Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has called time on her glittering cross-country mountain bike career, which has seen the 32-year-old achieve everything there is in the sport. The five-time world champion went out in style, seizing her first Olympic gold medal before an adoring home crowd at Paris 2024. A month later, in Pal Arinsal (Andorra), she secured a 2nd place finish, narrowly beaten by Great Britain’s new Cross-country Short Track (XCC) UCI World Champion, Evie Richards, and placed 14th at the UCI Mountain Bike Cross-Country Olympic (XCO) World Championships, where the young Dutch all-rounder, Puck Pieterse, took the crown. It’s not the last we’ll see of Ferrand-Prévot though, who is joining road cycling’s Women’s WorldTour for the 2025 season.
Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has announced her retirement from cross-country mountain biking.
In a post on Instagram, the reigning Olympic and five-time UCI XCO World Champion said that while it was “strange” to be announcing her retirement, she was “feeling happy” and “in peace” with her decision.
The 32-year-old isn’t stepping away from cycling completely though. A multi-discipline star like Ineos Grenadiers team-mate Tom Pidcock and rival Puck Pietrse (Fenix–Deceuninck), Ferrand-Prévot started her career by juggling cyclo-cross, mountain biking and road cycling. She is now turning her attention to the road – a decade on from winning the UCI Road Cycling World Championships – and will join the Women’s WorldTour road cycling team Team Visma | Lease a Bike for the 2025 season.
But it marks the end of a illustrious off-road career that spanned over a decade, where she has won everything there was to. From an explosive start in the juniors to a golden final summer, here are the highlights of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s mountain biking career.
PROVING HER POTENTIAL
After cutting her teeth in cyclo-cross, the Frenchwoman made her UCI Cross-country Mountain Bike (XCO) World Cup debut in Houffalize, Belgium in May 2009. She finished on the podium in fourth and became the Junior European Champion only two months later. The following season, she backed up this potential with her first Junior UCI World Cup win in Offenburg, Germany, and her first rainbow stripes in the discipline in the Junior competition at Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada.
The step up to the Under-23 class didn’t phase Ferrand-Prévot either, who took four wins and the overall in the 2011 season before progressing to the elite class in 2012.
BREAKING THROUGH
While she took a couple of years to find her feet in the elite class, Ferrand-Prévot burst onto the world stage with back-to-back wins to kick off the 2014 season in Nové Město na Moravě (Czechia) and Albstadt (Germany). Her multi-discipline race schedule meant that she would only compete at one more UCI World Cup – third place in Meribel (France) – but she still managed to finish 10th in the overall, and it was clear that France had a new mountain biking star to get behind.
REACHING FOR RAINBOWS
The reigning road and cyclo-cross UCI World Champion, she didn’t start her 2015 cross-country mountain bike season until August. But she had one race firmly in her sights – the UCI XCO World Championships in Vallnord, Andorra. Winning would make her the first person to hold world titles in the three different disciplines and a great of the sport at just 23. After a fast start, Ferrand-Prévot found herself in the lead on the second lap, where she did what she does best – pulling away from the chasing pack to build an unassailable lead and win by almost a minute.
ALL-ROUND DOMINANCE
While she managed to amass five elite UCI XCO World Championships and a bronze medal in 10 starts, her performances in 2022 highlighted what a dominant force she can be – regardless of race distance. Racing in front of a partisan crowd in Les Gets, Haute-Savoie (France), Ferrand-Prévot kicked off her UCI World Championships week with a win in the short track – the discipline awarded its own rainbow jersey since the 2021 season. Two days later, she sailed home first to take her fourth UCI XCO World Championship. But she wasn’t finished yet. Three weeks on from Les Gets, she beat Annie Last (Great Britain) in a sprint finish to take the UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championship in Haderslev, Denmark, becoming the first rider to simultaneously hold the XCC, XCO and XCM rainbow jerseys.
PERFECT FINALE IN PARIS
The Olympics had always alluded Ferrand-Prévot, and the Frenchwoman had unfinished business after disappointing results at her three previous attempts – 25th London 2012, DNF Rio 2016, and 10th Tokyo 2020. For the 2024 season, she focused her sole attention on Paris 2024, avoiding the travel-heavy early rounds of the WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series in Brazil and only competing at Nové Město na Moravě (Czechia) and Val di Sole, Trentino (Italy) – both of which she won to claim the 7th and 8th UCI XCO World Cups of her career.
Lining up on the startline at the Elancourt Olympic venue, she was fresh and focused and wasn’t going to let anything stand in her way. In the lead group from the first lap, she pulled away on the second and no one could respond. By the end, she had built a lead of almost three minutes, and the destination of the gold medal was a foregone conclusion.
FAIRWELL FERRAND-PRÉVOT
Her final mountain bike races saw her take to the course where she had won her first UCI Mountain Bike World Championship in 2015, Andorra’s Pal Arinsal Bike Park. But it wasn’t to be a rainbow-stripped conclusion to her off road career. In the XCC, she attacked and led on the final climb but couldn’t shake off Great Britain’s Evie Richards, who narrowly beat the Frenchwoman in a head-to-head sprint for the line.
She appeared to have shaken off this disappointment in the early stages of the following day’s XCO, edging up to third after a slow start. She couldn’t hold the wheels of the early pace setter and eventual winner Puck Pieterse though and started dropping backwards through the pack. Rolling across the finish line in 14th, she posted on Instagram after the race that she had “nothing in the tank” before adding that it was a “good moment to [quit] this discipline.”
