Deignan: Rivals have no issue with me
Briton happy to discuss return with other riders New book reveals pain over missed drugs tests
Lizzie Deignan says she has not experienced any frostiness or had any negative comments from her fellow riders in the women’s peloton this season, not even from her predecessor as world champion, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot.
The Frenchwoman was one of the most outspoken critics of the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s decision to overturn Deignan’s UK Anti-Doping charge for three whereabouts ‘strikes’ on the eve of last summer’s Rio Olympics, describing it as “shameful” and claiming that “everyone” in the peloton agreed with her, but most were too afraid to say so.
Speaking ahead of tomorrow’s women’s Tour de Yorkshire, where she will start as one of the favourites on home roads, Deignan said her relationship with FerrandPrevot was “fine” and that her rival had never even brought up the issue in person.
“Me and Pauline are fine; we say hello,” Deignan said. “Bring it on, if someone wants to have a chat about it. I would like that. But no, that’s not the way it’s done these days, is it?”
Deignan, added that she had rediscovered her love for cycling. “Definitely,” she told
“I think all you need is a dose of reality. You need to spend time with people who have a full-time, nine-to-five job, who aren’t enjoying it, and kind of not get lost in the pressure and the expectation.”
Deignan’s start to this year was hit by illness, but the 28-year-old found some form at last week’s Ardennes classics, posting three second places to her Boels-Dolmans team-mate Anna van der Breggen, to suggest she may have the legs to triumph in tomorrow’s 122.5km race from Tadcaster to Harrogate.
The Yorkshire spa town is set to host the finish of the 2019 world road race championships, which Deignan has targeted as her career swansong.
The Otley-born rider’s ability to concentrate on her racing and move on from last year’s controversy continues to prove elusive, however.
Deignan gave a 10-minute interview to BBC Radio 4’s
yesterday which perfectly summed up where she finds herself in her career; a couple of gentle questions about her upbringing in Yorkshire, the famous story about the girl who skipped a maths lesson at school and ended up on British Cycling’s programme, her silver medal at London 2012. And then the conversation inevitably turned to those three strikes.
Nearly one year on, Deignan is an athlete who remains in limbo; uncomfortable looking back, unable to move on. Deignan was speaking to
as part of a round of interviews to promote her new autobiography, In the book – which she has written under her maiden name Armitstead – Deignan admits that she had thought about quitting at the end of last year, so traumatised was she by her Rio experience and the “vicious” reaction to it.
But she says she has since had “any number of GB Olympians” tell her they were also on two strikes heading into the Rio Olympics and – satisfied that she has never cheated and never will – no longer has the same feelings of despair.
Deignan also addressed the topic of sexism in her book, flagging up one particular episode at an unspecified training camp, when she was woken by a senior member of staff and asked to come downstairs to celebrate a male rider’s birthday. She found she was the “only girl in the room” and was left with “no choice” but to dance with the birthday boy.
It has since emerged that the episode to which she referred took place in 2011 when she rode for Garmin-Cervelo and that the rider in question was Dave Zabriskie. A spokesperson for that team has contested Deignan’s version of events, saying she was woken by a female member of staff, director of operations Louise Donald, who wanted only to make sure the women’s team at the camp “were included in the various team activities”. The spokesperson also said that Deignan was not the only woman in the room.
Deignan insisted she was “definitely the only young female rider in the room” adding that GarminCervelo’s women’s team “certainly didn’t feel part of that training camp”.