Jenny Rissveds Sweeps Pal Arinsal: Who She Is, and What Makes Her So Good

Curated by Gary Edgington · Rider News

On the highest, thinnest air the mountain-bike World Cup has to offer, Jenny Rissveds spent a weekend making a very hard sport look serene. At Pal Arinsal in Andorra, the Swede won both races on the programme — Friday’s frantic short track and Sunday’s brutal cross-country — riding away from the best women in the world and soloing to the line while everyone else fought over the scraps. It was a back-to-back sweep at a venue perched higher than any other on the calendar, and it came, fittingly, on what is now her home roads. If anyone still needed telling that Rissveds is the rider of the 2026 season, Andorra settled the argument. Here is who she is, and what makes her so good.

The weekend in Andorra

The cross-country race was a masterclass in front-running. Rissveds seized control on the second lap of the punishing four-kilometre circuit — a loop that piles on roughly 119 metres of climbing every time round and drops through sharp rock and root-strewn descents that wrecked several rivals’ races — and simply kept pressing. Her lead ballooned past twenty seconds, then to thirty-seven entering the final lap, and by the finish she had won in 1:18:47, a commanding seventeen seconds clear of Italy’s Martina Berta, with Switzerland’s Sina Frei a second further back in third after an all-out sprint for the minor placings. Two days earlier she had already taken the short track, completing the XCC-XCO double at the World Series’ loftiest stop. And there was a lovely subplot to it: Rissveds now lives in Andorra, and she made no secret of how much the win meant. “I’m in a really good place at the moment,” she said. “I made some big changes in my life last year and moved to Andorra. I’m just enjoying life, and I think that happiness helps me go fast as well.”

A season of near-total domination

Pal Arinsal was not a one-off; it was the latest chapter in a year of dominance. Across the 2026 campaign Rissveds has been in a class of her own, stacking up victories in all conditions — from the fast, dry World Cup rounds to the treacherous rain and mud of Leogang, where she won the elite women’s race outright. By the time she left Andorra she had won something like eight of her last ten races and stretched her overall World Cup lead to a huge 347 points over Frei, the kind of margin that turns a title race into a procession. Add the fact that she arrived at this season as the reigning cross-country world champion, and the picture is complete: this is not a hot streak, it is a rider operating at the very peak of her powers.

Who is Jenny Rissveds?

Rissveds is a Swedish cross-country mountain biker, born in June 1994 in Falun and now racing for the Canyon CLLCTV team. She announced herself to the wider sporting world in the most emphatic way imaginable: at the 2016 Rio Olympics she won the women’s cross-country gold medal at just 22, in the same season that she also took the under-23 world title. It was a coronation — a young prodigy seemingly destined to rule her discipline for a decade. What followed, though, was not the straight line to greatness that story usually promises, and it is the reason her current dominance carries so much more weight than a simple run of results.

The breakdown, and the comeback

Almost as soon as she had reached the top, Rissveds walked away from it. Overwhelmed and burnt out in the aftermath of her Olympic win, she stepped back from competition for most of 2017 and 2018, struggling with her mental health at a time when the sport still rarely spoke about such things. She has since been strikingly open about how dark it became — in one interview she said plainly that at her lowest point, two years earlier, she “didn’t want to be alive.” That she found her way back at all was remarkable; that she found her way back to winning is extraordinary. Her return has been built as much on rebuilding a life she wanted to live as on training numbers, and she has become one of cycling’s most powerful voices on mental health, proof that the comeback and the cause can be the same story. When she talks now about happiness making her fast, she is not offering a platitude — she is describing the exact mechanism of her second act.

What makes her so good

On the bike, Rissveds wins in a particular and unusually pure way: she rides at the front and dares the field to follow. Where many champions marshal their effort and back a finishing sprint, she prefers to break the race apart early, get clear, and ride solo — a style that demands enormous sustained power, real nerve, and the confidence to spend energy other riders would hoard. It suits the hardest, highest, most attritional courses, which is exactly why a venue like Pal Arinsal plays to her strengths: the thinner the air and the longer the climbs, the more her engine tells. She pairs that with genuine technical skill on the descents, where cross-country races are so often lost, and with the racecraft to know precisely when a gap can be turned into a chasm. And underpinning all of it is the mental resilience she fought so hard to rebuild — a settledness, by her own account, that lets her ride freely rather than fearfully. Talent got her to the top the first time; it is the whole package, hard-won, that is keeping her there now.

Why it matters

At 32, Rissveds is riding better than she did as a fresh-faced Olympic champion, and she shows no sign of slowing. She heads the World Cup standings by a distance, wears the rainbow bands of world champion, and has the look of a rider who could dominate through to a home-continent Olympics and beyond. But the reason her Pal Arinsal double resonates well outside the mountain-bike bubble is the arc behind it: from teenage sensation to Olympic gold, to a breakdown that nearly ended everything, to reigning world champion winning for the joy of it on her adopted home roads. It is one of the best stories in cycling — and right now, it is also one of the most dominant.

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