Demi Vollering — Tour de France Femmes Winner 2026

A second Tour win and champion of the Tour de France Femmes 2026.

Winning a race like this isn’t decided in one stage. Nine days of repeated intensity, requiring consistent fueling to push through the effort in front of you — and recover in time for the days to come.

Demi fueled her victory on Maurten Drink Mix and Gels — averaging 110g of carbohydrates per hour across the 1174.5 km from Lausanne to Nice. Solidifying her spot at the top of the podium.

Testing pre-Tour

Demi’s fueling strategy didn’t start the day of the Tour — it’s a process that goes back months. Maurten joined her in January to test her exogenous carbohydrate oxidation capacity — to determine how many of the carbohydrates she ingests during exercise is actually oxidized for energy. This 5-hour test involves consuming 120g of carbs per hour with Drink Mix 320 — 4 hours cycling outdoors and 1 hour on the home trainer. The idea behind this protocol is to be as specific to race demands as possible and to measure physiological markers once the cardiovascular, muscular, and digestive systems have already been under stress for a significant amount of time.

During the indoor portion of the session, Demi completed an incremental step test — a structured sequence of efforts at increasing intensities, each separated by one-minute breaks. These breaks serve two purposes: measuring blood lactate levels and allowing Demi to fuel by removing the mask for a few seconds. During this final hour, Demi exhales into breath bags at regular intervals, allowing us to capture her expired CO2. Because the carbohydrate in Drink Mix is labelled with a ¹ ³Cisotope , this CO2 acts as a marker, letting us calculate exactly how much of the carbohydrate she's burning comes from Drink Mix versus her own glycogen stores.This is done alongside tests involving doubly labeled water to confirm Demi’s daily energy requirements. With these numbers, the team behind her nutrition is able to ensure her daily caloric needs on and off the bike, along with her in-race fuel plan, are exactly where they need to be to ensure healthy caloric intake and top performance.

During a race, we really try to minimize the energy deficit and be in balance to optimize the recovery between stages and support performance for the entire race. For the nine stages, if you are in deficit one day, it's really hard on the Tour de France to restore the energy the next day. Because every day you spend a lot of energy, so you need to eat a lot. If one day you are 400 calories in deficit, you lose this energy for the next day.— Elsa Hugot, Team Nutritionist of FDJ-Suez