We Applaud Puck Pieterse's Podium Vibes

If you haven’t heard the name Puck Pieterse in cycling yet, that means you must not be watching much cyclocross. Or mountain biking. Or road racing.

Last weekend, she stunned viewers at the Nove Mesto Cross-Country MTB World Cup when she took the win in Sunday's race, narrowly beating out current MTB World Champion Pauline Ferrand Prevot. The race was her first-ever Elite World Cup, after a successful U23 season last year.

Not only did she take the win, the Alpecin-Deceuninck rider chugged her celebratory champagne on the podium, setting her status to “legendary"”in our minds.

Then again, sipping champagne rather than spraying it makes perfect sense, since she celebrated her 21st birthday on Saturday but likely didn’t get to indulge ahead of the race.

Is that video a large part of why we wanted to write this article? Absolutely. But we also wanted to make the early prediction that Pieterse could be joining the pantheon of greats in women’s cycling.

Puck Pieterse is the rarest of racers: she’s a triple threat

This win puts Pieterse in an elite category of riders: The triple threat. We’ve seen it before in cycling.

In the men’s field, of course, there are cyclocross superstars turned pro roadies like Wout Van Aert and Mathieu Van der Poel. There’s Thomas Pidcock, who cleaned up with wins a cross-country and short track in Nove Mesto this weekend while also racing (and winning) on the road and cyclocross course.

In the women’s field, just flash back to Pauline Ferrand Prevot’s own early successes: When she won cyclocross World Championships in 2015 at 21 years old, it caused shockwaves as she displaced reigning champ Marianne Vos, who had already won it six times in a row.

Neither Ferrand-Prevot or Vos have ever been satisfied with a single discipline. In one year, Ferrand-Prevot was road, cyclocross and XC MTB world champion. In 2022, she topped that record and held four World Championship titles simultaneously in gravel, short track, MTB marathon and XC MTB. Meanwhile, Vos has 13 World Championship titles and two Olympic gold medals.

Pieterse is still at the start of her elite career, but already has amassed plenty of race wins in the U23 category, including a 2022 cyclocross World Championship in U23. This year, she hit the road with a fifth place finish at Strade Bianchi, coming off of a second place finish at elite Cyclocross World Championships.

While her primary focus seems to be cyclocross with a secondary interest in mountain biking and a fleeting interest in road, we know from riders like Vos and Ferrand-Prevot that when a racer is this damn good in all three disciplines, they tend to keep racing in all three. We will certainly be keeping an eye on the young rider in any race that she enters this season!

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