This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 141

After rising to the top in the cyclocross field, the Dutch superstar burst on to the road racing scene in 2023 when she finished fifth in Strade Bianche at just 20 years old. Since then, she’s gone from strength to strength, winning the white jersey and a stage of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, as well as beating Demi Vollering to take the spoils at the 2025 La Flèche Wallonne Féminine. This was all while keeping herself at the forefront of the off-road scene – the Fenix-Deceuninck rider became cross-country world champion in 2024. Oh, and did we mention she was studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Human Movement Sciences too? It’s a crazy time to be Puck Pieterse – but that’s just how she likes it.

Rouleur: Do you think you’d get bored if you only did one discipline? 

Puck Pieterse: I don’t think I could do that. It would drive me mad.

R: Where does your heart lie? 

PP: I see myself as an off-roadie. I like it better in training as well. You always need to concentrate. On the road, when there are no corners, you can just ride. I like everything that hangs around when you’re off-road, the atmosphere, how relaxed it is. It’s more like a big family in mountain biking and cyclocross, less uptight than road racing. But I have come to like the road a lot actually over the past two years.

R: It helps that you’ve had so many good results on the road over the last few years, like the Tour de France Femmes stage win and Flèche Wallonne victory. But even as it gets more serious in bigger races, you always seem to keep having fun.

PP: That’s important. If you don’t like what you’re doing anymore, why are you doing it? Think of your job – you like doing interviews, I guess. It’s important to keep it relaxed, especially all around the races when the stakes get higher. You need to be able to have moments during racing and training where you can let go a bit and not think about everything around the cycling world but just riding your bike. I try to do that as much as possible.

R: Julian Alaphilippe said once “riding a bike is like playing a game”. Do you see what he means by that?

PP: Yeah. The more you know about how it works, the more it’s like playing chess. Of course, you need to have the legs and do all the preparation that goes into it, but in the end it is a game. I just want to win the game. To do that, I need to make the right moves at the right time, have some luck, and also check what my opponent is doing. It’s chess but against a peloton of 180 riders.

R: If we’re thinking about bike racing as chess, you’re very good at chess. Where does this come from?

PP: I’m competitive, I always have been. It’s not only about winning, but also pushing myself more. Winning against myself and getting better, I think that’s what drives me most, seeing how far I can push myself. Also in training, trying to do better than before motivates me. I like to go for power records, or QOMs, those kinds of things, you know? It just keeps you on your toes.

Pieterse is a multidisciplinary athlete (Image: Billy Ceusters via Getty)

R: We’ve seen you ride for general classification at races like the Tour de France Femmes. That requires some serious patience. Do you enjoy that?

PP: GC is just a different world. What you do on the first day, you might not feel it immediately because you are so fresh, but you will feel it on the last day. I’m more of a one-day racer, so everything you put in, you get out on the same day. It’s like one-day races are watching TikToks and getting a dopamine hit every 15 seconds when you watch a new video. In a stage race when it’s a sprint stage, for example, you don’t race to win. You need to save energy. Then the game becomes trying to save as much energy as possible, turning it around in your head so it’s not about winning or making smart moves but conserving energy for the long run. You have to think about the future, like: ‘If I don’t do it today, I will be happier later.’ I also like perfecting this part of the sport and learning about it.

R: You keep surprising people with your performances on the road, like when you came fifth at Strade Bianche in 2023, it was only your third ever elite road race. Does it surprise you?

PP: It’s weird. In cyclocross you really have a stairway up to becoming the best. As a junior you already compete against the top women because – at least when I was a junior – there were no different categories. As a junior you think you want to get top-20, so you build to that by the end of the season. Then when you break the top-20, you finally can maybe get top-15, then top-10. It’s really easy to see the forecast. On the road, because I didn’t race earlier and was just suddenly there, I did not know where I would stand. I knew I was with the best in cyclocross and mountain biking, but to be able to do that on the road too was quite special, because people often see the road as the ‘real’ discipline, which is not always fair.

R: What feels different on the road compared to cyclocross or mountain biking?

PP: On the road you have a team around you and you need to be the leader. Strade in 2023 was even before my first elite mountain bike win, so I was still just known as ‘the cyclocross racer’. Before the race, the team manager called me to the lobby and told me I would be the leader the next day. I was like ‘what am I going to say to my team-mates? They’re like 28-years-old and have full experience.’ I felt like I couldn’t tell them the tactic or what to do. But I have the feeling that I grew more into it, especially when I got results. It was weird at first though.

R: Do you feel like those big results, like the Tour stage win, or the mountain bike world title, have changed you as a person?

PP: Oh, no, you’re the same person before and after the race. Nothing really happens in that few hours. It’s a nice feeling of accomplishment and that’s what we chase. But you’re the same person.

R: Is it that feeling of accomplishment which motivates you to train every day?

PP: For sure it’s all more fun when you’re good at it and you’re winning. I think I would still love to ride my bike even if I hadn’t won those races, but it’s a big driving factor. I think every cyclist when they’re alone on their rides visualises themself winning and it’s what they look forward to. Other people might dream of getting that promotion, or finishing a marathon, or really look forward to their birthday party. It’s the same with cycling, but that visualisation is always winning the race.

R: Do your wins off-road mean more to you because that’s where it all started?

PP: I think they’re all big. From an outside perspective the road wins are bigger, like if you win a stage of the Tour, that’s bigger than anything. But for me, mountain biking is so close to my heart and I would love to show the outside world, or maybe the roadies, that the mountain bike level is so high. I loved seeing Pauline [Ferrand-Prévot] win the Tour this year. It showed that she wasn’t just winning in mountain biking because it’s easy there, she’s just super, super good. It validates it a little bit and adds to the depth.

R: In order to win the Tour de France Femmes, Ferrand-Prévot had to specialise and focus on the road in the approach. Do you ever see yourself focusing singularly on one thing?

PP: Oh yeah, the sprints will be my next goal, beating Lorena Wiebes and doing Madison on the track [laughs.] No, I don’t know. For sure, you need to be a specialist more and more to try and win the Tour and if you want to do one hundred per cent correct preparation, your training has to be adapted to that. I’m not fully ready to do that, so it’s just about seeing where I can end up in the next few years. Maybe one year I could see myself putting full focus on the Tour and seeing how far I can actually take it. I think Tom Pidcock is a good example of that. He only did one World Cup in Andorra on the mountain bike and then rode a dreamy Vuelta a España last year. He showed everyone he could be the GC rider that everybody already said he was. I don’t see myself fully ready to give it to the Tour next year, for example, so it will be a side quest for the future.

R: What about your team, Fenix-Deceuninck? Winning the Tour de France Femmes would be huge for them. Are they aligned with your ambitions to keep doing multiple disciplines?

PP: We’ll just see how it goes over the years. Until now, they have not put pressure on me and our agreements on my race calendar come naturally. They’re big fans of doing multiple disciplines and you see it with a lot of riders on our team, especially cyclocross and road. They combine a lot. Each year we make a plan together for the next year and if I say I don’t want to race somewhere, then I don’t have to.

R: If you look back to your childhood, what got you into racing in the first place?

PP: Where did it all start? My dad was one of the first people in the Netherlands with a mountain bike. He was quite the pioneer. He went cycling with his friends on Saturday mornings then would come home with a dirty face from the mud in the forest. I really wanted that as well so I went with him a few times and then we did the dikkebandenrace [a race for children in the Netherlands, where they ride bikes with fat tyres] at my local club and I won it. From then I was like, I want to do cycling and I was always super competitive with these kinds of things.

R: Are your family still very involved in your racing now?

PP: My family is everything to me, together with my sport. I still live partly at home with my parents so I’m at home a lot, especially in winter. My mum cooks, my dad is good at cleaning my bike, which is very nice if you come home after a rainy ride and your dad is just waiting for you to clean your bike so I can go inside to get warm. In cyclocross, you’d meet my parents very quickly – my dad drives the camper with my bikes and is in the pit zones, he’s my mechanic. My mum takes my jacket at the start and is also in the pits then at the finish to give me my bottle and everything. They’re really part of it, I couldn’t do it without them. Especially in ’cross they are the main people in my close circle who help me.

R: If you’re not riding a bike, what are you doing?

PP: Do you have any hobbies? I finished my studies last year so I was always pretty busy with them. I did my Bachelor’s in Human Movement Sciences. Once I finished it I thought I’d try a year without studying to see how things go. Usually in my free time I’m either busy with things in the house, chilling with my boyfriend, or going for coffee.

R: Not many people riding at your level study and race at the same time, why did you do that?

PP: I think it was good for me that I had something that wasn’t racing. I had friends outside of cycling, like at first at university they didn’t know I did cycling so it was like ‘what do you do?’ I wouldn’t say I was a professional cyclist or anything, I just said I did cycling. It did get busy in the end doing both, but I like the challenge as well. You can make time for things. Studying does cost mental energy but not physical energy. While you recover, you can scroll social media or you can learn something interesting. Actually, I found it quite nice. Sometimes it was a lot of stress and sometimes I didn’t plan things that well, but in the end it came out really, really well.

R: Final question, if you could only win one more race in your career, what would it be?

PP: That’s so hard. I have a few different goals. I think the biggest would be to win the general classification in the Tour. It’s grown to be such a big race. If you do that, it’s really something different. I’m also looking forward to the Los Angeles Olympics for the mountain bike race there, it would be so cool to get a medal. The Olympics is bigger than cycling, similar to the Tour in that way.