Multi-discipline star Puck Pieterse will switch her focus back to the road and make her debut at the upcoming Tour de France Femmes, after a late puncture in the Paris Olympics cross-country mountain bike race took away an all-but-certain silver medal.
The Tour de France Femmes will not only be Pieterse's first Grand Tour, it is also her first stage race at elite level, with her road career to date solely consisting of one-day events. However, she has brought home a string of top results despite her inexperience, including fifth at Strade Bianche last year, sixth at her first Tour of Flanders in April and only one result outside the top 10 in the whole of 2024.
Pieterse casually announced the news on Dutch TV after the disappointment of missing out on a medal at Élancourt Hill in the MTB event, where Pauline Ferrand-Prévot took home gold for France.
"I'm going to ride a tour, in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. With a finish on Alpe d'Huez,” Pieterse said on the NOS talk show Studio Parijs
“I'm looking forward to that at the moment."
Pieterse was devastated after the mountain bike race, with the Dutch national team even considering protesting about silver medallist Haley Batten after the American rode through the pit zone “without feeding or having technical assistance”. However, Batten was quickly given a fine but nothing more, confirming fourth for the Dutch rider.
Turning her focus to the Tour allows Pieterse to move on from the disappointment quickly.
The 2024 Tour de France Femmes starts in her home nation the Netherlands on August 12, with three stages based around Rotterdam for the race’s first foreign Grand Départ since its inception in 2022.
Her close rival off-road rival, and current cyclocross World Champion, Fem van Empel (Visma-Lease A Bike) is also expected to make her debut at the Tour de France Femmes which starts on August 12 and runs to August 18 with the grand finale up Alpe d'Huez.
Pieterse rides for Fenix-Deceuninck on the road, who were one of the top teams at last year’s Tour, constantly jumping into breakaways and chancing their hands against the squads with much bigger budgets.
Their aggressive racing ended with them landing a stage win on the fourth day in Rodez, as Yara Kastelijn survived in the breakaway and made Fenix-Deceuninck one of only seven teams to net a TDFF stage win in the first two editions.
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