Armitstead ready to block out the noise and conquer her rivals
On top of everything else, Lizzie Armitstead was stressing about her parents last week. They flew out to Brazil a little early, “bought some cheap bikes and did a tour round the coast” before heading for the Amazon. “I was quite relieved when I got a text message from my dad to say they’d arrived [in Rio],” she said.
Maybe it was better they were away from the furore.
To say that Armitstead has had a smooth build-up to today’s women’s Olympic road race would be like saying the International Olympic Committee has handled the Russian doping scandal with a firm hand.
Armitstead’s three strikes for ‘missing’ three out-of-competition drug tests in a 12-month period may only have hit the headlines on Monday night, but the world champion must have known since early June that this controversy was coming down the tracks. These things have a habit of leaking out.
While waiting for the inevitable, the 27 year-old has been through a Court of Arbitration for Sport appeal – which would have been hugely stressful with her entire career, not to mention her Olympic participation, on the line – and had to excuse herself from various races without giving proper explanations.
Armitstead has then had to face a week of incessant questioning over the rights and wrongs of her presence at the Games in Rio.
Those questions are not without validity, of course. There were – and remain – extremely awkward questions to answer regarding the disciplinary process, the fact that Armitstead allowed herself to miss those tests despite knowing the potential implications, and the timing of her appeal, which was only lodged after her third strike.
We must all also ask ourselves whether or not the reaction would have been the same had she not been a British world champion.
Wherever you stand on the issue, though, Armitstead is here now. And lest we forget, she remains one of the favourites for today’s race. It will not be easy for her. She knows there are many within the peloton who feel she has been allowed to dodge a ban. Her French rival Pauline Ferrand-Prévot said as much, which suggests there may be some uncomfortable moments on the start line.
But Armitstead is a steely competitor. She may have admitted to her head being all over the place after a training ride on Thursday, but she also said she was 100 per cent confident that she was guilty of no more than making a mistake, and insisted that she had prepared for the Games with the utmost professionalism.
If she can successfully block out the noise, and she really has prepared as well as she can, she will be a factor. The route, 136.9km long and featuring two laps of the Grumari circuit and one of the Vista Chinesa circuit which the men did yesterday, is possibly a little tougher than she would like. But Armitstead spent all of May preparing specifically for Rio’s unique demands and is confident she can hang with the peloton’s best mountain goats before beating them all on the descent and flat run-in to the finish.
“I’ve definitely become more comfortable [at climbing],” she said this week.
“The power I can produce, I can now produce comfortably. I’m not red-lining where I used to, so I’ve definitely made improvements, but it’s not something that comes naturally still.”
With the depth of the women’s peloton not nearly that of the men’s, there are fewer potential winners. The Dutch and the Americans, both of whom have four-women teams as opposed to GB’s three women, have the strongest lineups. Nikki Harris and Emma Pooley will try to hang with her as long as they can but they are unlikely to reach “the pointy end” of the race as Armitstead called it.
Anna van der Breggen and multiple world and Olympic champion Marianne Vos – Armitstead’s nemesis from London where she pipped the Briton to gold – are both potential winners, as are Megan Guarnier, Evelyn Stevens and Mara Abbott from the American squad. Elisa Longo-Borghini (Italy), Ashleigh Moolman (South Africa), Emma Johansson (Sweden) and Ferran Prévot are also all worth watching out for.
What a story it would be if Armitstead and Ferrand-Prévot were left together in a two-up sprint.
“I’ve realised I’ve nothing to lose on a course like this,” Armitstead said. “It’s not going to come down to tactics for me. It’s not going to be a case of making the wrong decision. It’s going to come down to physically what I’m able to do. So I should give myself the best opportunity and the best chance. It’s not often you get this opportunity.”
That is certainly true. It is difficult to tell what toll the last weeks and months will have taken. The first GB medal winner four years ago, the woman who got the ball rolling, Armitstead admitted this week she did not know how a medal might feel around her neck given the experience she has been through.
She said she realised that a win would be forever tainted in some eyes. No doubt in some eyes it would. She has to block all of that out now. Leave the rest of us to worry about how to react.