After a debut season that fundamentally reshaped the Women’s WorldTour, the reigning Tour de France Femmes champion has signed an extension to keep her in yellow and black through 2028.
No one really knew exactly what to expect when Pauline Ferrand-Prévot announced she was stepping away from the dirt to return to the road peloton. It is one thing to dominate cross-country mountain biking with an iron grip; it is an entirely different beast to conquer the modern WorldTour. But after a debut season with Team Visma-Lease a Bike that saw her casually ride away with both the Paris-Roubaix cobblestone and the Tour de France Femmes yellow jersey, the French superstar has proven she is the undisputed apex predator of two wheels. Now, she is doubling down, signing a contract extension that will keep her firmly planted at the Dutch squad through the end of the 2028 season.
The decision to extend is a massive, era-defining win for Visma, securing the absolute cornerstone of their women’s program for the foreseeable future. For Ferrand-Prévot, it sounds like she has finally found the precise environment needed to thrive on the tarmac. In the team’s press release, she noted that she feels happy and at home, stating that for the first time in her career she feels truly understood as both a person and a rider. That kind of psychological and structural alignment is terrifying news for the rest of the peloton. When a rider with her generational engine is completely dialed into a team’s culture and support system, the results usually speak for themselves on the steepest gradients of the Tour de France.
But the most interesting part of the announcement is not just the contract length; it is the specific technical focus that comes with it. Ferrand-Prévot explicitly stated that her next major objective is to violently upgrade her time-trialing skills. She already possesses the devastating punch and the aerobic capacity to break the peloton in the high mountains, but improving against the clock is the exact marginal gain that turns a Tour-winning climber into an unshakeable, complete general classification threat. Looking further down the road, she also locked her sights on the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. It seems the reigning Olympic mountain bike champion is ready to add some heavy road hardware to her already overflowing trophy case, and the rest of the Women’s WorldTour has officially been put on notice.