Pauline Ferrand-Prévot to retire from mountain biking at the end of 2024

The reigning world XCO champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has revealed that she will retire from mountain biking at the end of the year, with the 32-year-old keen to make a return to the Women's WorldTour and ride the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift next season.

Confirming the news to Eurosport after she had won her first UCI XCO World Cup of the season in Nove Mesto, the Ineos Grenadiers rider set her sights on Olympic success at this summer's Games in Paris. It will be her first and final Olympics in her home nation, where she will look to claim an elusive medal before heading back to road racing.

"I mean, this is my last chance to try to be Olympic champion so I don't want to miss it," she said. "Because it will be for sure my last year also on MTB so I want to do everything to be good this year and to try to win the Olympics at home."

The Frenchwoman has competed in the last three Olympics but achieved her best result in the road race (eighth) at the 2012 Olympic Games. On the mountain bike, her Olympic best came in Tokyo three years ago, where she placed 10th. It has been away from the Olympics that Ferrand-Prévot has cemented her status as one of the best mountain bikers of her generation.

To date, the multi-disciplinary has won five world championships in a career that has seen her win 65 mountain bike events and amass 38 World Cup podiums. Her talents have, of course, spilt over into other disciplines, with Ferrand-Prévot a former world champion on the road, in cyclo-cross and in gravel.

Read more: Pauline Ferrand-Prévot will test Ineos’ true commitment to women’s cycling

Explaining the decision to end her mountain biking career after this season, the Frenchwoman said that she has achieved everything there is to achieve in the discipline, hinting that her priorities will lay elsewhere beyond the Olympics.

"I think I did everything on MTB and I still like it but it doesn't make sense to continue more and also it's my last chance to be Olympic champion at home, so it's good to finish on it," she said.

Her decision to step away from mountain biking will certainly shine a spotlight on her impending return to road racing, with Ferrand-Prévot letting it be known on the Geraint Thomas Cycling Club podcast recently that she has ambitions to race the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in the future.

Ferrand-Prévot has been the lone female rider for Ineos Grenadiers since she signed for the British team at the start of 2023. In her time with the squad, she has helped develop the new Pinarello Dogma XC mountain bikes and raised outside expectations that a women's Ineos Grenadiers squad is to come.

However, the team's first women's squad has yet to materialise and Ferrand-Prévot's contract is due to run out at the end of the year, with her agency SEG Cycling putting the Frenchwoman firmly in the shop window for the winter. The 32-year-old's preference is to stay with Ineos Grenadiers and lead a new women's team, but if nothing comes of this, then she will head elsewhere ahead of her return to the road.

Read more: Where next for Pauline Ferrand-Prévot?

The former world road race champion last raced consistently on the road in 2018 for Canyon-SRAM, but her best years came in 2014/2015 before her focus turned squarely to mountain biking. In that time, Ferrand-Prévot won the World Championships in 2014, Flèche Wallonne that same year and finished second at the Giro d'Italia Women.

So far, Movistar have ruled themselves out of signing the Frenchwoman, but her signature will certainly be sought after over the coming months. In the meantime, Ferrand-Prévot will hope to end on a high in mountain biking with a medal at this summer's Olympic Games.

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