Pauline Ferrand-Prévot storms to stage success on way to Tour de France Femmes title

The Guardian

3 days ago

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot confirmed an exuberant overall win in the Tour de France Femmes in style, with her second mountain-stage win in Châtel Les Portes du Soleil. Amid euphoric scenes, Ferrand-Prévot, gold medallist at the Paris Olympics last year, followed up her lone win on the Col de la Madeleine on Saturday with another solo exploit in the Tour's final stage.
Ferrand-Prévot becomes the first French rider to win the Tour de France Femmes, 36 years after her compatriot Jeannie Longo won the Tour de France Féminin, although that race did not compare with the scale, difficulty and global renown of the latest incarnation. Suddenly, after waiting 40 years for a successor to Bernard Hinault in the men's Tour, all France is now enamoured by women's cycling and with the 33-year-old from Reims, who was called within minutes of confirming her victory by the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
Ferrand-Prévot's achievement, of winning the Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix in the same year, and both within 12 months of winning an Olympic gold medal for mountain biking, confirms her versatility and ambition. With the Olympic rings tattooed on her arm, she had reverted to road racing from mountain biking and stated that it was her ambition to win the Tour within three years. She did it in one.
'I think I put the bar really high this year in terms of preparing for this race,' she said. 'There have been a lot of sacrifices. Now I just want to enjoy the moment, because it might only happen once.'
The writing was on the wall even on stage one, when she jumped clear of the peloton on the final climb of the Côte de Cadoudal in Plumelec, with a sharp acceleration. But she bided her time and has remained calm and contained throughout, even during the mid-race public spat between her team manager, Jos van Emden, and Demi Vollering's team manager, Stephen Delcourt.
For seven of the nine stages she remained discreet, but when her moment came she was ready. If her first stage win, on the Madeleine on Saturday, confirmed the earlier impressions of her speed in Plumelec, her win in Châtel emphasised her dominance.
'I'd said to the sports directors this morning that if I could win in yellow then I'd try to,' she said. 'It all came down to how I felt on the last climb. I attacked but I didn't think I'd be able to keep going like that and win.'
As the final stage began there were, initially, some nerves and Ferrand-Prévot was put under pressure almost immediately as she lost ground with the main peloton on the long descent from the start to Sallanches.
'I made a mistake on the first descent,' she said. 'I think I was just a bit scared with the pressure of the jersey, so afterwards I stayed close to the front and made an effort to stay there.'
But the race leader rejoined the main group on the approach to the first climb, the Cote d'Arâches-la-Frasse. Even before top of the first category climb a selection had been made with the favourites all moving ahead of the splintering bunch, in pursuit of the lone breakaway, Anna van der Breggen.
The Dutch rider, 12th overall as the stage began, built up a near two-minute lead on the approach to the hardest climb of the stage, the Col de Joux-Plane. Behind her the main peloton dwindled further after Cédrine Kerbaol, then fifth overall, crashed at the foot of the climb and was distanced quickly.
The Joux-Plane's gradients reduced the lead group to just seven riders, including Ferrand-Prévot, second-placed Sarah Gigante, the 2023 winner, Vollering, and the defending champion, Kasia Niewiadoma.
Five kilometres from the top, Gigante accelerated, taking her rivals with her, but as on Saturday's climb, to the top of the Madeleine, the Australian was not able to open a gap. Instead, it was Vollering and Niewiadoma who combined on the fast descent to distance Gigante, in the hope of pushing her out of the Tour's top three. By the foot of the descent they had succeeded and she was never able to recover.
Vollering, second overall, and Niewiadoma, who finished third, have shown remarkable consistency. They have appeared on the podium in every edition of the Tour de France Femmes since its inauguration in 2022. But this past week was all about the rebirth of French cycling. With the yellow jersey plus four stage wins out of nine days of racing, two for Ferrand-Prévot and two for the irrepressible Maëva Squiban, the hosts have dominated. There is, at long last, life after Hinault.