When Pauline Ferrand-Prévot looked back in the finish straight at the Paris Olympic mountain bike race on Sunday, she was probably just making sure her massive lead was safe. But the rearward glance also served as a kind of finale, as the 32-year-old multi-disciplinary phenom closes the book on her storied mountain bike career.
Not that Ferrand-Prévot is retiring. It’s just that, after winning pretty much everything there is to win on the flat-bar side of the sport, she’s got some unfinished business with the road career she largely left behind after 2018. In a Monday interview with RMC radio, Ferrand-Prévot confirmed that her next big target is the 2025 Tour de France Femmes.
“I’m happy to talk about it because it’s something I wanted fixed before the Olympic Games,” she said. “This winter, I decided to stop mountain biking at the end of this year and I signed with a road team to secure my future.” Her gold medal, while a fantastic way to go out, didn’t have anything to do with her long-term plans. “No matter what, I was stopping MTB at the end of this season,” she said.
Ferrand-Prévot didn’t announce her new team, but she’s widely expected to sign a deal with Visma-Lease a Bike. “It will be official the second week of August what team I will join,” she said in separate comments immediately post-race. “But we already have a nice project and I will be happy to prepare for the Tour de France and try to win next season.”
In truth, the rapidly growing Women’s WorldTour is about the only place left where Ferrand-Prévot has unaccomplished goals, although she’s already been road world champion back in 2014. She’s also a former cyclocross world champion, but off-road, she has five elite world titles in the XCO, two more in short track, and two marathon titles as well. The Olympics were the only place she’d fallen short, and now she has her storybook home victory, and says she does not envision ever coming back to mountain bike racing; unless there’s a major change of heart, the rest of her career will be spent on the road.
But as Abby Mickey wrote in June when rumors of Ferrand-Prévot’s career change became public, the WorldTour she’ll rejoin next season is far different than the one she left behind at the end of the 2018 season.
Her last WWT road race, in 2018, was the one-day La Course by Tour de France, which pre-dated the TdFF. Her last major stage-race results are almost a decade old, dating to the 2015 and 2014 Giro d’Italia Femminile, respectively won by her then-teammates Anna van der Breggen and Marianne Vos.
As it turns out, she’ll see both of them again soon. Vos will be her teammate on Visma (presuming that is where Ferrand-Prévot is headed), while van der Breggen herself announced an un-retirement to return to the peloton in 2025 after three years in the team car with SD Worx-Protime.
That all sets up a fascinating set of storylines for the 2025 TdFF, although we need to not get ahead of ourselves as the 2024 edition gets underway in less than two weeks. But Ferrand-Prévot is perfectly capable of doing it. In the RMC interview, she spoke of the intense focus she brought to the Paris Games, to the point where she isolated herself sometimes even from friends.
“I also cut off social media and media requests for many months because I really wanted to prepare for these Games in my own way, and for me the best way was to train hard and recover. These months were really intense in training, and I don’t regret it because seeing what I have now is incredible.”
After watching boyfriend Dylan van Baarle in Saturday’s men’s Olympic road race, Ferrand-Prévot will get right back to work, focusing on another goal that will also require sacrifice – a sacrifice that if she achieves it, will be just as worth it.
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