U23 street world champion Puck Pieterse is now not on the beginning listing for the Netherlands on the UCI Road World Championships, as she has withdrawn from the elite ladies’s lineup scheduled for September 21-28 in Kigalli, Rwanda.
Pieterse, who turned 24 in Could, was confirmed two weeks in the past to be a part of a star-studded seven-rider Dutch roster that features three-time street race champion Marianne Vos and two-time street race champion Anna van der Breggen, in addition to Demi Vollering, who had silver medals from previous Worlds in each the street race and time trial.
The reigning women’s U23 road world champion will now solely focus on defending her mountain bike world title in the elite women’s cross-country event, taking place on September 13 in Crans-Montana.
“With the Mountain Bike World Championships and everything else Puck has coming up in the near future, it became a bit much. It was decided in consultation to remove this World Championship from the program,” Laurens ten Dam, women’s national team coach, told Dutch media on Thursday, first reported by NOS.
“Of course I’m disappointed, but ultimately, I’ll still need Puck in the coming years.”
Replacing Pieterse on the roster is Riejanne Markus, who finished just behind compatriot Marianne Vos, the duo going eighth and ninth, at last year’s Road Worlds in Zürich.
A year ago Pieterse pulled on a rainbow jersey at a road championships as the women’s U23 gold medalist. While she finished 13th in the 154km road race, the 22-year-old saved enough riding with Dutch teammate Mischa Bredewold to finish ahead of Australia’s Neve Bradbury and win the last U23 title in a race mixed with the elite field.
Her road title came just two weeks after she made history as the first Dutch woman to win an elite women’s XCO Mountain Bike world title. Ultimately 12 months’s MTB Worlds in Andorra, Pieterse soloed to the elite ladies’s XCO victory, using 59 seconds forward of Dutch teammate Anne Terpstra. With the XCC races on the identical venue, she completed fourth in that occasion, simply 4 seconds off the rostrum.
Pieterse earned a bronze medal on the UCI Cyclocross World Championships to begin 2025 after which dominated the spring Classics, together with one week in April the place she gained La Flèche Wallonne Féminine and completed on the rostrum at Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Amstel Gold Race. In July, she earned three prime 10s on the Tour de France Femmes for her Fenix-Alpecin street workforce.
After ending the nine-day stage race on August 3, she made an instantaneous switch again to the mountain bike, ending tenth within the XCO World Cup spherical at Andorra per week later.
The multi-discipline rider is now confirmed to race on the Les Will get, France spherical of the Mountain Bike World Cup collection later this month. Thus far this season on the MTB World Cup circuit, she has XCC wins at three races and two XCO victories, profitable each disciplines in Austria and Italy. She is ranked fifth within the XCO World Cup standings headed to Les Will get.
The Dutch Nationwide Federation has had a busy time this week with bulletins, additionally confirming that former elite males’s street world champion Mathieu van der Poel would not compete at the Rwanda Worlds. Like his compatriot Pieterse, he can even give attention to a cross-country title on the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Switzerland, and can line up at Les Will get as nicely. Van der Poel has gained world titles in street, gravel and cyclocross and is trying so as to add his first for MTB.
This 12 months’s UCI Mountain Bike Cross-country Olympic World Championships start September 11 with the Combined Staff Relay, and maintain junior, U23 and elite races for women and men from September 12-14. The Cross-country Brief Monitor occasions shall be held in Zermatt on September 8-9.
