"The climb is much longer than you think"

Vern Pitt heads out on a tough and testing loop, guided by the local  knowledge of homegrown star Elynor Bäckstedt

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The face of the sheep was impassive, but I detected behind the eyes a burning expectation. "Can I have a Coke?" I gasped at the man in the ice-cream van, before I remembered my manners through the fog of exhaustion, "Please." It was the first sunny day in what seemed like forever, so I went all in. "And can I have one of those flake 99s too?" I enquired, gathering myself.

Refreshments in hand, I met the ovine spectator's gaze once again. I'd earned this ice cream, I'd been climbing for over an hour, and I'd be damned if I was sharing it. Local Trek-Segafredo pro Elynor Bäckstedt had warned me about these woolly would-be muggers up here. "I was eating my bar and they were hungry apparently so he was quite keen on chasing after me. They're not timid, they just walk everywhere," she had told me a few days before.

Perhaps sensing I was not to be messed with, he turned and walked back towards his grassy verge with a mixture of resignation and disgust. I'd conquered the Bwlch, I'd conquered sheep. Wales complete.

I'm in this verdant corner of the British Isles for the first in an occasional series of features on the routes of Britain's best riders. Today it's the turn of Elynor Bäckstedt, the Trek-Segafredo pro and junior Worlds medallist who has given me a comprehensive guide to the roads of her youth.

"It's very different from Belgium," she tells me when I ask her how it compares to where she used to live in the first couple of years as a pro. She's relocated back to Wales in large part due to the complications of Brexit making living in Europe complex, especially for her husband, who she married last summer. But it's clear from speaking to her that she has no regrets about having to train on these roads; indeed, the weather in Wales is frequently Belgian in nature.