The Daily Telegraph

Sharon Laws

Cyclist who overcame injury to become road race champion

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SHARON LAWS, the cyclist, who has died aged 43, burst on to the sporting scene when she placed second in the Australian National Road Race Championsh­ips in 2008; she went on to compete in that year’s Beijing Olympics, and in 2012 was crowned Britain’s national road race champion.

Her achievemen­ts were all the more remarkable given that her profession­al career was dogged by a string of mishaps. She broke her leg just six weeks before she was due to compete in the 2008 Olympics, leaving her unable to stand up for long enough to attend the opening ceremony. In the event she crashed twice in torrential rain during the 120km women’s road race, coming 35th out of 62 finishers.

Encouraged by British Cycling to channel her energies into mountain biking, she managed only a handful of events before suffering another injury – dislocatin­g a shoulder falling down the stairs. “Nothing in my cycling career seemed to be plain sailing,” she lamented.

Yet she staged a triumphant return to form in 2012, just three days after Britain’s selectors had snubbed her for the London Olympics. At the National Road Race Championsh­ips in Ampleforth she conquered the 66.5 mile (107km) course with a lead of more than a minute over her rival Lizzie Armitstead. The year ended on another high when Sharon Laws and Emma Pooley claimed bronze in the team time trial at the UCI Road World Championsh­ips.

Towards the end of 2012 she signed with South Africa’s Momentum Toyota team, racing around the country and being interviewe­d on national television. In March 2013 she joined 35,000 other competitor­s at Cape Argus, where she surged into the leading group of six. But with a kilometre to go, her bike was caught up in a collision, she was thrown through the air and landed on her back, fracturing a vertebra and breaking her ribs and collarbone.

It looked as though she might never race again, but determinat­ion not to end her career on such a grim note won out. In 2014 she signed a contract with the US team Unitedheal­thcare and went on to win the Queen of the Mountains jersey at the inaugural Women’s Tour that May. Even a diagnosis of cervical cancer in October 2016 failed to keep her out of the saddle entirely. She would ride for two hours a day in the week following a chemothera­py session, finding solace in the fresh air of the Cotswolds.

She was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on July 7 1974 and settled at Bourton-on-thewater, Gloucester­shire, aged six. She played hockey to county standard, but cycling initially failed to appeal; she later recalled “seeing people in Lycra for the first time and laughing at them”.

After Nottingham University, where she read Biology, she worked in Uganda and Zimbabwe before returning to Britain to complete a Master’s degree in Conservati­on at University College, London. A career in the Civil Service as an environmen­tal adviser followed.

Work took her to South Africa and she began to indulge a newfound love of mountain-biking. In 2004, with Hanlie Booyens, she won the inaugural Cape Epic eight-day mountain bike race, over terrain so challengin­g that the route designer earned the nickname “Dr Evil”.

A move to Melbourne gave her further opportunit­y to ride competitiv­ely, though her success in the Australian nationals still came as a shock. She beat Australia’s reigning Olympic champion Sara Carrigan to second place, and was in Beijing three months later.

Sharon Laws spent her final year in pro cycling as a mentor and racer with Podium Ambition. She won her third national title in the British Mountain Bike Marathon Championsh­ips at Llandovery, only a month before her illness was diagnosed.

Sharon Laws, born July 7 1974, died December 16 2017

 ??  ?? ‘Nothing was plain sailing’
‘Nothing was plain sailing’

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