Profile: Pauline Ferrand-Prevot on Training with Cecile Ravanel, Depression, Disordered Eating, & More

“I knew in the dry I would be almost unbeatable.” There is no ego when Pauline Ferrand-Prevot talks about the Tokyo 2021 Olympics. Through the highs and the lows, her voice is quiet, matter of fact. “I never, ever imagined that it could be raining. It's crazy, but I even didn't have the right tires for the terrain. Now, I can say, ‘I'm so stupid,’ but it is crazy.”

There is a level some athletes reach, when they have worked, sacrificed, and won, where they can talk about big things in simple terms. Sitting in the team van, huddling from the wind blowing from the Gulf of St Tropez, it is easy to forget that the petite, blonde lady huddling in her big, puffy jacket to keep warm may be the greatest bicycle racer of her generation. She is the only bicycle racer ever to hold World Championship titles in road, mountain bike, and cyclocross at the same time. The expectation was that Pauline would go on to dominate women’s road cycling.

Many check books would have opened for a young rider with those kinds of results, they eclipse the palmares of a young Wout van Aert or Mathieu Van Der Poel, but Pauline spurned the more traditional and lucrative route of pursuing a career in road cycling to follow her passion - mountain biking. “I don't even know how much I earn,” she admits. “I'm not lying, I want to earn my life in cycling because you need to eat and you need to have money, like everyone. But it's not the priority, I want to follow my passion and enjoy my life.”






It is hard for most of us to even imagine her last year. The Olympic cycle was the culmination of five years’ dedication, five years of obsessing and sacrificing. All this leading to a fragile, three-week window of form. Finally, a one-and-a-half-hour slot where your entire life’s work will be judged. Imagine your entire working life distilled into a single point, then throw the expectations of an entire country on top of that. How would you cope if it went wrong?

More than almost anybody else, Pauline knows how low it can go, because she carried much of the same pressure into the Rio Olympics in 2016. “After Rio, I was very depressed,” She recalls. “For a few months. It was the hardest time of my life and I had to spend a few weeks in hospital. So I said, ‘Ok, after Tokyo, even if don’t win or don't have a good race, I never want to be like in Rio again’.”

This past winter has been a time for unflinching reflection. “After this Olympic season, it was important to just sit,” she explains. “To write on paper what was good from the last five years because the Olympic season is just one year, but we prepare for so long before. So it was very important for me to sit and to just know what was good or not. I know I can be super strong physically. I know I can be super-well prepared mentally. These are the things I know I can do. I'm good at arriving at a one-day race, knowing that I will be in super shape.”

Pauline recognizes that the sport is changing though, “I think our sport is growing and it's becoming more technical and more explosive. Before it was two-hour races, and now it's only one hour and fifteen minutes. I think you have to work differently. I'm 30, I'm not old, but yeah… I come from the old generation with my past on the road bike. So my technique is good, but I'm not the best. I knew this winter that it was my weakness and I have to work on it. The other point is that I never did strength training in the past, I started this winter to have more explosivity and more energy. I think it can make a big difference.”







There is a word Pauline uses when analyzing her performance from last summer - “skinny”. Picking her up on it, she is keen to talk about it, “It's really good to speak about it because a lot of young girls are making mistakes with weight and being skinny.”

There is a lot of history to unpick around this subject, “In cross-country, there was always a lot about weight because if you are skinny, you can climb faster. A lot of young girls didn't eat and wanted to be skinny to be strong. It's an endurance sport, so you cannot be too heavy to go fast, but because there is less and less long climbing, you don't you don't need to be super skinny.”

“You know that I made this mistake in the past?” Again, Pauline drops a huge truth in her quiet matter-of-fact way. “I was not eating enough. In the beginning, you are super good, it is like you are flying. It's crazy because you didn't change anything in your training, but because you have less weight you are flying on the climbs. And because you are like this, you want to more and more. It's like when you have one tattoo, you want more and more… it's the same.”

“You feel good because you are skinny,” she continues, “but you are only like this for a few weeks or a few months, if you are lucky. After it's a total disaster because your body is empty and because we are women, we need fat because you are meant to make babies. It's huge damage for your body and you can’t see this before, you know? It's terrible because you can’t feel it and you can’t see it, and when it happens, you are nothing, you have no power, you are tired, you don't have your cycle… it’s terrible. It takes months or years to recover from that. And yeah, it's hard. It's hard because it's good and then it's not good, and you don't really realize why at the time.”

Once you have recognized this tendency in yourself, how do you live with it? For Pauline, the answer is in the detail, “It’s really annoying, but I need to weigh all my food when I want to be at a certain weight.”

“I talk with my trainer and he might say, ‘Ok, you have to lose two kilos, but not too fast’.” While most people are familiar with the idea of counting calories to lose weight, Pauline comes at the problem from the other side, “He might say that I have to eat 2000 calories per day. That's pretty good, you can still lose weight with two thousand calories, but you will not lose two kilos in one month, it will take longer. It's safer. For me, I found that if I weigh all my food and I put it on an app, then I have the number of calories I eat per day. Because I'm an extreme person. If my trainer told me to lose two kilos, I would lose it in a really short time, you know?”

Over the past winter, Pauline reordered her life to work towards her next goal - Paris 2024. Top of the list was moving to Frejus to be near her technical coach and former MTB enduro world champion, Cecile Ravanel. After we talk, she heads out onto the test track at the Boulouris CREPS center. Jumps are today's objective.

The center has built replicas of some of the largest jumps in cross-country racing for riders to familiarise themselves with. What is most impressive is that Pauline clearly is not comfortable on them. She looks like doesn’t really want to be doing this, but has decided that this is what she needs to do to win, so she clears every single one of them, over and over again. That kind of strength of willpower is a rare thing. Yet to see Cecile and Pauline together, you might forget this is serious work with a real risk of injury as the pair can barely stop laughing when they are together.

A little later, reigning downhill world cup champion, Valentina Höll, joins them on the pump track. Pauline is thriving being surrounded by other exceptional athletes, “It is like a dream for me to ride with Vali, because, for me, she is the strongest woman in downhill today. It’s just pure happiness and I can learn a lot. She gives her advice, but not too much, so it’s super helpful and I can understand more. There’s no rivalry because we are not coming from the same discipline, so it’s just super helpful. And Cecile was the biggest star in enduro - it’s all about learning with humility and having fun.”






When you understand that Pauline’s career is defined by the Olympics, you can see the phases clearly. In her first phase, she followed the path expected of her, racing on the road, trying to fit into a fairly traditional career path. After the disappointment in Rio, you can see the shift - she began to withdraw from road racing and it is no coincidence that she ended up working with one of the two people ever to defend an Olympic XCO title {Paolo Pezzo won in both 1996 and 2000).

For 2022, she is still part of Julien Absalon’s team, despite their personal split. She is travelling to races with Cecile, Cecile’s husband and business partner, Cedric, and Barry Austin, her coach. To put herself in the best possible mindset, she is consciously building a group of people that make her comfortable, “I need to be in a very good atmosphere and to feel very good. These people help me feel good and, for me, it's the most important thing.”

And that is the start of her third phase. This past winter she has spent more days racing enduro than road bikes, bagging laps on a DH bike, and showing up to the Frejus kids’ club to ride with them. Looking through her social media from this past winter, she is smiling in almost every frame.

It is too early for Pauline to know what her program might look like heading to the Paris Olympics, team negotiations will happen later. Yet when you look at her journey as one of self-realization as she matures as an athlete, for this next phase, it is clear that she intends to be at the center of it all and, maybe more importantly, she intends to have fun.

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Interviews Racing and Events Stories XC Racing Pauline Ferrand Prevot PBWMN