Paris 2024 Olympics - Mountain Bike - Women's Cross-country - Elancourt Hill, Elancourt, France - July 28, 2024. Pauline Ferrand Prevot of France celebrates winning gold. REUTERS/Matthew Childs
ELANCOURT, France (Reuters) - France's newly-crowned Olympic mountain bike champion Pauline Ferrand-Prevot sports a tattoo on the back of her neck proclaiming 'life is a joke'.
Seeing the funny side has certainly come in handy down the years for one of the best female cyclists of all time, especially after some heart-breaking Olympic disappointments.
But on Sunday in the hills close to Versailles the joke was on the 32-year-old's rivals as she obliterated a high-quality field to win gold by almost three minutes.
"It's a good lesson for life," she said when asked about the inspiration behind the inked message that her rivals could have read on Sunday, had they not been so far behind her.
"You have to be serious, but you don't have to take everything too seriously. I got it done after my second iliac (artery) surgery. I had really bad moments in my career but today it was worth it. So life is a joke for sure."
Ferrand-Prevot became road world champion in 2014 but her other 14 world titles have all been in mountain biking, including at last year's championships in Glasgow.
She has endured her fair share of injuries though and crushing disappointment at the Rio Olympics where she failed to finish the mountain bike race and in Tokyo in 2021 when she crashed and then punctured, coming in 10th.
Ferrand-Prevot spent the last three years focusing all her efforts on delivering gold on French soil and how those tireless hours of preparation paid off in the Sunday sunshine.
"This is the culmination," she said. "I've been working for years for this race. This morning, I told myself that it was years of work for an hour and a half race, a bit too much.
"But it's worth it. It's the win of a lifetime. The day and the race were perfect. The first lap, I wanted to see how the others were and I quickly saw I was having an incredible day."
Amongst the huge throng of people hugging an emotional Ferrand-Prevot during the post-race celebrations that went on and on was France team manager Yvan Clolus.
"This was her destiny here today," he said. "She had to attack early to push everyone beyond the limits."
With her Olympic itch scratched, Ferrand-Prevot will now return to road racing and with an announcement expected soon on which team she will ride for.
But she is already setting lofty goals.
"I decided to quit MTB and be back on the road," she said. "Very happy to prepare for the (Tour de France Femmes) and try to win that in the next years."
(Reporting by Martyn Herman, additional reporting by Vincent Daheron; Editing by Ken Ferris)
