Lizzie Deignan, Great Britain’s top female road cyclist, has announced that she plans to retire after next year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The 30-year-old returned to competition earlier this year after giving birth to her first child and next month will aim to win her second road world championship, with the women’s elite race passing through her home town of Otley, West Yorkshire.
That, plus seeking to win Olympic gold in Tokyo – she was runner-up to Marianne Vos of the Netherlands at London 2012 – are the two main goals the Trek-Segafredo rider has set herself as her career draws to a close.
Deignan, who in June won the Ovo Energy Women’s Tour, told Cycling News: "I made the decision [to retire in 2020] during my pregnancy. I wanted to return just for the Yorkshire Worlds and the Tokyo Olympics, and that would be it."
She added: "The biggest motivation for returning was to try and become the Olympic champion. There's another four-year cycle after Tokyo to get to the next Olympic Games, and I think that would be too much."
A four-time national champion on the road, Armitstead won the world championship in Richmond, Virginia in 2015, a year in which she also clinched the season-long women’s world cup title for the second successive season.
She headed to the Rio Olympics as one of the favourites to win the road race but finished fifth, with her build-up to the event overshadowed by the news that she had missed three anti-doping controls, only escaping a ban because the official due to carry out one of those tests was deemed not to have made adequate efforts to contact her at the hotel she was staying at.
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ICU - Intensive Cookie Unit - mmm
Friend of mine is currently kicking around 15th in the SRMR - it's good viewing.
Apart from the tracking app, there's a Facebook group and the bike specs are available online:
https://bikepacking.com/bikes/2019-silk-road-mountain-race-rigs/
http://jamesmarkhayden.uk/bikes/srmr-bike-spec-and-equipment/
who lets their 4 year old play unsupervised in the park?
My boy is 5, and would be a danger to himself if left for more than 5 minutes as he has no fear and will climb anything. That or ride flat out into another kid while each of them was looking somewhere else
By 'eck. When I were five I were working nights down t'pit, had a wife and three kids and had just finished me national service. Kids today ........
Luxury! We used to live in shoe box in middle o' road, had to lick road clean wi' tongue, father used to cut us in half wi' bread knife, had to get up two hours before we went to bed, worked 28 hours a day and had to pay boss to give us a job. You tell the kids today, and they just don't believe you.
I think that's the least of that poor bikes problems. But any attempt to remount the chain would result in the dreaded small/small cross chaining, also very objectionable.
I can understand the stealing of the handlebars from a locked bicycle but to remove from an unlocked bike does indeed seem strange.
I have HexLoxed the bolts of my bars on my new bike to hopefully lower the scrotes chances of getting mine.
Couldnt someone have ensured that bike chain was fully re-mounted before taking that photo of the Defy - very painful for some of us to look at!
"Oh Strava is dangerous, you should get yourself into a race if you think you are so fast." Uh-huh.
Nothing particularly odd about the bar theft. The bars are easy to remove and shifters are expensive, easy to conceal and annonymous to dispose of. The only surprise is that they didn't go for the rear mech too.
Surprised they didn't take the stem, seatpost and saddle, too!
Missing a good opportunity to plug Bike Register and/or Immobilise.
https://www.bikeregister.com
https://www.immobilise.com
And http://findthatbike.co.uk/