Latest news with #Saumur
The Guardian
a day ago
- Sport
- The Guardian
Tour de France Femmes 2025: stage four from Saumur to Poitiers
Update: Date: 2025-07-29T11:45:39.000Z Title: Preamble Content: Demi Vollering of FDJ-Suez will start today's stage 4 despite a heavy crash on the approach to Angers yesterday. The 2023 Tour de France Femmes champion thus avoids the fate of several other high-profile riders in the first three stages: Marlen Reusser (Movistar), Charlotte Kool (Picnic PostNL) and Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE Team ADQ) are among eight riders in the peloton who have abandoned already. 'It's not normal, the attitude of many teams and many riders. They're disrespectful. We lose the respect in the last years in men's and women's cycling,' said Vollering's team manager, Stephen Delcourt, after yesterday's accident. The highly decorated Dutch rider will doubtless be riding through a lot of pain after a heavy impact on her back, knee and glutes yesterday. The irrepressible Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease A Bike), meanwhile, retook the GC lead after yesterday's stage, won by Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-ProTime). Vos is a mere 6sec ahead second-placed of Kim Le Court Pienaar (AG Insurance-Soudal) and 12 sec in front of her own Visma teammate, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, in third place overall. Those narrow gaps will mean plenty of nervousness among the GC teams with the potential for surprise attacks, especially if the wind blows. Stage four, a 131km trip from Saumur to Poitiers, should be one for the sprinters but the presence of the category-four climb of Cote de Marigny might tempt a few potential escape artists to give it a go. That summit of that solitary categorised climb comes after 101.6km of racing – but the chances are we see a race well controlled by sprinters' and GC teams alike. Stage start: 1.45pm UK time / 2.45pm local time
Yahoo
a day ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Vollering to keep racing at Tour de France after crash
SAUMUR, France (AP) — Former champion Demi Vollering will continue racing at the women's Tour de France despite a heavy crash that left her bruised. Her FDJ-Suez team said on Tuesday that Vollering underwent medical tests that have excluded a risk of a concussion after she hit the ground during Monday's Stage 3. Her team said Vollering, who lagged 19 seconds behind race leader Marianne Vos in the general classification, is 'determined to take the start' of Tuesday's stage from Saumur to Poitiers. Vollering fell less than four kilometers from the finish line in Angers in a crash that involved several riders. Examinations carried out by the team doctor revealed that she had suffered multiple contusions but she did not go to hospital 'given the non-urgent nature of her condition,' FDJ-Suez said. Vollering is one of the most decorated cyclists of her generation. She won the Tour de France in 2023. The nine-stage race ends Aug. 3. ___ AP sports:
Associated Press
a day ago
- Sport
- Associated Press
Vollering to keep racing at Tour de France after crash
SAUMUR, France (AP) — Former champion Demi Vollering will continue racing at the women's Tour de France despite a heavy crash that left her bruised. Her FDJ-Suez team said on Tuesday that Vollering underwent medical tests that have excluded a risk of a concussion after she hit the ground during Monday's Stage 3. Her team said Vollering, who lagged 19 seconds behind race leader Marianne Vos in the general classification, is 'determined to take the start' of Tuesday's stage from Saumur to Poitiers. Vollering fell less than four kilometers from the finish line in Angers in a crash that involved several riders. Examinations carried out by the team doctor revealed that she had suffered multiple contusions but she did not go to hospital 'given the non-urgent nature of her condition,' FDJ-Suez said. Vollering is one of the most decorated cyclists of her generation. She won the Tour de France in 2023. The nine-stage race ends Aug. 3. ___ AP sports:
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
I've met the best candidate for Tory leader. Unfortunately, he is French
The best candidate the Tories could ever find to lead them out of their current slough of despond is a Frenchman you've never heard of. Unfortunately for them, he's just won himself the job here in France. Bruno Retailleau, 64, the current Home Secretary in the wobbly Bayrou Cabinet, triumphed on Sunday with 75 per cent of the vote for leadership of Les Républicains, crushing his flashier rival Laurent Wauquiez, a former Sarkozy minister and top civil service mandarin, in what had been billed as a neck-to-neck race. In an increasingly polarised (and messy) political landscape, Retailleau, the son of a grain dealer and Mayor of their small Vendée town, is the quiet man. He was an MP for two years, but a Senator for twenty: the French Upper House (which enjoys more powers than its British counterpart the House of Lords) is a less restless place, where compromise is the rule. Unlike Wauquiez – and Emmanuel Macron – Retailleau attended local Catholic schools, not grand Parisian Lycées and ENA. Also unlike them, he did his military service, in France's grandest cavalry regiment, at Saumur, once attended by General George Patton before WWI. He then progressed in local, then regional politics, almost under the radar even when he became one of the LR grandees. In short, he is a type we'd almost forgotten existed: a soft-spoken grassroots politician, with traditional values and an interest in practical things, led by observation rather than ideology. He may be a classical liberal, yet in 2005 he (unsuccessfully) denounced Jacques Chirac's projected privatisation of the French motorway system, arguing that in the absence of actual competition, it would risklessly transfer state monopolies to private entities. (Two decades on, parliamentary and National Court of Audits reports have pointed out precisely the kind of unchecked profits private conglomerates then made from state-funded infrastructure). Retailleau also voted against the projected 2005 EU Constitution, as well as against its replacement, the Lisbon Treaty in 2006, which he viewed as encroaching on France's sovereignty. Any Home Secretary is usually the target of the Left: the hoary accusation of 'racism' has been levelled against Retailleau when he criticised 'separatism', which in France refers to immigrant communities living in 'cultural bubbles' rather than trying to integrate in the wide French polity. He also riled the Mélenchonistas when said he would use 'every means' to 'reduce immigration' which he said 'doesn't benefit our country'. And after Suella Braverman and Giorgia Meloni, he, too wants to resettle illegal arrivals in third countries, negotiating with Iraq, Kazakhstan and Egypt. It would be enough to make him the usual punching ball of the liberal classes, except that he says these things with unfailing politeness. Leftists have to pay attention to realise he's standing against everything they want to push. As a result, Retailleau has become an acquired taste among many French voters who still have qualms about supporting Marine Le Pen or her youthful party president Jordan Bardella. That's not so much because they're Fascists (they're not) but because they're perceived as incompetent. The selfie-taking screaming Bardella fans are highly visible, but the voting classes are mostly older. Their own self-respect may well lead them decide that a father of three who flat refused to appear with his young family on the cover of Paris Match (a rite of passage for presidential candidates) could be a blessed relief from the publicity-hungry crowd that noisily begged for their votes for decades, never to deliver on their promises.
Times
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Odile de Vasselot obituary: French Resistance heroine
In June 1940 Odile de Vasselot, a spirited 18-year-old from a French military family, tuned in to a homemade radio in her bedroom as she tried to follow the horrifying progress of the German conquest of her country. She had become increasingly depressed seeing columns of disconsolate refugees escaping the swift Nazi advance and felt deep shame at the collaborationist Vichy government's claim to be her country's new legitimate authority. Suddenly, as she searched the airwaves, de Vasselot heard a familiar voice: that of the French army officer Charles de Gaulle. Living mostly on military bases after her birth at a cavalry headquarters in Saumur in 1922, de Vasselot had at one point played regularly with de Gaulle's son. Her father, a military instructor, and
