INSIDE HELL

At the epic first ever Paris-Roubaix Femmes Vern Pitt went inside the British Drops-Le Col team to experience the madness at first hand

- Vern Pitt

Knees bloodied, body bruised, face splattered in mud, but Lizzy Bennett is still smiling. The Welshwoman hasn’t won, in fact she hasn’t even made the time cut at the first ever women’s edition of Paris-Roubaix but if there’s anyone that seems to sum up the mood on this sodden afternoon in northern France it’s her.

“I’m good now, maybe not so much acouple of hours ago,” she says, laughing and still wiping the mud off her face. “I was in the front group and maybe on the third secteur in I crashed and I’m not saying my day was over from there but I was on the back foot. I ended up crashing three times. It was a mudbath on most secteurs to be honest, each time I just lost the front wheel and went down.

She adds: “I’ve scratched up both my knees and my elbows as well. Looking back now it was a pretty surreal experience, during the race I felt good but because it was wet it was just pot luck if you stayed up.”

We wonder if she thought about quitting, and there’s no hesitation in her answer: “No. It’s just such a historic race, it’s just so cool to say you’ve done it.”

She was not alone in trying but failing to finish within the 14 minutes of winner Lizzie Deignan that was required and yet still pushing on to the Roubaix velodrome. The race may have been a relatively modest 116km long but with 28km of cobbles it had blown the peloton to pieces, with more than a third of the starters refusing to give up on their spot in history despite being so far back.

A long time coming