Pauline Ferrand-Prévot knew she wouldn’t win stage four’s time trial at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, but she maybe didn’t expect to tumble more than two minutes down the general classification.
Thirty-fourth on the day, the Frenchwoman finished 2:13 adrift of the stage winner, and new yellow jersey wearer, Marlen Reusser (Movistar), and 1:55 off last year’s runner-up, Demi Vollering (FDJ United-Suez), her big GC rival.
As a result, the defending champion is now 14th overall, and will need to claw back time over the next five stages if she’s to retain her yellow jersey.
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“I did my best and I pushed as hard as I could. Now there’s nothing I can do,” Ferrand-Prévot told the media beyond the finish line.
“It was quite a lot of stress. Even though I finished far off, I still prepared a lot. I’m glad this day is over.”
The 21km course between Gevrey-Chambertin and Dijon always suited the peloton’s mightiest specialists against the clock. Ferrand-Prévot, by contrast, a diminutive climber, hadn’t raced a time trial in more than five years, having switched her ambitions to mountain biking.
Asked ahead of the race if she felt she was starting from zero in her time trial preparation, she laughed that it was more “minus 10 – [but] I did my homework quite well”.
That preparation included wind tunnel testing and positional work to relieve pressure from the two surgeries she had had to treat iliac artery endofibrosis. This meant that she sat quite high in the saddle. “It wasn’t the prettiest sight, it wasn’t the fastest for everyone else in the peloton, but it was the fastest for me,” she said.
Attention will now turn at Visma-Lease a Bike to how Ferrand-Prévot can recover her GC position before Sunday’s finale in Nice. “This year is not lost,” her sports director Jos van Emden said. “This is some kind of starting point.”
Wednesday’s fifth stage is expected to be raced like a one-day Classic, with eight categorised climbs on the route to Belleville-en-Beaujolais. There’s also the race’s queen stage still to come: a 21km climb to Mont Ventoux on day seven.
“Last year, on the Col de la Madeleine, I took quite a lot of time [ed – 3:03 to Vollering]. This year, we have Ventoux, which is a long climb, too,” Ferrand-Prévot said.
And in the face of disappointment, she picked herself up, and made sure to stay optimistic: “It’s also good now to not be the favourite. It’s like, ‘Ok, I need to catch them.’ It’s also something I like.”
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