Pauline Ferrand-Prévot

Ferrand-Prévot was winning world titles before she left the junior ranks, taking the junior cross-country mountain bike title in 2009 and adding junior world titles on both the road and the mountain bike in 2010. She rode the London Olympic road race in 2012 as the youngest starter in the field and came eighth.

In 2014 she won La Flèche Wallonne by a second from Lizzie Armitstead, finished second at the Giro Rosa, and became the first French rider to take four national titles in a season: road race, time trial, cyclo-cross and cross-country. That September she won the world road race in Ponferrada from a group of fifteen, the first French winner since Jeannie Longo in 1995.

The cyclo-cross world title came at Tábor in early 2015, a second clear of Sanne Cant, and the cross-country mountain bike title at Vallnord that September. At 23 she held the road, cyclo-cross and mountain bike rainbow jerseys at the same time, which no rider had done. She fractured her tibial plateau in training that November.

At Rio in 2016 she finished 26th in the road race and abandoned the mountain bike race. She joined Canyon-SRAM for 2017, turned her preparation over to off-road racing and stopped riding the road after 2018. The world titles came back in 2019 with cross-country and marathon wins at Mont-Sainte-Anne, then cross-country again in 2020, 2022 and 2023, short track and marathon in 2022, and the first UCI gravel world championship in Veneto that October.

She won Olympic cross-country gold at the Colline d'Élancourt in 2024, nearly three minutes clear of Haley Batten. Visma-Lease a Bike signed her on a three-year deal and she returned to the road in 2025, third at Strade Bianche and second to Lotte Kopecky at the Tour of Flanders before attacking at Camphin-en-Pévèle with fifteen kilometres to go at Paris-Roubaix and reaching the velodrome 58 seconds clear.

At the Tour de France Femmes she dropped Sarah Gigante on the Col de la Madeleine to take the yellow jersey on stage eight, won again into Châtel the following day and finished three minutes and 42 seconds ahead of Demi Vollering. She was 16th at the world championships in Kigali in September, in the bronze medallist's time.