"It's About Giving Our Sport The Visibility It Deserves" — Vollering Uses Her Record-Equalling Third Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes Win To Publicly Call Out The Sport's Broadcasters
Five days on from one of the most accomplished solo wins of her career, Demi Vollering's third Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes trophy is still on her sideboard at home in Belgium. The criticism she pinned to it as she lifted it on the podium last Sunday, however, has spent the past week travelling further than the trophy itself — and the Dutch champion has spent every interview since refusing to soften it.
The numbers are the headline. Live broadcast coverage of the men's Liège-Bastogne-Liège, won by Tadej Pogačar from a long-range solo on La Redoute, ran for roughly 150 kilometres of the 259.5km route. The women's race, won by Vollering on a near-identical solo move from a near-identical launch ramp, received approximately 45 kilometres of live coverage on the same broadcasters in the same window. Her ride to the line was, for the most part, broadcast to no live audience at all.
"We used to start very early but the live broadcast was longer," Vollering said in the post-race press conference. "Now we only get short coverage on TV, because the stream only begins after the men's race. It's about giving our sport the visibility it deserves. We must keep fighting for the future of the sport. I don't want to be the rider who only ever wins behind closed doors."
The remarks have produced a ripple beyond the usual women's-cycling commentariat. SD Worx-Protime have backed her publicly. Lidl-Trek, who have separately spent more than $300,000 of their own corporate funds matching the prize money gap on women's WorldTour races this season, issued a statement calling broadcast access "the next equality fight". The UCI has not commented.
Underlying the row is a structural problem the sport has been quietly carrying for half a decade. The Ardennes weekend — Amstel, Flèche, Liège — is run as a single broadcast package by Flemish public broadcaster RTBF, and the women's races are slotted into the windows that the men's broadcasts do not occupy. The result is a model where any over-run on the men's race shortens the women's race coverage; any close finish on the men's race kills the women's broadcast in real time.
Vollering's argument is not for parity of coverage — she has been careful to acknowledge that the men's race draws bigger audiences and bigger sponsorship — but for a guaranteed minimum window. "Show our final hour live, every time, no matter what happens in the men's race. That is the floor. That should not be controversial." It is a position that race organisers ASO and Flanders Classics have privately said they would support if RTBF and the regional broadcasters who buy the package would commit to it.
The ASO calendar offers two early tests of whether the conversation produces anything beyond statements. La Vuelta Femenina starts in Galicia on Sunday, the first WorldTour stage race of the post-Ardennes block, and the broadcast windows have already been published. They are tighter than 2025's. The Tour de France Femmes begins on July 25; that contract is up for renegotiation in November.
For Vollering, who turns 30 in November and who has now won the women's Doyenne three times — equalling the all-time record held by Jeannie Longo — the calculus is simple. "I race to be watched. If you don't broadcast our races we don't grow. If we don't grow our sponsors leave. We have a small window to fix this. I am going to keep saying it until somebody fixes it."