Let M be a complete non‐compact Riemannian manifold satisfying the volume doubling property. Let be the Hodge–de Rham Laplacian acting on 1‐differential forms. According to the Bochner formula, where and are respectively the positive and negative part of the Ricci curvature and ∇ is the Levi–Civita connection. We study the boundedness of the Riesz transform from to and of the Riesz transform from to . We prove that, if the heat kernel on functions satisfies a Gaussian upper bound and if the negative part of the Ricci curvature is ε‐sub‐critical for some , then is bounded from to and is bounded from to for where depends on ε and on a constant appearing in the volume doubling property. A duality argument gives the boundedness of the Riesz transform from to for where Δ is the non‐negative Laplace–Beltrami operator. We also give a condition on to be ε‐sub‐critical under both analytic and geometric assumptions.