"One thing is for sure: we fought all day" - Demi Vollering and Netherlands bring great legs but take no medal after Zurich tactical blunder

That’s a little harsh no? Who says Vos would have outsprinted Lotte? As far as I have always observed, no matter what is officially declared, the WC title is considered more personal than national, in fact we never talk about which country is WC! Cycling is largely a selfish sport and selfishness is a considerable advantage in many cases. It is not because it is called a team sport that it’s really about teams, the classic set-up is a leader with helpers but that only works occasionally at a national level for WC because for that there has to be a pretty clear distinction between a leader and a helper. When several aspire and have the chance of winning that often goes wrong. Neither WVA or Remco are stupid but they also messed it up (just as easy to say for US in retrospect) as have so many others. When we consider the evolution of the SD team and the probable friction in the (bursting, overqualified) Dutch squad, it seems quite natural for someone like Demi to decide to try to do her own thing. She’s obviously hugely talented and was definitely capable of winning in the right circumstances but you can never know in cycling, do we call riders who attempt breakaways stupid? No, we wait to see if they work before judging and sometimes they do, you just can’t know in advance, you don’t know how strong you are on the day, how strong others are, if and how others will organise, etc. When you consider Tadej’s decision not to go to the olympics you can say that’s selfish too, he didn’t get flack for that, though the article on Slovenian fans forgot to remind us of some of these kind of reasons he’s less popular at home than people imagine. Demi will be better off at another team and in the long run that will be good for the sport unlike what SD have done with their selfish recruitement strategy not unlike Sky/Ineos of the past which only led to Visma and UAE at their expense and cycling heading towards being just a business, heck we already observe fans demanding that riders turn up to whichever events they consider interesting.

The Dutch in general :-)