Yorkshire Calling

A new baby, a new team, and with the Worlds being held on home turf, it’s time for Lizzie Deignan to shine again.

- Owen Rogers

Lizzie Deignan is riding to meet Cycling Weekly’s photographer just over the French border from her Monaco home. The gradient would have most amateurs wheezing over their handlebars, but she is spinning effortlessly, as if using no effort, each pedal stroke smooth and fluid. The personification of souplesse. It’s as though she has never been away.

But despite her stylish pedalling, Deignan last turned a wheel in anger over a year ago at the 2017 World Championships. There, barely recovered from an emergency appendectomy less than a month before, she finished 42nd.

In that time a lot has changed. The 2015 world champion spent 2018 away from racing while pregnant, giving birth to baby Orla in September, and she is preparing to return to competition with a brand new team, Trek-Segafredo — the first time a team has been built around her.

Back in Monaco to take advantage of the weather and training roads, and to escape the distractions of what she calls the ‘love bubble’ that surrounds a newborn baby, it’s clear she is happy with her racing sabbatical, but ready to return to competition.

“I did say I’d like to get to six months before I stop breastfeeding and that is quite a limiting factor on training and progression. I think that’s a good thing because it’s holding me back, which I think I need. In terms of being at race weight and pushing the boundaries of my diet, there is no room for that.”

Later at a harbourside restaurant, one of the waiters admires her Trek Madone leant against the wall, its blue flashes matching the azure Mediterranean lapping a few metres away, and the smile on her face suggests Deignan is content.

However, it was not always like that. The 18 months before that last race in Bergen were not all plain sailing for the Yorkshirewoman.

Going through the motions