Pauline Ferrand-Prévot bought a dog this summer and called it Rio. Perfectly understandable for a medallist at this summer's Olympics, but less so for someone for whom those Games hold only the most miserable of memories.
Ferrand-Prévot was in a very dark place when she spotted the French bulldog puppy in a pet-shop window. Holed up in her friend's apartment in Paris for two weeks, she cut herself off from the world, reeling from the disappointment of finishing 26th in the road race and abandoning the mountain bike race in Rio.
The Games were all she'd thought about for the best part of a year and climbing off the bike was the final straw in a season that had veered far from the script she'd written for herself by becoming road, cyclo-cross, and mountain bike world champion between 2014 and 2015.
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"Cycling was what I loved to do the most but it has become my biggest nightmare," wrote Ferrand-Prévot a couple of weeks after the Games, claiming that becoming a triple world champion was the worst thing that happened to her.
The precocious success - she's still only 24 - bred lofty expectations, and she became fixated on the Olympics as next in line on the palmarès. A tibial plateau fracture last winter set her back at the start of this year, however, and she was then plagued by sciatic nerve problems, which, despite a long list of treatments, was never fully understood or remedied.
The Olympics had almost become an obsession and, as such, she was too eager to make up for lost time and pushed herself too hard when she should have been gentler on her body. It all came crashing down on the final descent in Rio.
'Now it's time to look ahead'
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