With Jolanda Neff winning Switzerland’s first-ever women’s Olympic mountain bike gold medal and leading the way to a historic podium clean sweep, the Swiss women’s mountain biking team made history at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.
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S. Frei Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
After completing a challenging new course in Izu City in 1:15:26, Neff came out on top. She finished the five-lap race with a victory over S. Frei with a 1:11 lead, while Linda Indergand took third place 8 seconds later.
The race, held at Izu Mountain Bike Park, 150 kilometres south-east of Tokyo, began on time with 38 cyclists despite temperatures of 28 degrees and significant humidity.
Because of earlier rain, the route presented additional traction issues and had a different feel from the day before’s men’s race.
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Popular athletes including S. Frei, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (FRA), Jolanda Neff, Laura Stigger (AUT), Loana Lecomte (FRA), and Linda Indergand all got off to strong starts on the 1.3-kilometer starting circuit.
Slow starters like Australian Rebecca McConnell and American Kate Courtney were held up by traffic at the two-lane Amagi Pass, but Courtney eventually moved into the top 10 on the first full lap while McConnell fell behind.
Evie Richards of the United Kingdom had a good start and battled it out with the 19-year-old youngest rider in the race, Hungary’s Kata Blanka Vas, who raced forward from a poor starting position.
On The First of Five 3.85-Kilometer Loops
Neff and Ferrand-Prévot got a head start, but the French UCI World Champion slid in the ropes while chasing the short line up a rock garden, causing her to fall back when she remounted.
Neff, the 2017 UCI World Champion, went off on his own, while Richards, maybe motivated by his countryman Tom Pidcock’s triumph the day before, emerged as the initial leader of the chase.
The first circuit ended with Neff, who broke her hand at the Mercedes-Benz UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Leogang in June, leading by 19 seconds over the 24-year-old Briton, Lecomte and S. Frei together at 23′, and Indergand making it three Swiss riders in the top five.
The Swiss swept the first three spots on the second lap, with 28-year-old Neff’s lead ballooning to over 40 seconds by the end of the race. Former Under-23 UCI World Champion S. Frei had fallen to third place, but Ferrand-Prévot had powered her way back into contention in second.
Her countrywoman Lecomte, who had won the first four rounds of the 2021 UCI World Cup before suffering a mechanical, did not fare as well. Richards was slowly making his way back to the Dutch team of Anne Terpstra and Anne Tauber.
By the halfway point, Neff’s lead was well over a minute; she had maintained a steady pace by utilising the grassy margins of the 4,100-meter Izu mountain bike course for maximum traction and efficiency, which helped her win the test event there in October 2019.
By the end of lap 3, the Swiss 1-2-3 had formed, with S. Frei (second in the 2019 test event) in silver medal position while Stigger and Japan’s Miho Imai dropped out. The French multi-discipline former UCI World Champion (for road, mountain bike cross-country, mountain bike marathon, cyclo-cross) Richards, Lecomte, Tauber, Terpstra, and Ferrand-Prévot formed a talented pursuit group about 2 minutes back, and the group pushed to stay in the top 10.
Together, the two Swiss riders kept the rest of the podium intact as lap four came to a close, 1:27 behind their national champion. Lecomte was 2 minutes and 15 seconds ahead of Terpstra, and the Hungarian Vas was in an outstanding sixth place after getting off to a slow start in 33rd.
The riders’ adrenaline got them through the last gruelling 3.85 kilometres as fatigue took its toll. There was never any doubt that Neff would win, and he subsequently swept the podium. Vas came in in a remarkable fourth place, followed by Terpstra in fifth, Lecomte in sixth, and Ferrand-Prévot in tenth.
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Jenny Rissveds (Sweden), the 2016 Olympic Champion, placed 14th, one spot ahead of Kate Courtney (Australia), the 2018 UCI World Champion, and Catharine Pendrel (Canada), the bronze medalist from Rio 2016, who competed in her fourth Olympics and placed 18th.
Neff was the best rider in Japan, but the day belonged to the Swiss. Already a 74-time winner, this race will be especially satisfying if she takes home her 75th victory.
