Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is 'definitely ready' to take on her first road race in over three years at the Zürich World Championships on Saturday, according to Ineos Grenadiers coach Kurt Bogaerts.
Bogaerts has worked with Ferrand-Prévot since she joined the British team as their only women's rider at the end of 2022 with the goal of winning Olympic mountain bike gold - the one race that had eluded her during an illustrious career.
Having achieved that goal in August in dominant fashion at her home Paris Games, Ferrand-Prévot ended her MTB career at Worlds in Andorra last month and is now turning her focus to trying to win the Tour de France Femmes with a new team for 2025, Visma-Lease a Bike.
Before that, however, Ferrand Prévot, 32, will make her long-awaited return to road competition this weekend on the 154.1km Zürich parcourse as part of a strong French squad, a decade on from becoming road World Champion in Ponferrada, Spain.
"I think she can be very successful and with the way she trains, she's definitely ready to turn it around to the road," said Bogaerts to Cyclingnews before Worlds.
"She has the experience, she's an ex-World Champion from when she was very young. I think she was also second in the Giro so I know the capabilities she has and I think she has a proper chance to score on the road."
Bogaerts was unsure how Ferrand-Prévot would match up against the likes of Demi Vollering (Netherlands) and Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) on the Swiss course but assured that there isn't excessive pressure on her to land a result given her time away from the discipline.
"I don't know, it's difficult to say but it all depends on how the race turns out. The Dutch women always have a strong team but I think the French team will be strong also with the likes of [Juliette] Labous on the climbs so it will be interesting to see where Pauline is," said the Belgian coach.
"But she doesn't need to go with a particular ambition, I think she needs to explore to get her back in the game on the road. Then, go like that into the winter because ending the season after MTB worlds would leave a bit of gap to fill, so I think she's lengthened the season with something that is a challenge."
The superstar French rider will line up as one of three former road race World Champions at the start alongside the defending rainbow jersey Kopecky and Marianne Vos (Netherlands) and the oldest French rider with the rest of her talented squad all being under 25.
Top WorldTour riders Labous, Évita Muzic, Cédrine Kerbaol, Marion Bunel, Léa Curinier and Jade Wiel make up the rest of the French squad looking to achieve France's first elite women's road race world title since Ferrand-Prévot in 2014.
Bogaerts also revealed that Ferrand-Prévot had been making small changes in her training to prepare for the discipline switch, with Ineos being fully committed to their sole female rider right until her last day with the team.
"We put a bit of focus on making the swap. It's small changes that will be helpful for next year, she's already on road shoes for example," he laughed. "We've tried to finish this season as well as we can as a stepping stone to next year. The team is in full support of that and I think we have a record of that.
"Even people who are leaving the team get full support until the last day like last year with Tao [Geoghegan Hart]. We gave 100% knowing that he would go somewhere else and we did the same with Pauline."
Completing the Olympic dream
For Bogaerts, who is also Tom Pidcock's long-term coach, it was a career highlight to work with a 12-time World Champion across disciplines in Ferrand-Prévot, made even sweeter by the long build-up to the Paris Olympics and subsequent emotional triumph.
"She's an amazing athlete, it was an amazing experience for me to work with Pauline. Amazing work ethic, super professional, super nice person, a lot of respect, very thankful," he said.
"For me, it's one of my better experiences with an athlete. She had already achieved a lot before I worked with her, but then she had one major goal when she started working with me and that was winning the Olympics. If you then see how she finished that race, she won almost by a three-minute gap, which shows she was ultimately prepared.
"I was a small part of that but she made a lot of sacrifices, put in a lot of hard work again I think shows our team what we can do."
While it isn't a decision he gets to make, Bogaerts couldn't hide his disappointment at Ineos' continuing lack of a women's team when asked about ending the working partnership with the Frenchwoman.
"Of course, it's not my decision what the team needs to do but ,of course, if you have a good relationship with a rider then you hope you can lengthen that," said Bogaerts.
"If there was a [women's] team then it probably would have been easy to continue that pathway and try to achieve other goals so that's a disappointment for me personally but it's not up to me to say what the team needs to focus on."
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