Pauline Ferrand-Prévot: ‘It wasn’t the plan to ride Roubaix but I felt good so I said why not?’

Just a few months short of a decade on from her last road victory at the 2015 Giro d’Italia, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot clinched one of the most prestigious successes of her career by winning Paris-Roubaix Femmes, just a week after finishing runner-up to Lotte Kopecky at the Tour of Flanders.

Speaking in the wake of her Roubaix win, the 33-year-old Frenchwoman confessed that neither race had initially been on her programme for the initial part of this season and that she'd been racing Roubaix purely to support her team leader Mariannne Vos.

‘It was a great day for us,’ the Visma-Lease a Bike rider said in her post-race TV interview in Roubaix’s world-famous velodrome. ‘I didn’t expect this. To be honest, it wasn’t the plan to ride Flanders and Roubaix, but because I felt good I said, “Why not? I want to try.”’

Ferrand-Prévot admitted, though, that winning Roubaix hadn’t been in any way easy. ‘This was my first time and maybe the last! I just tried to survive on the cobbled sections. I had a crash before Mons-en-Pévèle so I had to chase, but Marianne was at the front, so I was kind of between two situations. When I came back, I just tried to attack and after that I tried to go full gas until the end.

‘I’ve been sick for the last two days so I wasn’t even sure this morning whether to start. But I said, “OK, I’ll just go and do my best for Marianne.” Finally I took the start and it’s amazing. My boyfriend [Dylan van Baarle] won three years ago and now I’ve won. It’s quite incredible! It’s great we’ve both got one of the paving stones. We’ll have two at home now.’

With team leader Vos in great shape and Ferrand-Prevot in flying form too following third place at Strade Bianche last month and that second place at Flanders, Visma | Lease a Bike looked well set going into ‘the Hell of the North’. ‘I was confident that this team could do something really good,’ Ferrand-Prévot said. ‘But you also need to have some luck and put everything together. It was a great day for us.’

The Frenchwoman’s principal focus for this season is the overall classification at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift this summer. ‘The Tour de France is the main goal of the season so I want to be 100 per cent for that and win it within three years, so I think we are on a good step and are building something,’ she said.

‘It was also good training to get in position for the first stage of the Tour de France because it will be quite hectic and I wanted to use racing as training.’