Demi Vollering explains SD Worx exit and how therapy helped her understand herself

Vollering left SD Worx-Protime ahead of the 2025 season after several successful years with the team. While the squad remained one of the strongest forces in women’s cycling, she says she increasingly felt that something was missing.

“In my feeling we had run into a wall,” Vollering said in an interview with Dutch newspaper AD when reflecting on her time at the Dutch team. “I often asked: ‘What is the plan to become even more successful?’ And then the answer from the team was: ‘Why? We are the best women’s team in the world.’ But that wasn’t the point for me. I wanted to take the next steps.”

The 28-year-old also felt that a certain image was expected of her within the team. Vollering says she was sometimes portrayed as a cold and calculating winner, something that did not match her personality.

“There was a certain image expected of me, that I had to be very cold,” she explained. “Lotte Kopecky and Anna van der Breggen are very different personalities from me. That’s fine, but I didn’t want to change who I am. I thought: maybe somewhere else I can be more myself.”

That search eventually led her to FDJ United-Suez, although the French team was not an obvious first choice. Vollering initially hesitated when the possibility was first raised by her fiancé and manager Jan de Voogd.

“Jan came with that team and I thought: no, a French team is not something I’m going to do,” she said. “But Jan kept insisting. He said: I really think we should at least talk to them.”

The conversation changed everything. Vollering recalls immediately feeling a strong connection after the first meeting with the team.

“When that online meeting finished, I closed my laptop and instantly felt that spark. That happiness,” she said. “I suddenly had a big smile on my face and I didn’t even know where it came from. But I knew: this is it. It was the gut feeling I had been searching for and hadn’t found with other teams. I was so happy that I had waited.”

Off the bike, Vollering has also focused on the mental side of her career. Shortly before travelling to Spain for the 2025 Vuelta, she visited someone close to her who was going through a very difficult period, something that stayed with her during the race.

“Just before I left for Spain, I visited someone in my surroundings who was in a very bad place,” she said. “During the Vuelta I had nightmares. I worried so much about that person, while in a stage race you have zero time to deal with it.”

Despite that, Vollering still managed to perform at the highest level. “I could still perform, I could still win,” she said. “But it also made me think about mental strength. I win races because I’m mentally strong, but there are also people who fight themselves so much that they simply can’t win anymore.”

At first she struggled to talk about those feelings within the team. “I thought: I’m the leader, I can’t show emotion,” Vollering said. “But actually that is also strength.”

Working with a psychologist helped her accept that side of herself. “This is just how I am, take it or leave it,” she said. “As elite athletes we do so much physical work, but in the end the mental side is the biggest part. If things aren’t right up here, the results will never come.”

Vollering has enjoyed a strong start to the 2026 season with victories at Setmana Ciclista Valenciana and Omloop Nieuwsblad. Last weekend at Strade Bianche she was unable to contest the victory after suffering a mechanical and being misdirected during the chase, in a race won by her Swiss teammate Elise Chabbey.