2023 XCC and XCO World Cup overall winner Puck Pieterse will not be defending her title at the first two races in Brazil. She has chosen to focus on her road race debut in the Tour of Flanders.
The 21-year-old Fenix-Deceuninck rider will turn her focus back to the mountain bike after her early season on the road, with her eye on gold at the Paris Olympics, but she will not be in contention for the 2024 Overall World Cup.
She will face some tough opposition on the road circuit ... much more than she'd face diving back into the XCC/XCO series for 2024? Just making the top ten in Flanders will be a major accomplishment on her part, given how relatively green she is on the road. Since she was SO dominant last year on the MTB side of things, she probably figures she can skip the first two races and STILL take the overall! Shout out to Mona Mitterwallner BTW .. .for grabbing second in the Absa Cape Epic this year. That could be a harbinger for her taking her UCI MTB racing to an even higher level in 2024. And competing against Puck.
"Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight. Matter of fact, it's safe to say that they would rather switch than fight" -Thomas Todd
Bummer, I think she did quite well last season. Need any of us to call your team manager and convince her/him that riding mountainbikes in Brazil surely must be more fun than riding cobbles and tarmac just across your southern border?
@vhdh666: Fuggin' manager can fugg up then. If it wasn't for fun, she (or probably most of the mountainbike athletes for that matter) would never have come this far. This is mountainbiking, not Olympic gymnastics.
The name Puck is a girl's name .
Puck, the mischievous sprite of Shakespeare, is a unisex name given more often to girls in The Netherlands and is also the name of one of the moons of Uranus, discovered in 1985 and named Puck for the Shakespearean figure.
The name might derive from the Irish word puca, meaning goblin or sprite and representing a mythological shape-shifter.
Championships have been won before with riders having non scoring rounds.
Is there some rule that says they have to race all rounds?
I could see her ride both the road and MTB olympic race.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDTFZLw4Rg0