Cycle
Olympics
This Sunday, 36 of the fastest women in the world will line up at Elancourt Hill outside of Paris for the Olympic Mountain Bike race. With the UCI World Cup well underway, a few favorites have emerged, but the Olympics can bring chaos and uncertainty, leading to huge upsets. Will French favorites pull off medals in front of the home crowd? Or could a rising star spoil the party?
Alessandra Keller, the 28-year-old rider from Switzerland, is the current leader of the UCI World Cup. Though she has not won a World Cup race this year, her top-ten finishes in all six races have given her a healthy lead over young break-out star Puck Pieterse of the Netherlands. With second and third place finishes at recent World Cup races in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and Les Gets, France, Keller will certainly be a contender at the race on Sunday.
It is hard to ignore the decisive show of force Puck Pieterse put on display at Les Gets in early June. The 22-year-old rider from the Netherlands won the race with a more than two-and-a-half-minute lead over second place after riding away from the field on the first lap and staying solo in the front for the entire race. Pieterse, who won the World Cup points competition last year, is just as comfortable mixing it up in the mud in a cyclocross race as she is tearing up the technical sections of an Olympic-level mountain bike course. Pieterse skipped the first two World Cup races this season to compete in the Tour of Flanders, one of the most famous ‘Spring Classics’ road races. However, a long season of cyclocross plus a few road races already in her legs opens up questions about whether she has enough left for an Olympic medal in Paris.
There can’t be a discussion about women’s mountain biking without mentioning Pauline Ferrand-Prevot. The 32-year-old French rider has won four Cross Country Mountain Bike titles and in 2015, at the age of 23, she became the first cyclist of any gender to simultaneously hold world titles in mountain biking, cyclocross, and on the road. Despite a dominant career, Ferrand-Prevot has struggled to find success at the Olympics. She has never medaled in any discipline. To add to the drama of trying to ride her way to her first Olympic medal in front of the home crowd, Ferrand-Prevot recently announced that this will be her final season competing in the mountain bike discipline. She plans on focusing more on the road, with the intention of racing the Tour de France Femmes in the coming seasons. Ferrand-Prevot put up back-to-back wins at Nove Mesto in the Czech Republic and Val di Sole in Italy earlier this season, showing she is still at the top of her game heading into Paris.
Ferrand-Prevot and fellow Frenchwoman Loana Lecomte were both favorites heading into the Tokyo games. In the first four races of the season, Ferrand-Prevot was in the top five, and Lecomte won every single one. Tokyo proved to be a different story, with both French riders finishing out of the medals in tenth and sixth, respectively. The Tokyo race instead saw a Swiss sweep with Ferrand-Prevot’s longtime rival Jolanda Neff bringing home the gold. Neff has been battling respiratory issues and announced in mid-July that she will not be competing in Paris.
The Olympics fall in the middle of the regular World Cup season, meaning many riders have to decide how much priority to give Paris over the rest of their season. In a normal World Cup season, riders may just be starting to come into peak form, with the biggest race of the year being the Mountain Bike World Championships in late August. Lecomte said in a pre-race interview before her win in Crans-Montana this year that she will be treating the Olympics like another World Cup race.
One rider who will be prioritizing the Olympics is American star Haley Batten. The 25-year-old rider from Park City, Utah, recently told the Park Record, “For the first part of my season, I focused on qualification for the Olympics. Now, all of my efforts are on being my absolute best in Paris.” Batten raced at the Tokyo Olympics, finishing as the top American in ninth place. Since then, Batten has forged herself into an experienced, formidable racer. Batten has said this season she has gotten more comfortable racing in the pack and more confident in her own abilities. She thinks that confidence will be key to performing well in Paris since the course will favor a more bunched-up, tactical race. “The climbs aren’t so steep or so dramatic where you can really get away,” Batten told TownLift. “You also have these major technical sections, so you really have to have all the elements of being a mountain bike rider to be able to perform super well.”
Batten has had success in the past in the shorter, faster ‘short track’ races that precede each World Cup race. This season has also seen her take her racing to the front of the pack, with two amazing performances in Brazil at the start of the season where she came away with third and first after long battles with Rio de Janeiro gold medalist Jenny Rissveds of Sweden and Savilia Blunk, her teammate on Team USA. Batten had been trading the lead with Rissveds with one lap to go in Mairipora, Brazil, the first race of the season, when Rissveds finally got away from her on one of the last climbs. In hot pursuit, Batten crashed on a berm on the final downhill. Blunk moved into second place, but Batten recovered quickly enough to finish third.
With a mix of experienced favorites hunting for elusive medals and rising stars looking to solidify their place in the sport, the Women’s Olympic Mountain Bike race is sure to deliver. Peacock will stream the race live at 6 a.m. Mountain Standard Time on Sunday, July 28.
