‘I can’t wait’ Ferrand-Prévot looking forward to the Tour de France mountains

Some days you win, some days you lose, but for Visma | Lease a Bike stage five of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift it was both.

The punchy final 10km would always make it hard for Marianne Vos to keep the yellow jersey, the steep final climb and its bonus second sprint likely to draw out the GC riders for the first big showdown of the Tour. Eventually, Vos, the woman for whom no superlative does real justice, was dropped, and despite a valiant chase, she finished eighth, leading the chasers home, 33 seconds behind stage winner Kim Le Court (AG Insurance-Soudal). And, as if to rub salt in the wound, it was Le Court who took the Dutch rider’s yellow jersey. 

On the other hand, the team will be pleased with their GC rider, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who was fifth in the final sprint, moving up to second overall ahead of the mountainous stages, which begin with Thursday’s sixth stage.

“It was very punchy, maybe a little bit too much for me at the moment, but I’m still happy to finish at the front of the race,” Ferrand-Prévot said. “Marianne almost made it, she was not too far back, but it was not possible, so yeah, at the end it’s a good day for us, we don’t lose time on GC so it’s perfect.”

Ferrand-Prévot is in her first season back in the women’s peloton after giving up road racing in 2018 and heading off-road to dominate the mountain bike world. There, she won multiple world championships and capped off her career with Gold at her home Olympics in Paris last year. She has returned to the road, stating her ambitions to win the Tour within three years, and she’s well placed so far.

There is a feeling of getting the band back together at Visma | Lease a Bike at the Tour this year. In 2014, she was one of Vos’s key support riders when she won the last of her three Giri d’Italia, eventually finishing second behind her teammate, the Rabo-Liv team locking out the podium with Anna van der Breggen third.

While Van der Breggen is now riding at SD Worx-Protime and a rival at this year’s Tour, nine seconds behind on GC, her relationship with Vos is reversed from those early years. Eleven years ago, Ferrand-Prévot was the understudy to the GC rider; now Vos will be helping her in the mountain stages. 

Since her return to the road, the French woman has yet to prove herself in the mountains. She finished 18th on Jebel Hafeet during the UAE Tour early in the season, but failed to even start the mountain stages at the Vuelta España, abandoning the race on the hilly, but not mountainous, fourth stage to Borja, won by Van der Breggen. However, she is optimistic about the coming days.

“I’m feeling very good uphill and I’m looking forward to the uphill stages, so we will see, but so far so good at the moment, so I can’t wait for it to be tomorrow.

“It’s really nice to be with the team and to really commit to this GC goal, and we will go as far as we can together.”