The Dutch team did not come to the World Championships for fifth place. With the likes of three-time world champion Marianne Vos, former European champion Mischa Bredewold and two of the Tour de France Femmes podium finishers, Demi Vollering and Pauliena Rooijakkers, in their line-up, they expected more. They should have got more. We all expected more. Where did it all go wrong?
Perhaps it was the brutal cold and pouring rain impacting both communication and logical thinking, but the tactics of the squad in orange already began to raise questions early in the race. When Bredewold and Riejanne Markus made it into a promising breakaway with just over half the distance remaining, the situation looked close to perfect for Vollering and Rooijakkers in the group behind. They could just sit behind and wait, letting others do the work to bring things back together. Right?
Wrong. Rooijakkers came to the front of the chase group and pulled hard to close the gap to her two teammates with Vollering on her wheel, while defending champion and eventual race winner Lotte Kopecky of Belgium sat calmly behind, profiting off the work of the Dutch team. The same thing happened again a few kilometres later, when Markus and Vos ended up in another breakaway alongside Ruby Roseman-Gannon of Australia and Justine Ghekiere of Belgium. It's a well-known fact that Vos is one of the fastest sprinters after a tough race, and with her teammate in the group, she only would have had to beat two others to take the rainbow jersey. Vollering could relax in the comfort that Vos could finish things off. Right?
Wrong, again. When the groups eventually came back together, rather than Vollering choosing to work for proven fast finisher Vos in a sprint, she attacked on the final climb of the day, dropping her remaining teammates and leaving herself isolated in the final group of six riders who fought for the win. The Dutch squad went from having strength in numbers to a lone leader who had to try and sprint against others who she knew had faster legs. It was a head-scratching finale to a race that had armchair critics screaming at their TV and journalists in the press room exclaiming in confusion.
“I think sometimes the Dutch can work very well together and sometimes they don’t, sometimes their biggest strength is their biggest weakness,” silver medal winner Chloe Dygert commented after the race. “Sometimes on that team everyone wants to win, which causes everyone to lose.”
It’s true that in today’s race it seemed that Vollering’s urgent desire to take the world title was the thing that eventually made things go very wrong for her. Her rivals commented after the race that they were aware of how much the Dutch rider wanted victory, and this insatiable hunger looked to cloud Vollering's judgement when it came to tactical decisions.
“I hoped Vollering would be smarter, she was desperate to win this race today. That’s cycling,” Elisa Longo-Borghini of Italy said after the race. The 32-year-old clinched a bronze medal in the sprint finish after Vollering single-handedly closed down what looked like a promising solo attack from Longo-Borghini on the last lap.
In fact, there was no one in the peloton who seemed to be able to decipher the Dutch team’s plan today: “I was surprised with how the race played out as I expected fireworks from the Dutch from the start and also that they would attack full, but it was honestly not super hard until the last lap,” Germany’s Liane Lippert said after the race. “I was so surprised by their tactics, but it’s not the first time it’s like this.”
Riejanne Markus did her best to defend the actions of her team after the finish, speaking to journalists with tears in her eyes and blue lips from the cold. The Dutch rider argued that she was getting in the breakaways as a satellite rider to try and ensure that Vollering had teammates to support her in the finale.
“I think were in a super good situation with me and Marianne in the breakaway and Demi behind. We tried to make it over the climb, we knew that the favourites would attack on the last climb so we tried to make it so we would be there in the last group with three, so we missed it by like five seconds,” Markus commented. “It was really disappointing because if we had three in the final it would have been a different game but in the end Demi was alone which made it too hard for her.”
Markus explained that Vollering had always been the team’s ‘plan A’ for these World Championships. Last year’s Tour de France Femmes winner had stated her plans to win today in no uncertain terms and the Dutch squad needed to make the race hard so she could do this.
However, with her eventual fifth place finish, was 'plan Vollering' really the right one for the Dutch squad? While they have made mistakes in the past by going into races with multiple riders sharing leadership, it seems that putting everything behind one singular rider doesn’t work for the team in orange either.
On paper, they had all of the resources for a perfect race today, with the line-up they had, there are no excuses, but bike racing is about more than being the strongest rider. To win the World Championships, you have to be the smartest too, something that, without a doubt, the Dutch team were not today.
