Evie Richards (Trek Factory Racing-Pirelli) not only scored back-to-back short track victories in Brazil at the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup but in the process she surpassed Pauline Ferrand-Prévot as the most successful elite woman in XCC.
Richards, the reigning XCC World Champion, opened the 2025 season with a win on the first of two consecutive weekends on the red clay in Araxá, Minas-Gerais. She followed that Friday with a final lap attack to earn her seventh career XCC World Cup victory..
"When you’re World Champion and you’re leading the series, there’s a lot of pressure, so I was really nervous before. That's pretty cool," Richards said at the finish when she was told she had the record.
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A continent and an ocean away, Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) was unaware of her mountain bike record falling, as she competed - and won - at Paris-Roubaix Femmes. The French rider had claimed the Olympic gold medal In Paris in cross-country mountain bike, having already captured world titles in XCC, XCO and marathon mountain bike as well as road, gravel and cyclocross disciplines.
Ferrand-Prévot retired from mountain bike competitions last year to focus on a return to the road, where this season she has finished third at Strade Bianche Donne and second at the Tour of Flanders.
Richards wasn't thinking about breaking records on Friday, and said even a solid game plan was not an objective for the volatile style of short track.
"It felt like a video game. It was just like figurines, when someone made an attack it didn't really process who it was. And Jenn's [Jackson] riding so strong, I did think she'd hold it to the end."
On the third lap Richards surged to the front of the pack on the climb and then over the rock garden with only Jenny Rissveds (Canyon CLLCTV XCO) and Jennifer Jackson (Orbea Fox Factory Team) in tow. There was a regroup for the next two laps and Jackson launched an attack on lap six.
On the final lap, Jackson's move was then nullified when Nicole Koller (Ghost Factory Racing) made a move, but Richards then made her final pass at the rock garden and left the Swiss rider to second place, Rissveds going third.
“Again, you can only do what you can do. We had a bit of a rough plan, but nothing changes too much, at short track, you never know who's going to come.
You’ve just got to be on your feet and defend on how the race goes, you can’t really have a plan.”
