REMEMBERING ROUBAIX

Last October Lizzie Deignan entered the history books as the first ever winner of the women's Paris-Roubaix and became the first ever Brit to win the race to boot. She regales Vern Pitt with the tale of that day

- Lizzie Deignan

What's the proper way to toast one of the most banzai lone rides in all the history of women's cycling, nay all cycling? If you've become the first-ever Queen of the Queen of the Classics and endured all the punishment and mud that the cobbles of northern France can throw at you, what is the meal befitting of such a champion? Perhaps champagne and caviar. Maybe a steak of Kobe beef. Such luxuries are not for 2021 Paris-Roubaix winner Lizzie Deignan.

"That night we stayed in a budget Ibis, next to a service station in the UK," she recalls. "It was about one o'clock in the morning, and the only thing that was open was a McDonald's. So I got a couple of bags of fries and a Diet Coke. That was my celebration."

Top-three triumph

Deignan, now expecting her second child, rates her 80km solo ride to become the first-ever women's winner of Paris-Roubaix as among the top three races she's ever done on a bike; the 2012 Olympics where she was narrowly pipped by Marianne Vos, and her Worlds win in 2015 are the others. As we ask her to recount the events of that day and her thoughts and emotions you can hear a touch of wonder in her voice still.

Until that day in October 2021 had been something of a year to forget for the Yorkshirewoman. She'd racked up a win at the Deignan's Tour de Suisse but none of her main goals had come to pass. It was “very disappointing".

“I had definitely written off the season as one of those years that it didn't go the way I wanted it to," she says. “But obviously all that changed on one race day. That is the benefit of a bit of experience, you do realize that as long as you keep chipping away and knocking at the door something good will come."