NO MERE MORTAL

High-flying mtb rider Puck Pieterse is showing immense promise on the road. Tom Davidson assesses her trajectory

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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 fairylike, 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.

Speaking to me by video call, Puck Pieterse looks puzzled as I muse on the meaning of her first name. Swivelling in a desk chair in her father's home office, the Fenix-Deceuninck rider clearly isn't sure where I'm going with this tangent.

She's fairly certain, she tells me, that her parents had no idea about the folklore when they chose the name. But does she relate to it in any way? "I think it suits me," she says with a smile. "It's nice that the name fits." Maybe I'm pushing this too far, but Pieterse, with her fiery ginger hair and high-energy aura, has a spritelike quality. Like the pucks of the folk stories, she shape-shifts in her riding across disciplines, and excels in them all. She has won world titles in mountain biking and cyclo-cross, as well as the white jersey and a stage of the 2024 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. In the latest edition of the Tour, which ended on Sunday, she helped her team-mate Pauliena Rooijakkers to a top-10 finish, herself placing 24th, in spite of multiple crashes.