Mountain bike pros in road cycling: From the trail to the tarmac
As soon as you make contact, you realise that there are two worlds - road cycling and the mountain bike scene. A world champion who still organises her own interviews? That hasn't been the case with the big racing teams in road cycling for a long time - even if the women there are far more accessible than their male colleagues.
Mona Mitterwallner, on the other hand, quickly gets in touch personally when we show interest in her career and her switch to road cycling. She has won the rainbow jersey twice in the women's mountain bike marathon - on her debut as the youngest athlete to date at the tender age of 19.
She has also won two World Cup races in the Olympic cross-country discipline and finished third overall in the most important race series in 2023. She is one of the world's best mountain bikers. But that's not enough for her.
The dream: First woman on the Tour der Männer
You don't have to talk to the 23-year-old Austrian for long to realise: She loves a challenge. The new. The seemingly impossible. Her petite body harbours a strong personality and unbridled ambition. Unlike many of her competitors, she does not shy away from formulating extremely ambitious goals very clearly. And to put herself under pressure.
She has always had ambitious goals, she says on the phone in Tyrolean dialect. Even as a child, she had a clear goal in life: "I wanted to be the first woman to ride in the men's Tour de France." You could name more modest goals.
After all, a lot has changed in women's cycling recently. The Tour de France Femmes has been in existence for three years and has managed to become the most important race in women's cycling within a very short space of time, generating new attention for the previously financially weaker sex. Now Mona Mitterwallner wants to go to the Tour de France Femmes and find out whether she can be one of the front runners. "The Tour de France - that's the dream of many cyclists," she emphasises.
She has signed a contract as a road pro with the World Tour team Human Powered Health for the 2025 season - they want to support her ambitions, although she doesn't want to focus everything on road cycling in the future either. For the Mondraker team, she also wants to continue to be at the forefront of off-road racing.
A trend? From trails to tarmac
But for now, the debutant has her first big test on the road ahead of her: at the Vuelta Femenina, the women's Tour of Spain, from 4 to 10 May 2025, she wants to find out how far she has to go to become a world-class road cyclist - especially on the two mountain top finishes at the Lagunas de Neila and on the Alto de Cotobello.
45 kilos at 1.58 metres: Mitterwallner's competition weight is something of a trade secret.
"I'm a climber," she emphasises - at 1.58 metres tall, she weighs around 45 kilograms. Her competition weight is something of a trade secret. Perhaps everyone, including Mitterwallner, will then have an idea of whether the Tour winners Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma should be wary of the petite Austrian in future.
Mitterwallner is not an isolated case - she is a conspicuous example of a trend. Long-standing mountain bikers are trying their hand on tarmac in droves. Countrywoman Laura Stigger, Swiss rider Steffi Häberlin (both SD Worx-Protime), Olympic champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) and world champion Alan Hatherly (Jayco-AlUla) want to compete in road races at the highest level like Mitterwallner and have signed contracts with racing teams in the international premier league.
What they have in common: They are all looking for new stimuli at the end of an Olympic cycle that ended last summer with the Games in Paris. What separates them: How much ambition they have to drive the change, how high they set their goals and how much space they still allow for mountain bike races.
Mitterwallner wants to compete in both disciplines at the highest level. That is a balancing act. Ferrand-Prévot recently said that she did not believe she could combine both disciplines at the highest level. Or rather: not anymore.
The 33-year-old Frenchwoman knows what she's talking about: in 2014/2015 she was the only one to date to hold the world championship titles in elite sport on the road, in cyclocross and on the mountain bike at the same time. A unique feat?
Everything for the Tour victory: Olympic champion disciplines herself
After winning Olympic gold, Ferrand-Prévot has said goodbye to cross-country racing - in the next three years she wants to devote everything to winning the women's Tour de France.
Although the reigning world champion and Olympic bronze medallist Hatherly is riding on two tracks, he is also planning his season in two parts: Road races until May, after which the 29-year-old South African will concentrate on the off-road World Cups and will be looking to defend his title as the world's best biker in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in September - where he will probably be up against Olympic champion Tom Pidcock and former road and cyclocross world champion Mathieu van der Poel.
The two were pioneers, paving the way for an entire generation to achieve a kind of work-life balance between their main job as professional road cyclists and a kind of good-mood side job on studded tyres.
But even with these two exceptional talents, you can see that the constant switching between the two types of bike requires precise season planning and a road team that plays along. A quick change of bike, then success in the other discipline - that doesn't work according to experts. Training and competition loads are too different and require targeted preparation.
Perhaps this is why Hatherly - unlike Mitterwallner - is cautious when it comes to big goals. "I've reached a point in my career where I'm looking for new opportunities to develop myself further. I've already used road races as preparation for the season in previous years, but now I'm doing it at a higher level. It's part of a long-term process to improve as an athlete," he says, explaining why he signed the contract with the Australian road racing team Jayco-AlUla.
Tyrolean Laura Stigger, second in the overall World Cup and sixth at the Olympics, was already world champion on the road as a junior in 2018 - now she is starting a kind of "taster internship", which Olympic road champion Anna van der Breggen arranged for her. The two met years ago during an altitude training camp organised by the Dutchwoman in Kühtai, a mountain village near Stigger's home town of Haiming. "I'm looking forward to gaining experience," says Stigger at the start of her two-year contract with her new racing bike team. No more and no less.
Stigger, Hatherly and Mitterwallner want to take the best from both cycling worlds and also develop as mountain bikers through road cycling. "Road races help mountain bikers to reach a higher level - so it makes perfect sense. It's all about the high aerobic load in races, especially in tours. This provides a huge stimulus that you can hardly achieve through training," emphasises cycling coach Dan Lorang. But there is more to it than just the physical improvement, claims Mitterwallner: "Both sports are on the upswing. I want to be part of these major developments."
In road racing, the rebirth of the Tour de France for women three years ago was a powerful boost. In mountain biking, some see that new markets could open up since the US group Warner Bros. Discovery, known in German-speaking countries primarily through its Eurosport platform, not only holds the TV rights, but also acts as the organiser of the most important race series.
"It's a good time for mountain biking to get money outside the cycling industry," says Tim Vanderjeugd, head of sports marketing at US bike manufacturer Trek. This could also be seen as a challenge to the bike scene to seize the opportunity to open up new sources of money. So far, the upswing for the off-road scene has been more of a feeling than hard facts.
Someone who has been part of the bike scene for around 40 years is putting the brakes on the euphoria: Thomas Frischknecht, former world champion and World Cup winner, now team boss of Scott-SRAM, sees mountain biking continuing to tread water. Hopes for new, large sources of money have not yet been realised - sponsors are still almost exclusively representatives of the currently rather poor cycling industry.
Road cycling the better option financially
So are mountain bikers currently exploring the labour market, are they considering changing jobs and disciplines in the long term - are they fleeing the terrain for economic reasons? The athletes answer in the negative in unison. Frischknecht doesn't really want to believe that: "Mountain biking hasn't developed as well as road racing from an economic point of view, as there is simply a lot more money in it. In my opinion, that's the main reason why you see so many mountain bikers in road racing: the money, which is very tempting."
Around three dozen mountain bikers have the prospect of a lucrative job.
The now grey eminence of bike sport calculates that in the current model of the World Cup, perhaps three dozen mountain bike racers have the prospect of a lucrative job. "Even for helpers on the road, salaries start much higher than for a good bike pro," says Frischknecht. This has consequences for the cycling labour market: the first division of road cycling alone, the World Tour, offers more than 500 cyclists a job in its 18 teams - including a guaranteed minimum salary of around 44,000 euros.
Who will be right in the end - where will the path, the trend, lead? In any case, road cycling can look forward to new talents, new faces and perhaps even new winners. The good news for mountain biking: Hatherly is currently still prioritising one very big goal: Olympic gold in Los Angeles in 2028. On the mountain bike.
