Cross-country skiing | Alexandre Pouyé on Mélissa Gal’s 2024/2025 season : “She’s a fairly academic athlete who needs to think about long-term progression”

Cross-country skiing: an entire season focused on the World Cup for Mélissa Gal

After several seasons fluctuating between the FESA Cup and the cross-country skiing World Cup, Mélissa Gal has this year succeeded in securing a place among the elite for the entire winter. From the opening stage in Ruka (Finland), the Haut-Savoyard even got off to a strong start, closing in on the top 30 in the individual classic.

“Mélissa, I think, is an athlete who needs to validate step by step. She’s a fairly academic athlete who needs to think about long-term progression,” analysed Alexandre Pouyé in an interview with Nordic Magazine. Last year, she returned to the World Cup after a good start to the winter in the FESA Cup. She won all three races in the first weekend.

I think that really served as a base and a benchmark for her, so that she could then go straight on to the World Cup,” continues thecoach of the French women’s team. Now she’s entering her season with a 33rd place finish in Ruka, but I think that was worth winning the FESA Cup. The intensity was insane, and when you look at the girls they were playing with down to the second, that’s already a step up.

And after starting the winter on stages renowned for their difficulty, the skier from the Pays rochois took a new step forward just a few weeks later. “After that, it’s always difficult to build a solid base and confidence. Even so, she had two great races in Davos with her first top 10,” recalls her coach. It was a goal she had set herself at the start of the season. That was really interesting.

However, the 25-year-old cross-country skier lost some of her speed over the month of January: “In the end, we had a little trouble finding the right adjustments so that she was in a really good physical condition to give more impact at certain times,” concedes the Savoyard.

“But on the positive side, there’s the fact that she’s had a full World Cup season, and the fact that she’s made real progress in the sprint, because up until now it’s been a bit of a struggle to qualify without really making it to the quarter-finals. Now we feel that, even though she’s only been through to the semi-finals once, she’s a lot closer than before,” explains Alexandre Pouyé.

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“On the other hand, it’s more complicated in terms of distance to find her level. There was a sequence of events during the season that wasn’t easy for her to manage. Now, she’s given her all to do the best races she can until the end of the season,” says Peiserot. There have been some good races again. In particular, she finished well in the French championships.

Read also

• Juliette Ducordeau’s 2024/2025 season as seen by Alexandre Pouyé: “We need to keep the reference points from the end of the season and build something solid on them”.
• Alexandre Pouyé on Flora Dolci’s 2024/2025 season: “She had the most consistent season of her career”.
• Alexandre Pouyé on Flora Dolci’s 2024/2025 season: “She had the most consistent season of her career”.