Pauline Ferrand-Prévot admits Tour de France obsession came at a cost: 'I lost the joy of everyday life'
The 2025 Tour de France Femmes winner says her husband’s training crash earlier this month changed how she sees the sport, and that she is starting next season “fully out of shape.”
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Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has said her drive to win the Tour de France Femmes again left her unable to enjoy life outside cycling this year, as she revealed she married Dylan van Baarle last week.
The couple were married in the Netherlands by Van Baarle’s mother, three weeks after he was hit by a car while training near Tiel. The Soudal Quick-Step rider broke his wrist and needed surgery, and had his cast removed three days before the ceremony.
Writing on Instagram, Ferrand-Prévot said the long break since her season ended had been necessary.
“I was so over-focused on winning the Tour again that I lost the joy of everyday life,” she wrote. “It was all about being, and doing more, to be the best.”
In 2025, she won Paris-Roubaix and became the first Frenchwoman to win the Tour de France Femmes, a year after taking Olympic mountain bike gold in Paris, but her 2026 season was more subdued.
This year Ferrand-Prévot was third at Roubaix and abandoned the Tour through illness before the penultimate stage after struggling to that point. Visma | Lease a Bike confirmed in September that she would not race again in 2026 after just 20 race days.
“I faced some down times in my career before, where I felt sad and lost, but I never really experienced doing everything so well and ending up with nothing,” Ferrand-Prévot wrote. “I think it’s one of the reasons for my ‘non-understanding’ state of the last few months.”
Van Baarle’s crash on 7 October changed her perspective. He suffered a heavy blow to the head, and at the time Ferrand-Prévot said his helmet had saved his life. A CT scan found no damage to his skull or spine.
“I realised how life is much more than winning bike races,” she wrote. “Seeing the person you love the most having such a hard time put things in perspective. For once, I was ‘happy’ to be by his side and do my best to support him. Usually he is the one who always takes care of me.”
Van Baarle, the 2022 Paris-Roubaix winner, was still able to walk almost normally to the altar. Ferrand-Prévot said the day surpassed anything she had felt after her biggest wins.
“I remember being happy when winning the Olympics, the Tour or Roubaix, but this feeling of getting married to Dylan with the most important people in my life there was another level of joy, happiness and fulfilment,” she wrote. “Experiencing this feeling of being so happy while not sacrificing everything or being extreme was something I had never experienced before. I will take note of that for the future.”
She is under contract with Visma until the end of 2028, and admits she has a long way to go before she is competitive again.
“It will be a long way to find a decent level again, as I’m fully out of shape,” she wrote. “But the most important thing for now is to find the joy of being on the bike again. I’m sure I will come back stronger.”
