'I don't think I could do just one discipline' – How a mantra about circles, childhood friends and an unruly chicken help Puck Pieterse to do it all

Puck Pieterse folds a slice of pizza the way New Yorkers do, and her very first slice was plain cheese, nothing else. She doesn't usually order it that way, she told me later; she just wanted to taste the basic version first.

That was lunch. For breakfast, she had a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Somewhere along the way, she hit the M&M's store in Times Square and went to town picking up every flavour she can't buy in the Netherlands. She ate enough that it made her feel sick. "It made me fly on the bike," she laughed. "I'm on holiday," she shrugged. Once her stomach settled, the leftovers became her post-ride recovery snack.

It was 24-year-old Pieterse's first time in New York, and she told a small crowd of fans that evening that it was a lot to take in: the noise, the lights, the sheer scale of it. "It's just so much bigger than my European mind can comprehend," she said.

She'd been to a Knicks game the night before. She was still processing the soundtrack: the organ, the sound effects narrating every possession, and an arena that left no doubt which side it was on, with ominous cues when the visitors had the ball and "crazy TikTok songs" when the Knicks did. You would never have guessed that from watching her ride on 8th Avenue at the start of rush hour earlier that day, or from how smoothly she handled clueless onlookers and city vehicles in a bustling Central Park just days before marathon weekend.

Later that evening, at Roberta's Pizza in Midtown Manhattan, I had a little over 20 minutes and three slices of cake to win her trust. We were both speaking our second language, and we were both frazzled by the room, but the sweets helped break the ice.

Pieterse rides for Fenix-Premier Tech, and everyone asks her the same question: how does she do it all? She races cyclo-cross in winter, the Classics in spring, and mountain bikes and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in summer, and she has won at the highest level in all three disciplines.

"It's definitely getting harder to combine everything because every discipline is getting way more specific," she told me. Her 2026 season showed the cost: podiums at Flanders, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour's polka-dot jersey and a third straight bronze at the cyclo-cross Worlds, but not the one standout victory she said she wanted.

The more interesting question is how she keeps her head clear while doing it, how a rider pulled in so many directions stays steady in each one. She came to New York between the road and CX seasons, for a community ride and pizza night hosted by Canyon and Zwift, and I spent the day trying to find out to that question. The answer, it turned out, involved circles. And not just riding around in them.

Protecting the circle

The question came from the crowd gathered on Roberta's rooftop, read aloud by the evening's host, Matt Stephens: did she have a mantra, or any trick for staying focused under pressure?

She has circles, Pieterse explained. Circle one is the race and only the race: your line, your effort, what you are doing right now. Circle two sits a little wider; it can be your mom or dad shouting from the tape, and they are allowed in briefly, but then you go back to circle one.

The danger is drifting further out. "On a bad day, you start hearing people talking about you, or your own head joins in with the negativity," she noted. She recognizes it happening and steps back inside.

Her race mornings are built to keep the first circle uncluttered. At a cyclo-cross race, her father prepares her pre-race meal, she rides two or three laps of the course, then tries to visualize it back at the camper, with Dutch rap in her headphones. Nothing superstitious, she insisted.

Back on 8th Avenue at peak time, circle one is a cab door, a delivery cyclist salmoning against the flow, a pedestrian stepping off the curb mid-text. Pieterse slid through the chaos without appearing to think. When I asked how she made urban survival look so effortless, she gave me a look that suggested it was not much of a question.

To her, it is simply second nature. "If you race a lot, you get a bit of awareness about what others are going to do, but of course you can never be one hundred per cent sure," she said. At home in the Netherlands, she rides through a city centre every day to reach her group ride meeting point. Dutch cities are smaller, she notes, but there are more of them, so traffic is woven into every training ride. She knows her routes, including – she admits with a grin – when she might sneak through a red light.

"I think if you're less into cycling and you're a tourist here, it's really dangerous actually with all the cars."

Still, she'd love to ride an alleycat race in New York, she said, before thinking better of it: it wouldn't be safe. NYC drivers, though, got a good review. "They know there are cyclists around, so that's nice."

I watched most of it from a few bike lengths back, on a Canyon Aeroad borrowed from her sponsor. I chased her through Midtown and into Central Park, where about 40 riders had turned out for the Canyon and Zwift community ride, on a loop already crowded with marathon-weekend runners and visitors. Over three laps, Pieterse found her way to the wheel of nearly every rider, chatting and making jokes as she went.

'Cross, Classics, and cake

Most fans on the ride wanted to know when her cyclo-cross season will start. Pieterse, who is still working out her 'cross schedule, was more curious about them: why they took up cycling in a city with so little room for it, and whether they only ride in the park or live somewhere with better roads. She was struck by how big the local community is, given how few bike shops she had spotted while walking around.

I'd heard Pieterse plans rides around bakery stops, so she didn't argue when I told her we would do a cake tasting while we talked. Cakes and sweets are part of the programme. At her local coffee stop back home, she orders apple pie in slices so massive they are meant to be shared.

She took the tasting seriously. The tiramisu was "surprisingly marshmallowy… when it should have been more mascarpone and alcohol," while the red velvet cake had the texture the tiramisu missed. "I know my cakes," she said. The key lime cake, airy and bright, ended up being her favourite.

Between bites, I asked how she manages to switch between disciplines. She splits her year into blocks: road, mountain bike, with the Tour de France sandwiched in between, then back to the mountain bike. 'Cross fills the winter, and by January, she is deep into the intense CX calendar. By the end of February, she has pivoted back to the road for the Classics.

The switch itself is smaller than people think, she insists. She trains on both bikes at home. She sees the Spring Classics and cross-country mountain biking as requiring the same type of explosive effort. The Classics are simply far longer, demanding deeper fatigue resistance.

The hard part is accepting what she has to give up. Her Classics rivals spend an entire winter preparing only for those races, while she is racing 'cross. Before mountain bike Worlds, she notes, she could have been at an altitude camp instead of racing the Tour.

"I'm fully committed to cycling and to becoming the best cyclist I can be," she said. She accepts the trade-offs because variety gives her so much. Pressed by the crowd that night to choose just one discipline or bike, she called herself an all-rounder, then picked the mountain bike. "For now," she added.

It circles back to her mental framework. The ground beneath her keeps changing, from mud to cobbles to singletrack, and her job is to keep circle one steady.

Her record explains why people keep asking about her ability to do it all. In 2024, she won the elite cross-country mountain bike world title, then a stage of the Tour de France Femmes on her first attempt, along with the young rider's white jersey. In 2025, she won La Flèche Wallonne, then five MTB World Cup races in a row.

Then came 2026. Before the Ardennes, she told her team she would "rather have one real stand-out result than three podiums." She got the podiums instead: third at Flanders, second at Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, no win.

When asked which win she would relive, she chose the 2024 Tour stage from Valkenburg to Liège over the closing climbs of La Doyenne. That day, on rain-soaked roads, at just 22, she beat race leader Demi Vollering in a photo finish, with Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney third.

"I had, in the evening before, in the night, I woke up... I dreamed that I was winning today," she told the room. "And then in the end, the final, I just knew what was going to happen. It was super weird."

There is one major title still on her radar. She has stood on the elite cyclo-cross Worlds podium four years running, silver in 2023 and bronze in each of the three years since, but never on the top step. The next chance comes in Oostende, Belgium, at the end of January. A few moments after we talked about it, a stray balloon shaped like a number one drifted up over us and into the black-blue evening sky.

'It's sad that we don't have the US World Cups anymore'

Pieterse knows North American 'cross better than most Europeans. She won the under-23 world title in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 2022, and has raced World Cups in Iowa and Wisconsin. No World Cup has come back since the 2023/24 season. The 2026/27 series has 12 rounds, including Glasgow on December 13, but none in North America.

When I told her that American cyclo-cross has struggled to regain its momentum in recent years, and asked what the US could learn from Europe, she was frank. "It's a very Belgian sport," she said. In Belgium, a fan can reach most races in about half an hour by car; here, she pointed out, it can take a seven-hour flight. What she liked about the American 'cross races she has done was the weekend format, with amateur and kids' races building to the World Cup on Sunday. She also wondered whether a late-season slot on the 'cross calendar might make the trip across the Atlantic easier on riders. Mountain biking, she noted, wrestles with the same question of where to put its World Cups.

"I think it's sad that we don't have the US World Cups anymore," she said. For riders, those races were a lot of fun, and though getting here is a long trip, "once you're here it's always been worth it." When the biggest names come, the public follows. Several people on the Central Park ride had told her they had watched her race 'cross here.

The other fix, she thinks, is online. "I think being present on social media can play a big role as well," she said, though geo-restrictions make races harder to watch in the US. And 'cross suits a screen: at "only fifty minutes to an hour," she said, a CX race is easier to watch than a mountain bike race.

Back to reality and racing

Whilst New York is something of a holiday, her next big trips away will be for racing. The 2027 Tour de France Femmes starts in Leeds on July 30, the race's first Grand Départ in the UK. She missed the big-name climbs of recent editions and sees chances for herself and Fenix-Premier Tech on a route with shorter climbs. "I think it will only make maybe even a more exciting Tour."

Home is Amersfoort, in the middle of the Netherlands, where she grew up and still lives. She started riding because her father came home muddy from weekend mountain bike rides with friends, and she wanted that too.

As a kid, she said, announcing she would turn pro was like saying "you wanted to be a police officer or a firefighter," something you say without really meaning it. Then, as a first-year junior, she had a good enough season to earn a spot at the Worlds in cyclo-cross and mountain biking. By the time she was under-23 and had signed with Alpecin-Deceuninck, she was suddenly sharing a roster with Mathieu van der Poel.

When things get heavy, she doesn't call cycling insiders. She calls a high school friend, a student whose life looks nothing like hers, whenever their schedules line up. And she calls Mischa Bredewold, who grew up two kilometres away. Bredewold is two years older and rode in the same club as Pieterse's sister, which made Puck the tag-along little sister for years. Now, both are professionals, and over the last couple of years they have grown close. Bredewold, Pieterse said, has a view on most things. "And it's usually a good opinion."

New York is a city built on excess, and hers was a bag of M&M's. From there, she headed to a short team camp in Lisbon, with rides on city bikes, more pastries, and surfing lessons. Then it was back to the Netherlands, back to the mud, and back to Moncler, her pet chicken who terrorises the neighbourhood. "She attacks cats, ducks, dogs," Pieterse said. "Nothing is safe." That includes her mother.

"I don't think I could do just one discipline," she said. "I would go out of my mind." She needs the change of scenery, and believes the variety makes her "a more whole cyclist." After a day with her, I'd put it a little differently. The mud and the cobbles, the cakes, the surfboard, the friend who has nothing to do with bikes: none of it pulls her away from the racing. It's what keeps her whole enough to do it.

Back to when the number-one balloon drifted above us, she didn't look up at it for long. A team camp was waiting, then a cyclo-cross season with the Worlds in Oostende at the end, and a rogue chicken at home in need of supervision. The city had been loud all day. As far as I could tell, circle one had stayed quiet.