Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, with her decade of sustained success and 15 world titles across four different disciplines, is one of cycling’s – men’s and women’s – most complete and versatile bike riders. Only the great Marianne Vos, her former teammate and occasional rival, can surpass her in breadth of achievements. And now, as the reigning Olympic mountain bike champion and 10 years on from when she was simultaneously world champion on the road, in cyclocross and MTB, Ferrand-Prévot is chasing the result that will immortalise her: becoming the first Frenchwoman to win the reborn Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
“I signed for three years,” she says about her move to Visma-Lease a Bike from Ineos Grenadiers for whom she competed in mountain biking since 2023, “and during these three years I really want to be as best as I possibly can be to try to win the Tour de France.” Thirty-three in February, three years older than reigning champion Kasia Niewiadoma and five years Demi Vollering’s senior, Ferrand-Prévot is unperturbed by her age, and neither by the fact that she hasn’t raced a stage race since 2018, and no Grand Tour since she finished sixth at the 2015 Giro d’Italia, a year after she was second to Vos in the same race.
“Because I chose a good team,” she answers when asked why she’s confident of fulfilling her latest dream. “I know I have to work hard and that I have strong competition, but when I see my power data, I know I am able to be a good road rider. It’s just a matter of spending time training with my teammates, racing in the bunch, also studying races and just getting back to road cycling.”
PFP, as she has come to be known, has been focused on her off-road pursuits for most of the past decade – she became the first women’s gravel world champion in 2022, adding yet another string to her bow. But after winning mountain bike gold in her home Olympics at Paris 2024, she knew the time was right to return to the road, the discipline she excelled in in 2014, winning La Flèche Wallonne – “that is one of my best memories on the bike,” she says – national road and time trial titles, and most memorably the Road Race World Championships. “I didn’t want to do one more [Olympic] cycle until the next Olympics, the same races and training, but I’m still not tired of cycling – I still want to race my bike,” she explains. “It was a good moment for me to switch towards road cycling and to have a new chapter in my career.
“I changed teams because Ineos doesn’t have a women’s team at the moment, and also I wanted a team who would be ready to support me. I’m 33 years old, I don’t have many years in front of me, but I want to perform at a high level and I know Visma are a good team and they were ready to have me.” The Dutch team’s double success with Jonas Vingegaard was convincing. “When you see they have won the Tour with Jonas, they know how to do it. Now it’s just a matter of hard work, and I know I am able to do the hard training sessions. You never know until you’ve done it.”
Ferrand-Prévot joined Ineos two years ago on an off-road-only program, the British team’s first foray into women’s cycling. To the dismay of many, though, Ineos still don’t have a women’s road team that Ferrand-Prévot could have feasibly headed. “I’m not disappointed about that because I did what I wanted to do with them,” the Frenchwoman says. “They supported me to win a gold medal at the Olympics and we did it. I really liked my two years at Ineos, met great people, and I will always remember it. If they are not ready to make a women's team, I respect their decision. It’s better to not do something if you’re not 100% ready than to do something by half. When they will be ready they will make a women’s team, we can't judge.”
Standing in the way of Tour glory will be the aforementioned Niewiadoma and Vollering, and potentially Lotte Kopecky, the Belgian world champion who she describes as “such a classy rider… what she’s doing on the road is very impressive”.
“When she won I was super happy,” she says of Niewiadoma’s dramatic win by just four seconds this August. “The way she did it was super amazing, and it was like Kasia: never giving up, giving everything. I know she will be one of the girls I have to follow next year.” On Vollering, she admires her steeliness. “I really like winners, [stories of overcoming] adversity, and characters like Demi I like.”
The nine-stage Femmes in 2025 starts in the north-west of France and finishes with five successive undulating or mountainous days, terminating in the Alps. “I saw the Tour parcours and it’s good,” Ferrand-Prévot assesses. There’s an acknowledgment from her that it’s a “totally different sport now, the level is higher”, but optimism isn’t in short supply; all that yearly domination, even if it was in different disciplines, has clearly bred confidence. “There are a mix of short and long climbs,” she says, “and I’m curious to see during the recons what I can do and what work I can do to be the best.”
