For Lizzie Armitstead this has been a heady spring, resplendent in the world champion’s rainbow stripes and notching up a hit-rate of victories that is astonishing, taken as a proportion of races started. The Yorkshirewoman has ridden seven races this season and won four, culminating in a tight victory in one of her major career targets, the Tour of Flanders, in early April.
This leaves Armitstead “full of confidence and excitement” going into Saturday’s women’s Tour de Yorkshire, when she will enjoy the rare privilege of riding on home roads as a world champion.
The finish is in Doncaster but, significantly, the start of the 135km race is in Otley, the town where she was raised and where she began cycling in 2004. Saturday’s event is “beyond any dreams I had as a 15-year-old starting my first races”, she said this week.
Saturday marks the end of a brief parenthesis in the 27-year-old’s season after a string of one-day races. Her programme has been relatively light but in several years acting as her own coach she has figured out that training suits her better than schlepping from race to race in the hope of finding fitness through competition.
From now on Armitstead’s focus will move to stage races such as the Giro d’Italia and the Women’s Tour, with her training based on honing her climbing skills for Rio, practising ascents that resemble the seven-kilometre uphill slog that is likely to decide the women’s road race in August. “The biggest challenge is the course itself, the final climb could be my nemesis and I will be concentrating on how to conquer it between now and the 7th.
“Yorkshire was not on my original schedule at the start of 2016. I am competing on Saturday after a week of sponsorship and off-the-bike commitments that had been planned in advance, so my preparation has been less than ideal, but I did not want to miss out on the opportunity to race at home.
“I’ve been busy, so I am not expecting to win, much to the disappointment of a lot of people I am sure, especially locally. I just want a fast aggressive race and to enjoy it.”
It is also an opportunity to renew an old acquaintance with Emma Pooley, likely to be a team-mate in Rio after returning to the GB squad with her eyes on a time-trial medal; for once, with her Boels-Dolmans team absent from this one, Armitstead will wear GB kit, at the head of a team mainly composed of younger hopes.
For most of Britain’s two-wheeled Olympians this has been a stressful week, with the resignation of British Cycling’s technical director, Shane Sutton, but unlike her colleague on the track squad, Armitstead will be barely affected. After her beginnings on the velodrome, over the years she has gradually moved away from the establishment in Manchester, spiritually as well as geographically, and she is likely to have personal control over pretty much every aspect of her build-up to the Games until hitting the start line on 5 August.
Not surprisingly Armitstead was unwilling to comment on the circumstances surrounding Sutton’s departure but before the Australian walked she expressed her support of the sprinter Jess Varnish’s right to speak out, saying: “Any athlete in her position has the right to say what she said.”
Over the years Armitstead has expressed her dismay at sexism in her sport while attempting to avoid being bracketed solely as a campaigner. In her eyes, she is an athlete who says what she feels when she wants to. She had no hesitation in explaining last year why the inaugural women’s Tour de Yorkshire held no interest for her, being on a flat course that offered little in terms of selection, and she will say similar things about other races that she feels pay only lip service to equality.
The Yorkshire organisers, to their credit, listened to her and have expanded their race massively. It is that rare thing, a single-stage women’s race run on precisely the same course as the second stage of the three-legged major men’s event, with greater prize money. The course could be tougher – it is the easiest and shortest of the three men’s stages – but the distance, cold and wind could make it selective enough.
“A full distance stage with the prize list on offer is unparalleled in the rest of my season,” said Armitstead. “I think it is a blueprint of how a women’s race should look in 2016.”
The world champion will renew her old rivalry with the former world No1 Marianne Vos at the Women’s Tour, in June; with the Dutchwoman absent on Saturday, the opposition looks set to come from sprinters such as Lucy Garner and Floortje Mackaj and seasoned campaigners such as Kirsten Wild, Tatiana Guderzo and Marta Bastianelli.
