Demi Vollering’s glorious spring continues with victory at La Flèche Wallonne, a result that has been years in the making and completes her rise up the ranks to the very top of the peloton.
You can trace Vollering’s career trajectory through each of her five career appearances at Flèche Wallonne, where her status has increased with each year. In her 2019 debut and follow-up in 2020, she was a young, emerging talent, mixing it up with the favourites while riding for Parkhotel Valkenburg to finish third in the former and fifth in the latter. Then, following a move to SD Worx, she became a deluxe super-domestique, playing a vital role in delivering team leader Anna van der Breggen to victory by setting the pace leading up to the Mur de Huy and catching the dangerous breakaway of Ruth Winder. And finally, in 2022, she made the leap to SD Worx’s co-team leader, with multiple podium finishes, but no wins, in the most elite races.
Now, with a career-first victory at the Classic, she continues an outstanding spring that has seen her become one of the two or three very best riders in the world.
So far this season, no rider has equaled her success. Remarkably, this is her fourth win of the season from just seven race days following victories at Strade Bianche, Amstel Gold and Dwars door Vlaanderen; only her SD Worx teammate Lorena Wiebes has as many. On two occasions she’s finished second, including as part of a triumphant SD Worx one-two with Lotte Kopecky at the Tour of Flanders, while the sole occasion she has finished outside of the top two (Omloop Het Nieuwsblad), she was still part of the winning team thanks again to Kopecky.
The Mur de Huy is notorious for being a climb that’s difficult to master, one that can take several attempts of trial and error before understanding its rhythms and nuances; it even took the great Anna van der Breggen four attempts before the first of her historic seven successive titles. Vollering has had a similar experience, and she had approached the climb differently each year before at last finding a winning strategy this time.
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It was clear from her fifth place finish on debut at the age of just 22, four years ago, that she was a great fit for it, but she perhaps went too deep too early the following year, when she attempted to attack Van der Breggen only to fade into third at the finish, looking spent as crossed the line. Then in…