Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (France) has one of the vital spectacular palmarès in biking, with 12 World Championship titles throughout disciplines – from highway to mountain bike, cyclocross and gravel – however her last likelihood so as to add an Olympic Video games medal to the tally is about to unfold at Élancourt Hill, close to Paris.
The indicators of type have been sturdy within the two UCI Whoop Mountain Bike World Cup races Ferrand-Prévot has taken half on this 12 months, with the French rider coming first within the cross-country Olympic races at Val di Sole and Nove Město nonetheless she sat out the remainder. The 32-year-old, who is predicted to show her consideration again to the highway in 2025, has been focussed on coaching for the massive purpose forward, lining up on Sunday as one of many favourites for the cross-country mountain bike race at her residence Olympics.
“The purpose was to be calm, to maintain all my power to coach and recuperate,” Ferrand-Prévot mentioned in an interview with L’Equipe. “There wasn’t a lot room outdoors for what I love to do.
“These will probably be my final Video games, I did not need to remorse something. I lower myself off from the whole lot and it was useful.”
Ferrand-Prévot took her fifth mountain bike cross-country (XCO) world title in 2023, having taken her first in 2015, and whereas gold could be a fairytale finale to her last 12 months of racing the mountain bike, she is not getting carried away by the stress related to ‘the occasion of my life’.
“Even when on paper, it’s enormous, it stays solely sport and in a number of years, nobody will care whether or not I gained or not,” Ferrand-Prévot instructed L’Equipe. “No matter occurs, the story will probably be lovely. I should not have this stress to completely win, it’s extra to say to myself ‘You probably did the whole lot to get to the place you might be right this moment’.”
Ferrand-Prévot has raced her mountain bike within the Olympics at London, Rio and Tokyo, with tenth in Japan being her finest outcome off-road and eighth place on the highway in London being her high inserting altogether. Nevertheless, she has achieved the whole lot attainable to enhance on that at her fourth Olympic Video games in Paris.
“I am fairly assured about my bodily situation,” Ferrand-Prévot instructed the French newspaper. “Something can occur and above all, it is nonetheless sport. Sport is gorgeous as a result of it may be merciless, however we will keep away from that being the case on Sunday.”
The race is about to play out on a gap lap of two.2km, earlier than taking up a number of passes of a 4.4km course, that features a technical rock backyard and a difficult climb. The girls’s race begins at 14:00 CEDT, with the boys’s cross nation a day in a while Monday July 29.
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