REMEMBERING ROUBAIX
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
