Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has fractured her nose after a crash at the mountain bike test event for the Tokyo Olympic Games. The world champion has returned to France where she will undergo surgery to repair the break.
"Hard crash during the test event. Broken nose … tomorrow back to France to have a surgery," Ferrand-Prévot wrote in a post on Twitter.
Ferrand-Prévot has only recently returned to competition taking months off to recover from surgery to correct iliac artery endofibrosis in both legs in February.
In an emotional comeback, she won the World Cup round in Val di Sole, Italy, and then won the UCI World Championships in Mont Saint-Anne, Canada.
She travelled to Tokyo last week to participate in the mountain bike test event that will be used for the Olympic Games next summer. However, she crashed ten minutes into the race through a rock garden. She was taken to hospital where X-rays confirmed that she had broken her nose.
"Some messages on social media are more difficult to write than others," she wrote on social media.
“After ten minutes of racing I fell down hard on the first rock section due to someone else. The x-rays taken at the hospital show that my nose is broken. I will go to a specialist tomorrow as soon as I get home. Anyway, I didn't like my nose anyway. And wait a minute, I didn't even cry."
