This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 7 August. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
Tales from Celtic folklore speak of a mischievous spirit – a playful trickster said to shape-shift through nature and enchant those it encounters. Often portrayed as fairy-like, this creature’s name is Puck. In 1600, William Shakespeare brought the character into the cultural mainstream, lending the name to a magical mischief-maker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who famously declares, “What fools these mortals be!” – a line that could serve as an apt warning to the rivals of my interviewee.
We are speaking two months before the race, Pieterse having called me from her family home in Amersfoort, the Dutch city that also gave the world the artist Piet Mondrian. “We have all the good ones,” she says, referring to the city’s famous offspring, who include world champion athlete Femke Bol. On the wall behind her is a series of paintings in Mondrian’s boxy, abstract style. They were made by Pieterse’s grandfather. Puck herself, though, is making art from pedalstrokes rather than brushstokes.
It’s two weeks after her 23rd birthday, and days after she won a World Cup mountain bike race in the Czech Republic. The reigning world champion in the cross-country discipline, she went on to win her next four races in a row. Pieterse’s start to the road season had been equally as impressive; she finished inside the top 10 in all 11 events she competed in before this year’s Tour, scoring podiums in all three Ardennes Classics, including winning La Flèche Wallonne ahead of Demi Vollering in April. And still, Pieterse has been racing on the road for only two years. “I thought that maybe I would miss the decisive split sometimes,” she says, “but that was not the case. I was always there in the race to battle.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
The best young rider in 2024, Pieterse went into last week’s Tour de France Femmes as an outside bet for the general classification. She kept up her streak of finishing in the top 10 over the opening weekend, before a pile-up on day three left her bumped, bruised and rolling home mid-pack. “Every day is really hectic,” she said afterwards, adding that this was also making it “more and more fun”. Then came another crash, this time on a fast descent on day seven, putting paid to her yellow jersey hopes. She would spend the next day doing wheelies on the Col de la Madeleine.
It was clear on the eve of the race that Pieterse is a rider unfazed by nerves. In the car park of her Fenix-Deceuninck team hotel, rather than dwelling on the GC bid ahead of her, she turned to practising drills on her bike. She pivoted around a cone, picked a bottle up off the floor, and balanced no-handed in the saddle, unclipping her left foot and leaning it on her front wheel to show off. It’s all part of her mantra for approaching racing: “Be as relaxed as possible – you need to be serious, of course, but within the seriousness, you can have fun as well.”
That mentality was clearly on display at Amstel Gold this spring, when, after finishing third on her race debut, Pieterse necked her podium beer and raised the glass above her head. “After the race I said, ‘We’re chugging it and we’ll have to see who wins’,” she remembers with a smile. A video of the moment went viral. To many fans, it confirmed their image of Pieterse: the playful spirit who pulls wheelies, bunnyhops onto kerbs, and vlogs her career on YouTube. What it didn’t tell was the story of dedication that got her to that point. “I did not sit still during winter,” Pieterse says of her 2025 preparation – and I suspect that not sitting still has been a lifelong trait.
(Image credit: Ed Sykes/SWpix)
Raised 30 miles south-east of Amsterdam, Pieterse grew up in a sporty family. “I’ve never known different,” she says. “In the Netherlands, it’s really normal to already have a city bike before you go to pre-school… My dad took me with him mountain biking with his friends when I was seven or eight.”
It wasn’t long before Puck, the youngest of two sisters, was tempted into her first road race; it would also turn out to be the first she won. “It was on school bikes with big tyres,” she points out. “It was two laps around a 1.5km course, and I think I just rode away after one lap. After that race, I went directly to join the club.”
Puck’s playbook
(Image credit: Javier Martínez/SWpix)
Favourite place to train? At home. The Amorengse Berg is the specific hill I do my intervals on. It’s two-and-a-half minutes, 6% I think.
Favourite racing conditions? Dry and not too hot, just normal weather.
Race you would most like to win? Tour de France. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it would be nice, no?
Favourite win of your career so far? Mountain bike Worlds [in 2024].
Favourite discipline? Mountain bike.
Favourite hobby away from cycling? Coffee stops – just sitting all day in the sun, with a nice drink, looking at people or chatting with friends. My order is usually an Americano and chocolate cake.
Do you have a nickname? No, my name is short enough.
Mountain biking was the discipline that stole Pieterse’s heart. What appealed to her most about it? “I think just the freedom of being in the forest,” she begins, “and it’s less boring, especially as a child. If you do hours on the roads, you ride in a straight line, you don’t have to think half of the time. If you go off road, you always have to look ahead at what’s coming, ‘Where’s this corner? How should I approach it? How should I brake?’ It’s good for people with a shorter attention span.”
The grin as she delivers that last comment betrays the truth that she has no problem applying herself. This is a person who, last September, completed a university degree in human movement sciences, having studied while racing all year round. A person who, when she wanted to learn to wheelie as a teenager, would spend hours practising on a grass patch near her home “to get it dialled”. Years of racing on forest trails, and in the cold mud of cyclo-cross courses, crafted her into one of the best bike-handlers in the sport, and among the pack’s fiercest kickers. It seemed logical, then, that she’d eventually give road racing another stab.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Pieterse claims, flippantly perhaps, that it was “just out of interest” that she chose to compete in Strade Bianche two years ago. The event was only her second-ever elite road race, her first at WorldTour level, and she ended up placing fifth. The result was proof of her potential on the road. But it wasn’t until last year’s Tour that she began to show just how good she could be.
A year on, the white jersey Pieterse earned for winning the young rider’s classification is still hanging in her bedroom. Her stage win into Liège on day four, sprinting ahead of world number one Vollering, brought a milestone first victory on the road. For her second, she would beat Vollering again, seven months later at Flèche Wallonne.
“After last year’s Tour de France, I wanted to show myself that I could win a road race again,” she says. It’s a drive that her Fenix-Deceuninck team and rivals around her have noticed, too. “When Puck participates, she only wants one thing, and that is to win,” says her sports director Michel Cornelisse. Last year’s Tour champion, Kasia Niewiadoma, describes her as “free-spirited, crazy, and good on the bike” – or, as the Celts might say, puckish.
She may not have won on her second Tour appearance, but with another stage race under her belt, Pieterse’s road experience is building steadily. Though she is aware that fans want to see her in the peloton more often – she has ridden only 20 road race days this year, nine of them at the Tour – she won’t be surrendering her shape-shifting any time soon.
“I still decide my own programme,” she says. The biggest off-road race on the horizon is the mountain bike event at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. Pieterse will be going for gold – and what fools the mortals be that try to stand in her way.
