of all, where she has been beaten more times than she's won.
Looking at this through the lens of comparison with Van der Breggen and Van Vleuten – which may or may not be fair, but is also hard not to do for anyone who has been invested in this sport for more than five years – it's clear to see that the playing field has changed for Vollering, and made that benchmark of success that she was held against from the very start of her career much harder to match.
A big part of why Vollering's predecessors racked up the wins at the Giro was because there was no Tour. which not only made the Giro the biggest goal of the summer, but meant riders didn't have to choose between them. For Vollering, the Giro and Tour have always been only a matter of weeks apart, and in the current era of training and peaking, targeting both just hasn't been possible.
But why hasn't Vollering tallied up the wins at the Tour like others did at the Giro? As we know, it's not because she isn't a supremely strong and often dominant rider – she is – but the landscape of women's cycling has changed enormously. Dominance isn't what it used to be.
It's interesting to note that the riders who have beaten Vollering at the Tour the last two years, Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, were also racing five years ago and in the era of Van der Breggen and Van Vleuten, but weren't beating them. Which is why it felt like Vollering would have no problem stepping up into their shoes, but everything shifted just as Vollering came into her ascendency.
The professionalisation of women's cycling has allowed so many riders to unlock their potential in a way they previously couldn't, whether that's with better resources, better training methods, or a better, stronger team of support riders around them in the race. This is 100% a good thing for women's cycling, but it is not the world we were thinking of when we were predicting how many dozens of Grand Tours Demi Vollering might win in her career half a decade ago.
Will Vollering win the Giro?
Well, this is the question, isn't it? And this is where we come back to contradictions. Because Demi Vollering absolutely will start this weekend in Cesenatico as the favourite. She has been the strongest rider in the peloton so far this year by a fairly large margin, she's been away training specifically for this, and when it comes to the big mountains that will decide this edition, like the Colle delle Finestre, she is expected to be the best climber. She should smash the stage 4 uphill TT, clearly has the strength to navigate any chaos on the flatter stages, and should conquer the Finestre.
And yet, it also wouldn't feel surprising at all for Vollering to be beaten. The image of Vollering dominating a Grand Tour is not a particularly familiar one, and it doesn't feel like our natural assumption. She's up against a very strong rival in Elisa Longo Borghini – note, a rider who was racing against Van der Breggen and Van Vleuten and not challenging them on GC, that's that changed playing field – and a very, very strong UAE Team ADQ team.
For various reasons, though Vollering is targeting the Giro, she is also trying to win the Tour again, and therefore, she and FDJ are holding something back that UAE aren't. UAE are sending their A-team support squad to the Giro with Longo Borghini, whilst Vollering is without her luxury domestiques Juliette Berthet and Évita Muzic. Her team is still undeniably strong, with Elise Chabbey, Amber Kraak and Eva van Agt, but it is not FDJ's ultimate super squad.
Perhaps the biggest thing for Vollering will be the mental side, which is an aspect of cycling she has never shied away from talking about. At the Giro, the demands on her mind will be a lot. Touted as the big favourite, a lot of attention will be on her from day one. That feeling of a race being yours to lose can be confidence-boosting, but it can also represent an onslaught of pressure, a heightening of the risk of failure. She must be confident but not complacent, assured but not arrogant.
There is also of course her inexperience in the Giro, versus Longo Borghini, who has ridden this race 13 times, and won it the last two. Vollering has hardly raced in Italy at all, in fact, so will be tackling new roads and a new kind of chaos. Bad luck and racing incidents are often where Vollering falters, because she doesn't have that Teflon-grade resistance to misfortune like Tadej Pogačar sometimes does, and there must be a level of apprehension about what could be waiting for her over the next nine days.
So no, we may not be seeing a Vollering with years of Grand Tour domination in her back pocket, ready to seize this Giro in the way her older compatriots did. She is a rider who is at once in a league of her own and eminently beatable, an odd place to sit in our era of cycling black and white – we want to split the peloton into dominant winners and unlucky losers, and Vollering is neither.
But the other fact is that Vollering is coming here to win. She wouldn't be choosing to race the Giro if she didn't think she could do that, and didn't really, really want to. It's not going to be easy, because it never is, but this is a clear chance for Vollering to complete her Grand Tour palmares, and maybe begin to surpass those comparisons that have lingered over her whole career.
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