Lizzie Deignan’s return to racing, following the birth of her second child last September, has been a balancing act. As the Tour de France Femmes ended last Sunday, the 34-year-old sat down outside her Lidl-Trek team bus in Pau’s Place Verdun and took stock of her first experience of the relaunched women’s race.
The look on her face spoke volumes. Juggling full-time motherhood while preparing for the rigours of stage racing in the climbs of the Massif Central and the Pyrenees was definitely not easy.
Deignan, World Road Race champion in 2015, will race in this year’s “Super Worlds” women’s road race in Glasgow on 13 August. By her own admission, it has been a battle to be ready, but only last month she said “we do need to get to a place in cycling where it’s more normal.”
“I’ve had a big workload,” she said. “I’m at a turning point now where I don’t know if I’m really exhausted or coming into fine-tuned form. I’ve raced so much since I started this season. I started the Tour carrying more fatigue than I would have wanted to.”
The previous afternoon she had been part of the peloton lost in the mists of the Pyrenees, as further up the Col du Tourmalet the Dutch rider Demi Vollering took her first yellow jersey. Deignan, meanwhile, after a career that started when women’s cycling was barely reported, was taking it all in.
“It was really cool, a really nice experience to race up the Tourmalet,” she said. “I’ve had a long career but I’ve never raced up a mountain pass with that kind of crowd.
“I was tired, empty and uncomfortable but I was able to consciously take a moment and think: ‘Bloody hell – women’s cycling has come a long way!’”
“It was weird that was the first time, as a 34-year-old, with the career that I’ve had, that I thought: ‘Wow, this has happened.’ It was a bittersweet moment. It should have happened earlier, but I’m glad it’s happened now. It was definitely emotional.”
“If I consider when I first started, women’s cycling is now completely unrecognisable,” she added. “We were all in team cars getting changed, sitting on camping chairs, with not enough staff.
“Now I have an osteopath, a chef, a masseuse, soigneurs, two directors and two race cars, three bikes to choose from and more kit than I could ever use in a season. It’s totally different to when I started.”
“It’s a huge journey,” she said. “People sometimes ask me: ‘Don’t you wish you were starting now?’ In some ways yes, because there are more opportunities now, but in other ways no, because I got to experience it all. It’s not that I should be grateful, because there’s still a way to go, but I’m grateful for the experience I have had. I know and appreciate all that we have.”
Deignan finished 35th in the Tour de France Femmes, after team leader Elisa Longo Borghini was forced to abandon due to illness. “It’s been a challenging Tour, physically and mentally, so I think I’ll hit a tired spot next week and it’s about how I come over that before Glasgow.”
The 10-day “Super Worlds” features some 120 nations and brings together the “entire cycling family,” according to Amina Lanaya, the director general of the UCI, the sport’s governing body. “This is about making transformational change to society,” Paul Bush, chair of the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships said, when the event was first launched. “It’s about how do we get more people riding a bike? How do we get to disadvantaged groups?
In what is being described as a “cycling Olympics”, more than 2,500 athletes are expected to compete for medals in 13 disciplines across 11 days of competition, at venues across Scotland, although Glasgow will be the World Championships hub.
Coming just one week after the finish of the Tour de France Femmes and two weeks after the men’s Tour ended in Paris, the event hopes to capitalise on a new global interest in cycling, dubbed the “Netflix effect” in the aftermath of the streamed series Tour de France: Unchained. As well as road racing and time trialling, other disciplines will include BMX racing, indoor cycling, mountain biking, para-cycling, track racing, trials and Gran Fondo racing.
Tom Pidcock, who finished 13th in the 2023 Tour de France, will switch his attention to off-road cycling when he competes in the cross-country mountain bike event, aiming to add to the Olympic gold medal he won in Tokyo in 2021.
