'She showed that the impossible is possible' – Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is Cycling Weekly's international rider of the year after an incredible year

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is Cycling Weekly's international rider of 2025. This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 4th December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Everyone knew that Pauline Ferrand-Prévot – a world champion in four different disciplines – was an exceptional bike rider. As such, very few doubted that her return to the road scene in 2025 after a six-year hiatus would be a success. But no-one could have foreseen the comprehensive glory that the French superstar enjoyed this year.

It was meant to be a season of finding her legs in the road peloton once again, and working towards achieving her ultimate ambition of winning the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. An end date of 2027 was put on that target. Yet the Visma-Lease a Bike rider, 33, made a barnstorming return, reminding everyone of her unique talent as soon as the spring got underway.

Podium finishes at Strade Bianche and the Tour of Flanders were perhaps to be expected – after all, short, punchy climbs were what she excelled on during her mountain bike years – but a 58-second victory at Paris-Roubaix Femmes, a flat brute of a race devoid of any significant climbing challenges, was not.

Even more unexpected was winning the Tour on debut, especially in so crushing a manner. Ferrand-Prévot triumphed on the Col de la Madeleine by a huge 1:45 margin, making sure of her victory the following day at Châtel to win the race overall by 3:42.

It was an exhibition, and it’s why Ferrand-Prévot is deservedly Cycling Weekly’s international rider of the year. “I can’t say I really like racing, but I like winning,” she recently said. “If I want to race, it’s because I want to win.”

Project PFP

Project PFP began in the winter of 2023, eight months out from her big career goal of mountain bike gold at her home Olympics in Paris in 2024. It was a goal she accomplished, rather expectedly, and shortly afterwards it was announced she would be joining Visma. The news followed a year of talks, first with the Dutch team’s now-departed sports director Merijn Zeeman, and then with the manager of Visma’s women’s team, Rutger Tijssen.

The latter man, speaking to CW about his role in the negotiations, says: “You never know if something is going to be a success. When a process starts you need to get to know the athlete and learn how to work together. Straight away I could see that Pauline was really, really good at rising to the occasion. She knows when the heat is on and she knows what to do – she doesn’t choke on that pressure.”

Those aforementioned spring performances came about as a result of Ferrand-Prévot’s being laser-focused on the demands of Classics racing – and they also indicated to Tijssen that even better was to come at the Tour later in the year.

“Pauline could win Roubaix because she trained like a Classics rider: fewer long endurance rides, and more powerful, intense sessions,” he says. “It was during Strade and Roubaix that I started to believe that she could be successful during the Tour de France, but we didn’t have any information on how she would do across nine days of racing.”

Nor did Visma know how Ferrand-Prévot would fare on a 20k climb like the Madeleine – women’s racing has rarely ascended such long HC climbs. But Ferrand-Prévot came up with a plan to better her chances. “We wanted to add some more race days to her calendar, but she wanted to fully commit herself towards the Tour de France,” Tijssen explains. It’s why she abandoned the Vuelta a España Femenina after four stages.

“She was doing the Vuelta in Classics shape, and we needed to transform her into a GC rider,” he continues. “We both believe that everything is trainable, and if you put your mind to it, anything is achievable.”

Tour training

Ferrand-Prévot decamped to the Alps, along with her parents, for a summer of training and recons, forgoing extra racing days. “She said no to competing at both the Tour de Suisse and Volta a Catalunya because she prefers the structured life of training. Travelling and racing interferes with that,” says Tijssen. While her main competitors like Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma rode various races to prepare for the Tour, it was Ferrand-Prévot’s approach that eventually paid off.

In describing how it did so, the Visma man mixes his baking metaphors deliciously. “The cherry on the cake was the Madeleine, because everything she did there was trained and planned for: the aerodynamics, her power and cadence on the flat roads, and being patient when Sarah Gigante attacked. Everything was talked about beforehand.”

Ferrand-Prévot has already declared her intention to defend her Tour glory in 2026, while also setting her sights on Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. On the evidence of 2025, she’ll have little trouble excelling across those very different races.

“Once she has a goal, that focus and discipline comes naturally to her,” Tijssen says. “What she did this year should not really happen, but she showed that the impossible is possible.”