'I pick my battle, and I choose the Tour de France' – Forget year-long dominance, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is all about delivering when it counts most

When setting up the list of favourites for a race like the Tour de France Femmes, generally one of the first things to do would be to go and take a look at recent race history to see how the form has been evolving for the season. It's the riders that have done well at other Grand Tours, excelled in the mountains or delivered cracking individual time trial results that will give them an edge over other contenders that are likely to go to the top of the list.

However, when it comes to Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, that's not how it works. The French Visma-Lease a Bike rider is cut from a different cloth.

Key rivals like Demi Vollering and Marlen Reusser may have been racking up the race days and victories in recent months, with the Giro d'Italia win for the Dutch rider and home race victory at the Tour de Suisse for Reusser. On the other hand, the race and results calendar has been unapologetically quiet for the 2025 Tour de France winner and Paris Olympics mountain bike gold medallist, with just 12 race days so far this season and the last of these was in May.

On top of that, there isn't a victory among those 12 days, and the results from her only stage race at the Vuelta Femenina were less than spectacular, finishing 35th overall. Though that's nothing to be concerned about or knock her down the favourites list, she did, after all, claim victory in France in 2025 on the back of a DNS in her previous hit-out in Spain.

It's simply that a packed calendar packed with multiple goals just isn't Ferrand-Prévot's style.

"My goal, since the beginning, is to be able to be 100% for the Tour de France, so I never really had in mind to win other races. I know that I need a specific preparation to be able to win races, so I just pick my battle, and I choose the Tour de France as the battle," Pauline Ferrand-Prévot told reporters in an online media conference three days before the race.

"I'm not the kind of rider who can and who wants to perform all season long; I just want to have a big goal in the season and to commit to it."

The Tour de France was always the race that was the raison d'être behind her return to the road after years of focusing on the mountain bike, which culminated with gold at her home Olympics in 2024. That drive hasn't changed as a result of delivering a winning blow in the very first season of her multi-year plan to capture victory at the race, which women's team manager Rutger Tijssen joked was almost unfortunate because "my three-year plan was in the trash bin".

But, all jokes aside, while that may have taken the pressure off, it hasn't done anything to reduce its lustre as a goal, with the French rider making clear that the French Grand Tour was an event and experience that held a special place in her heart.

"It's not just about winning, you know, also especially because I won last year, so this year I also want to enjoy," said Ferrand-Prévot.

Some things change, others stay the same

This hyper-focussed approach hasn't always been the way Ferrand-Prévot operated. There was a time in her career when she did it all, switching across disciplines and sweeping through to take a swathe of results that at one point saw her hold the road, cyclo-cross and cross-country mountain bike world titles all at once, but as the years rolled on she became more focused.

That was first in terms of discipline, as Ferrand-Prévot honed in on mountain biking before returning to the road, and then she continued also to refine her training to pinpoint key events,

The sparse calendar, she said, is a good way to keep the motivation fresh, which may not be the case if she had to race weekend after weekend.

"It was good when I was younger. I had the hunger to race a lot, but now I just prefer to train to build for an event and to go in altitude in training camp rather than racing more," said Ferrand-Prévot.

"I think it's because of age; I'm now 34, and I don't have like the same motivation, I would say, to race every weekend. I think it's also why I have fun. It's because I know that it's not every weekend, and when I come to the race, I know that I'm ready."

While the racing schedule may look significantly different to the early years of a career that has now spanned through a decade-and-a-half of successes, disappointments and also obstacles – including multiple surgeries for iliac artery endofibrosis – there are some things that remain the same.

Right from the time when Ferrand-Prévot was in her early 20s and lining up alongside Marianne Vos for the Rabobank-Liv squad – and also standing on the overall podium of the Giro d'Italia GC podium one step below her race-winning teammate – there is a characteristic that has continually helped drive her toward success.

"She's still the same Pauline, but what I learned already from her at a young age, until now, she's very determined," Vos, who now races with Ferrand-Prévot at Visma-Lease a Bike, said in a pre-Tour de France Femmes media conference.

"When she has her mind on something, she will make it work, and we've seen that, of course, in different disciplines and different goals that she set, and eventually she got to the goal and made it happen."

"Next to that, she's just very good to have in the team. Loyal, nice, and, as I said, also very determined. She knows what she wants, and she knows what she needs, and that's actually really nice to have in the team because you really work together for the same goal. When there's such a leader in the team, you know what you go for."

The ticking clock

The Visma-Lease a Bike team has clear goals, and while stage wins and an early yellow jersey would be nice, capturing it on the final day is the overriding target.

Still, winning one year is far from a guarantee of being able to win another, as it's not just the competitors and form that vary, but also the parcours.

"Every year is going to be different, so you need to adapt," said Tijssen, referring to a skill Ferrand-Prévot is clearly adept at considering her varied successes.

The standout change this year, when the course was announced in October, was a time trial over 21km on stage 4, which, in theory at least, was an advantage to riders like Reusser, Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx) and Vollering who populated the steps of the time trial podium at the World Championships in 2025. The defending champion, on the other hand, hasn't raced a single UCI individual time trial since her road return.

When asked if, given her inexperience in the area, it was like starting from zero when she started working on the time trial preparation, Ferrand-Prévot quipped that actually, "I had to start from minus ten."

Still, with her proven ability to deliver, even without a track record in the discipline, it's hard to imagine she'll end up on the start line anything but prepared.

"I really like this kind of challenge, so I took it very seriously, and I think I did my homework quite well," she said.

The work on positioning, aerodynamic testing and simulations got underway soon after the route was announced and from November the efforts on the time trial bike were a regular part of the routine.

"Indeed, we spent quite some time on the time trial bike, really two, three times a week at least," said Tijssen of the focus on this area. "And not just doing easy spins, but also really training on it without losing the focus on what she's good at. Because in the end, you should always try to make the athlete better in what she's already really good at, instead of putting too much emphasis on the challenges and the things that she's not that good at.

"So we maintain focus on what she was really good at, which is long climbing, being race ready for Saturday, and that, for her, means being really ready in every aspect of the race. And we never lose sight of the explosive part of women's cycling, because the races are being decided on the two in a three minutes effort, so we took them into consideration as well."

Last year it was a winning effort on the Col de la Madeleine which put Ferrand-Prévot in the overall lead and whipped French fans into a frenzy, the roadsides packed with cheering and sign-waving fans even hours ahead of when the home-nation hero would pass through in yellow.

The queen stage this year ends on Mont Ventoux, a 15.7km climb averaging 8.8% that Ferrand-Prévot has tackled repeatedly in her preparation because "I really like to know where I put my wheels". On first glance its not that dissimilar from the Col de Madeleine at 8.8% at 18.6km but when it comes down to the detail there are significant differences.

"It's a hard climb. It's different than Madeleine because I think the wind also will have more of an impact. It's a climb, also, where after Chalet Reynard you need also quite some power because it's a more flattish part," said Ferrand-Prévot, pointing out that on the other hand there had been no time for recovery on Madeleine.

"I think maybe we will have more like team tactics for Ventoux than we could see last year for Madeleine."

Whatever happens, it's clear that Ferrand-Prévot and the team have put in the work to try and, as Tijssen put it, "make the uncomfortable comfortable, and make the uncontrollable controllable".

In the days ahead of the Tour de France Femmes start in Lausanne Switzerland, that has left Ferrand-Prévot confident in her preparation and smiling her way through media conferences, but also well aware of the potential challenges ahead.

"I feel happy and at the moment relaxed, so let's see," said Ferrand-Prévot. "In a few days, maybe I will be crying and unhappy. But at the moment, I'm in a good way."

There may not be any predicting exactly what may unfold once the racing starts on Saturday, but there is an attitude that Tijssen believes will stand her in good stead, and that is that "there is just one way, and that's moving forward".

"There is nothing that's going to hold her back from being as good as she can be when she has her peak moment."

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