Bear in mind, though, the women's péloton has not seen anything remotely like this kind of super-peaking in a long time, such that most active pros will not have come across it before. Coming out of an era where only the very best could afford to dedicate themselves full-time to the sport, a lot of the time making women's cycling financially viable as a career required you to be at the top for as much of the season as possible, so dropping weight for short but intense form peaks was kind of anathema. We haven't really seen anybody go for this kind of "drop in to season's goal at peak form then disappear or revert to the mean" strategy in quite a long time, and when we have it's typically been riders who spend most of their season in the North American scene and then jet into Europe for major season's goals, like Mara Abbott (who also had significant eating disorder issues that massively impacted her career), or the ITT mayflies who would often attract suspicion as well.
Add to that that we are just coming off an era where super-peaking was perceived negatively, as a sign of Clinic matters, due to a generation of GC riders trying to follow the Lance Armstrong strategy of racing sparingly to then be fresh at the Grand Tour, and the way the biopassport was framed to us when it was introduced, that it would put an end to such strategies. And for a while it seemed to - although it does appear to be coming back into vogue a bit. We're not used to women who are the pre-race promotional stars then not being prominent everywhere they go and it will be a bit jarring at first that we're going to have a lot of "...and PFP will be in attendance!" if she then largely performs more like Jebel Hafeet than Col de la Madeleine because she cannot hold that competition weight for long and so only pulls out the stops on rare occasions. And neither are the riders - they're used to regular form cycles, sure, but they're also used to knowing who is going to be there and who isn't when the climbs get serious, because they're the same people that are usually there, and if they're not usually there, they're definitely not usually putting three minutes into the people that are, so this has changed a lot of perceptions within the bunch. I feel this is behind some of the comments we've seen, but framing it within a discussion point around weight enables them to be a bit freer with their choice of words without veering into territory that gets too close to something the journalists can sell as hostility or, worse, accusation.
Certainly I think pettiness and jealousy is easy to attribute in Vollering's case here, but Reusser I'm less sure of, since circumstances meant that she was never relevant to the GC at the Tour, and when it comes to the Col de la Madeleine she doesn't have her own performance to compare to the way Demi does. Reusser may have come 2nd in the Giro and be upset about that, but PFP and her race weight would not have been a factor in that. On the other hand, Demi will have known where she was relative to her best and therefore where she would have come out relative to PFP.
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