Pauline Ferrand-Prevot put in a fantastic ride to secure the gold in the Women’s Cross-Country at the UCI Cycling World Championships.
The win secured the Frenchwoman’s fifth XCO world title and meant she has won both the XCC and XCO world titles for a second consecutive year.
Her compatriot Loana Lecomte came second, with Dutch rider Puck Pieterse in third.
Ferrand-Prevot secured the historic double-double despite a shaky start in Glentress Forest. After the race the 31-year-old expressed her delight after a difficult race on a challenging course.
She said: “At the moment I’m feeling really happy because it was a super-hard race. I didn’t have a good start but I wanted to keep my own pace during all the race, it’s what I did. Full gas on the uphill and trying to recover in the downhill so it worked perfectly. I’m really proud of myself because I kept to my plan like this because I didn’t have a good start and sometimes you start to think but I just said ‘OK, I have one mission today and I have to reach it.’
“When I came here last Saturday we walked the lap and I said ‘Wow, I really don’t like this’, I didn’t feel very good. Sometimes you have a feeling about the lap and that day I didn’t feel like it was for me. All the week I tried to work mentally and to just take it day by day. Today I felt okay, not super, but as I say I was on a mission and I just wanted to go full gas and to see at the end the result.”
Pauline Ferrand-Prévot
Image credit: Getty Images
At the start line it was Pieterse, Martina Berta (Italy), and Jolanda Neff (Switzerland) who got off to the strongest starts, while defending champion Ferrand-Prevot was stuck in the group behind.
Within seconds Lecomte moved to the front of the race, while fellow Ferrand-Prevot remained behind. At the end of the shortened start lap Lecomte remained at the front of the race but it wasn’t long before Pieterse took over in the lead.
The two created a slight gap to Berta in third, followed by Evie Richards and Alessandra Keller. Pieterse led up the first climb, but behind Ferrand-Prevot had worked her way to the chase group. Lecomte then went clear and passed the river crossing solo and at the same time Ferrand-Prevot looked to stage her attack.
After only 11 minutes of racing the French rider made her race-deciding move that saw her pass Pieterse on the climb to move within sight of leader Lecomte.
With eyes on her French team-mate, Ferrand-Prevot continued to push on. Lecomte crossed the line after the first lap seconds ahead of Ferrand-Prevot as Keller sat in third behind them, but it wasn’t long into the second lap when the French duo formed a front group.
Ferrand-Prevot then made her second move minutes later and went clear from Lecomte. She managed to open up an early 10-second lead before she crossed the line to complete the second lap of seven with a 14-second advantage. Pieterse would cross the line in third, 33 seconds behind to provide a top three that would eventually mirror the podium at the end of the race.
The bronze medal was hotly contested throughout the race and it was Keller who moved to third on the third lap. While she overtook Pieterse, Ferrand-Prevot extended her lead to 24 seconds in front of Lecomte. Richards then joined the chasing group of Keller and Pieterse and they battled it out, 1:05 behind the front of the race.
At the culmination of the third lap the Ineos Grenadiers rider was still ahead, now by 28 seconds, and the chasing group crossed the line together. At this point Mona Mitterwallner was back in seventh, but she would later make her way further up the rankings.
It was all change again in the battle for bronze as Keller created a slight gap and moved clear before British rider Richards dropped Pieterse in pursuit of the Swiss rider ahead of her. Mitterwallner had worked well to move herself further up the course and then joined with Pieterse as Richards and Keller remained together.
Ferrand-Prevot’s lead continued to swell and by the fourth lap she was in front of Lecomte by 41 seconds. Keller had managed to retain a slight advantage to take third place by five seconds as Richards and Pieterse joined forces behind her.
Keller remained in third as Mitterwallner joined up with Richards as Pieterse was the next rider to create a gap. The young Dutch star, who already has three UCI Mountain Bike Series World Cup titles to her name this season, continued to impress in Glentress as she moved to join Keller in the fight for third.
On the penultimate lap Keller and Pieterse were 1:50 behind Ferrand-Prevot who had a gap of 57 seconds to Lecomte. Mitterwallner, who won the cross-country marathon world title a few days prior, then moved ahead to drop Richards into sixth as she moved across to become part of the chase group.
Pieterse then shook up proceedings once more as she was the next rider from the group to move slightly clear. At the front of the race Ferrand-Prevot continued to stamp down her mark and now had a lead of over a minute on Lecomte, who was still solo herself.
Pieterse was brought back into the group but it didn’t take long for them to lose another from their ranks, this time from the back of the group as Keller struggled to keep up with the two 21-year-olds.
The climbs started to do damage to Keller’s tiring legs and she was dropped once more by Pieterse and Mitterwallner as the gradient increased.
Ferrand-Prevot went into the final lap with a 1:03 advantage on Lecomte, which left Pieterse and Mitterwallner to battle for bronze over the 3.5km that stood between them and a place on the podium.
A spark of brilliance from Mitterwallner who attacked on both climbs looked as though it may have been enough to seize the last medal up for grabs as she created a faint gap to the Dutch rider as they approached the final sections of the course.
Away from the fierce bronze-medal battle that was playing out behind, Ferrand-Prevot crossed the line to clinch a historic double-double with plenty of time to take in the atmosphere and celebrate her fifth world title in the XCO discipline with the crowd as the rain poured down.
After Lecomte had reached the line to claim silver, Pieterse took the opportunity to take her second medal of the week and overtook Mitterwallner with a few hundred metres until the finish line.
Lecomte crossed the line 1:14 behind Ferrand-Prevot to take the silver medal and a French one-two on the podium after an impressive solo ride.
Pieterse’s last-gasp efforts paid off and she went on to cross the line four seconds clear of Mitterwallner to take home the bronze medal.
Keller took fifth, Richards sixth, Berta seventh, Gwendalyn Gibson (USA) eighth, Jolanda Neff ninth and Savilia Blunk (USA) rounded out the top 10.
As La Marseillaise rang out around Glentress Forest, Ferrand-Prevot and Lecomte stood together to celebrate both their individual achievements and those of the French mountain bike team at the XCO World Championships.
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