The host nation was able to add another gold medal to its dossier at the 2024 Olympics, as Pauline Ferrand-Prévot emerged victorious at the Women's Mountain Bike competition.
The race was held on a 4.4km course in Élancourt, a small town in Paris' southwestern suburbs. The course featured 110m of elevation gain per lap along sharp, switch-backing singletrack trails and fast descents. Technical features included rock gardens and jumps along the pathway. The course was accordingly relentless, fast, and physical throughout, providing a true test of the riders' skills and endurance. This race marked the eighth appearance of mountain biking in the Summer Olympics since its debut in Atlanta in 1996.
Reflecting her strength on this terrain, Ferrand-Prévot had also won the Olympic test event held at the same venue held one year before the Olympics.
Ferrand-Prévot currently rides for the UCI Mountain Bike team Ineos Grenadiers, and has won 12 elite World Championship titles across various disciplines, including road cycling, mountain biking, cyclo-cross, and gravel. She has previously participated in three Olympic Games in London, Rio, and Tokyo, with her best result in earlier editions of the Olympics being 8th place in the road race in London 2012. In 2015, at the age of 23, Ferrand-Prévot became the first person in cycling history to simultaneously hold World titles in road cycling, cyclo-cross, and cross-country mountain biking.
She has shown a predilection for mountain biking talent before, being a 5-time World Champion in mountain bike cross-country, with her most recent title won in 2023. In 2023, Ferrand-Prévot also won both the cross-country Olympic and cross-country short circuit events at the UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow
Haley Batten raced to second, earning the silver medal for the United States of America. Born on September 19, 1998, in Park City, Utah, Batten began cycling at the age of nine and turned professional at 17. She has won multiple national championships, including titles at junior, an elite World Cup victory in 2024, a bronze medal at the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Mairiporã, and a first-place finish in Araxá, Brazil in 2024. Olympic Participation: Batten represented the USA in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics before here silver medal performance in France in 2024.
Jenny Rissveds would bring home the bronze medal for Sweden, finishing third on the day.
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