Before epic return to the road, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot had a years-long battle with undiagnosed injury: "No one could find the cause..."

The smallest of injuries can spell disaster in pro cycling, a sport in which races are won or lost by mere seconds. Hence having an undiagnosed injury can be career-threatening at worst, and this was the case with Pauline Ferrand-Prévot. Although she is one of the very best in modern cycling, the veteran had several seasons where she was being hampered by something she didn't understand.

In 2017 and 2018 she was dealing with endofibrosis, which is the narrowing an an iliac artery - an injury more and more common to pro cyclists. She underwent two surgeries for it, at the start and end of 2019, and it proved to be a key moment in her career, even if off the bike. “Whenever I had to push beyond 70 percent of my maximum effort, I got a feeling of a ‘dead leg’, as if something was pressing on my thigh and foot,” she told L'Équipe. “During those four years I visited countless doctors and underwent many treatments, but none of them really worked.”

In the period of 2014/2015, she was briefly world champion on the road, cyclocross and mountain biking simultaneously. In 2016 she took a step back from the road, but her performance also started to suffer. It was only after her first surgery in 2019 that she got a hold of her best performances once again, winning the mountain bike world title - which she would defend successfully the next year.

The Frenchwoman's coach Barry Austin didn't know at the time what the issue was, but believed it was physical. However this was not the case with everyone in her circle. “No one could find the cause, so they concluded it must be psychological," he explains. "I told her: ‘I believe you'. In the end we found the cause by consulting doctors who were not cycling specialists. I went to doctors from other sports, because they have a more open perspective.”

That ultimately proved to be the solution, which ended up saving her career. She won the MTB worlds four times as well as winning the Olympic Games race in Paris; became Gravel World Champion and in 2025 made a glorious return to the road where she won Paris-Roubaix Femmes and the Tour de France Femmes, bringing glory to the French.

“In cycling, when several people say the same thing, you often immediately assume that must be the explanation. But when we met this doctor, a former rugby player, he acted as if he knew nothing about cycling. He focused on the injury, listened to the athlete and developed a plan. We were incredibly lucky," Austin concluded.