All smiles now for golden Frenchwoman Ferrand-Prevot

ELANCOURT, France : France's newly-crowned Olympic mountain bike champion Pauline Ferrand-Prevot sports a tattoo on the back of her neck proclaiming 'life is a joke'.

Seeing the funny side has certainly come in handy down the years for one of the best female cyclists of all time, especially after some heart-breaking Olympic disappointments.

But on Sunday in the hills close to Versailles the joke was on the 32-year-old's rivals as she obliterated a high-quality field to win gold by almost three minutes.

"It's a good lesson for life," she said when asked about the inspiration behind the inked message that her rivals could have read on Sunday, had they not been so far behind her.

"You have to be serious, but you don't have to take everything too seriously. I got it done after my second iliac (artery) surgery. I had really bad moments in my career but today it was worth it. So life is a joke for sure."

Ferrand-Prevot became road world champion in 2014 but her other 14 world titles have all been in mountain biking, including at last year's championships in Glasgow.

She has endured her fair share of injuries though and crushing disappointment at the Rio Olympics where she failed to finish the mountain bike race and in Tokyo in 2021 when she crashed and then punctured, coming in 10th.

Ferrand-Prevot spent the last three years focusing all her efforts on delivering gold on French soil and how those tireless hours of preparation paid off in the Sunday sunshine.

"This is the culmination," she said. "I've been working for years for this race. This morning, I told myself that it was years of work for an hour and a half race, a bit too much.

"But it's worth it. It's the win of a lifetime. The day and the race were perfect. The first lap, I