Pauline Ferrand-Prévot was not supposed to take the start line at Paris-Roubaix on Saturday, though the framework of expectation and surprise is insufficient when applied to a rider like Ferrand-Prévot; everything about her 2025 season has been and necessarily will be a surprise. Ferrand-Prévot is back on the road this year after a six-year hiatus spent dominating the mountain biking scene. She decided to swap out her thick tires for skinny ones after winning gold in Paris at last summer’s Olympics, completing the career sweep in the process, and she’s returned to a very different peloton than the one she left in 2018. Ferrand-Prévot is a former road-race world champion, so it’s not like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. But she’d never raced against latter-day crushers like Demi Vollering and Lorena Wiebes. Could PFP beat the new generation?
As it turns out: yes, with flair. Ferrand-Prévot has been one of the best riders through the early-season cobbled classic swing, taking third at Strade Bianche, second at last weekend’s Tour of Flanders, and continuing her linear ascent of podia by winning Paris-Roubaix on Saturday. Each performance has been more impressive than the last: she won a small-group sprint in Italy, made the elite four-rider selection and finished second in the sprint for the win in Belgium, then escaped all alone to win at home in France.
When Ferrand-Prévot slipped the peloton with 25 kilometers left on Saturday, she was not making an all-out attack for the win. At that point in the race, a 20-strong group of hardy riders was in the process of reeling back Trek’s Emma Norsgaard when Ferrand-Prévot punched away on one of the only points of topographical interest on the entire route. As she said after, she was trying to set it up for her teammate Marianne Vos.
“The goal was to make the sprinters tired, mostly to bring Marianne as fresh as possible so that she could be able to sprint for the win,” she said. “I was not really thinking about winning the race, to be honest. I just wanted to make SD Worx work.” Unintentional wordplay aside, that was obviously the correct tactical decision. With that many riders still in contention that close to the finish line, the tactically correct play was to burn out Ferrand-Prévot’s strength in service of forcing SD Worx to give Vos a free ride. Everyone else in the group would necessarily then stare at Lotte Kopecky, the best one-day racer in the world, and Lorena Wiebes, the best sprinter in the world, until they won or lost the race for themselves. Any other rider who worked to reel back Ferrand-Prévot was simply winning Wiebes’s race for her.
That’s the unique burden SD Worx shoulders as the peloton’s best team, a weight that warps the dynamics of every big race into a fascinating shape. They are not quite as strong as they were last year, however, especially relative to the peloton and especially on Saturday, when they lost several supporting riders to early crashes. By the time Kopecky gathered herself and began drilling it on the front, Ferrand-Prévot was gone. She scooped up then promptly dropped Norsgaard, and was met in the legendary Roubaix velodrome by a jubilant home crowd. It was her first win on the road since 2015.
As Ferrand-Prévot said after the race, she was not even planning to race either cobbled monument this spring, until her great ride at Strade Bianche changed her mind. Her team’s initial plan was to send her up to altitude for a while to get her legs under her before the summer, which made sense given how she started the season. She was so far back at the UAE Tour that she and her managers at Jumbo were giving quotes that gave the impression she was still learning how to ride on the road. “My ultimate goal is to win the Tour within the next three years, so I see 2025 as a learning year before I really target victory,” Ferrand-Prévot said after finishing 3:39 behind Elisa Longo Borghini this past February. “It’s a completely different sport from when I last raced.”
That’s true—Annemiek van Vleuten dominated the sport during Ferrand-Prévot’s early prime and absence—though many of her rivals and teammates are still around and still riding well. Vos is 37 and I guess will just keep winning bike races forever, and it’s a shame Longo Borghini suffered a concussion at Flanders and couldn’t fight at Roubaix, because she is still a killer. The operative difference is the position of SD Worx, which was not a WorldTour team the last time Ferrand-Prévot was a road racer. Every race they do not win, they will face huge questions, as the burden of being the best team comes with the expectation that they will defy the logic of professional cycling and win everything. They have the strength to win most everything, but as we’ve seen over and over again, that can work against them. Everything was set up for Wiebes on Saturday, and while Kopecky was mostly working for her, the two were not always on the same page.
“I struggled at one moment because I was leading into the sector and Lotte attacked, so then it’s really hard to accelerate again to follow,” Wiebes said. “So later I said to her please don’t do that when I’m leading at the front.” Wiebes gets at something critical here, something that makes me sympathetic to her team’s difficult position: it is more difficult to react than to act. Trek, Jumbo, and the rest of the peloton have the luxury of knowing that one team will have the onus of doing the work to contain any race that starts to get wild. “A lot of times, we’re going to have situations where the solo person is going to win,” EF sports director Carmen Small said after the race, “because SD Worx doesn’t have the depth like they did before and you put in new people like Ferrand-Prévot, it equalled out the big teams almost.” That’s exactly right, and exactly why this season is shaping up to be such a good one: the top of the women’s peloton is super varied, and the once-dominant SD Worx is still so good that they will win a ton, but not so good it will ever be boring.
