Elizabeth Mary Deignan (née Armitstead; born 18 December 1988) is an English professional world champion track and road racing cyclist. She was the 2015 World road race champion and is, as of March 2017, the reigning Commonwealth road race champion. Deignan is also twice winner of the season-long UCI Women's Road World Cup, winning the overall competition in 2014 and the final edition in 2015. At the 2012 Summer Olympics, Armitstead won the silver medal in the road race. She has won the British National Road Race Championships four times, in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017.
Prior to her road career Armitstead won a total of five medals at the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in 2009 and 2010, including a gold medal in team pursuit in 2009 with Joanna Rowsell and Wendy Houvenaghel.
Video Lizzie Deignan
Early life
Armitstead was born in the market town of Otley in West Yorkshire, where she attended Prince Henry's Grammar School, a state comprehensive school. She took up cycling in 2004 after British Cycling's Olympic Talent Team visited the school. She is a graduate of British Cycling's Olympic Podium Programme. Armitstead has been a vegetarian since the age of ten.
Maps Lizzie Deignan
Career
2005-2009: Track years
Armitstead won a silver medal in the scratch race at the Junior World Track Championships in 2005, she was under-23 European Scratch Race Champion in 2007 and 2008, and came second in the Points Race in 2007. In the 2008-09 Track Cycling World Cup season, she took a total of seven gold medals after competing in three of the five meetings.
Armitstead was a member of the gold medal winning team pursuit squad at the 2009 Track World Championships, her second appearance at a senior world championship event. She also competed in the scratch race, where despite being brought down in the closing stages of the race, she jumped back on to claim the silver medal. She completed the championships with a full set of medals, winning bronze in the points race whilst riding with her right wrist numb and strapped up -- she was only able to move her forefinger and thumb.
2009-2011: Move to road
Alongside her breakthrough in the velodrome, Armitstead was also making progress in road racing: in 2008 she was part of the team which delivered Nicole Cooke to the road race gold at the World Championships in Varese, Italy, and the following year she joined the Lotto-Belisol cycling team and rode a number of top level road races. She won the under 23 category of the British National Road Race Championships and the silver medal in the senior category after some controversy. That season she also took a stage of the Tour de l'Ardèche and won the youth classification of the Giro d'Italia. During the winter of 2009-10, Armitstead returned to the track, taking two golds at the Manchester round of the 2009-10 Track Cycling World Cup and two silvers at the 2010 UCI Track Cycling World Championships. In 2010, she rode for Cervélo TestTeam. That year she won three more stages of the Tour de l'Ardèche and a silver medal in the road race at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Dehli. Armitstead decided to stay with the franchise in its new guise as Garmin-Cervélo throughout 2011.
2012
Following the discontinuation of the Garmin Cervélo women's team, Armitstead rode for the AA Drink-Leontien.nl team in 2012. Armitstead built the whole of her campaign around the summer Olympics, taking spring classics wins at the Omloop van het Hageland and Gent-Wevelgem: at the Games themselves, she would go on to win the silver medal in the road race at the 2012 Summer Olympics, behind Marianne Vos, in so becoming the first Briton to win a medal at the 2012 Games.
2013
Having had to move teams in the past two seasons due to teams disbanding, Armitstead signed for the Boels Dolmans Cycling Team for the 2013 season. Her 2013 season was affected by a recurring stomach illness which was eventually diagnosed as a symptom of a hiatus hernia. Even with her well documented medical concerns Armitstead emerged victorious at the British National Road Race championships - claiming her second white, red and blue jersey.
2014
In April 2014 it was announced that Armitstead had renewed her contract with Boels Dolmans until the end of 2016. Armitstead enjoyed a career-best year, starting with a win at the Omloop van het Hageland. A week later she also won the first World Cup race of the season, the Ronde van Drenthe, after team mate Ellen van Dijk closed a significant gap for her in the final kilometres of the race. At the third World Cup race, the Tour of Flanders, she finished second behind Ellen van Dijk. Armitstead took part in the inaugural 2014 La Course by Le Tour de France in Paris on 27 July 2014, but crashed with 1 km to the finish. A week later she won the women's road race at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Armitstead, overhauled Emma Pooley with 7 km to go to win her first major gold medal. Armitstead won the UCI Women's Road World Cup with a race to spare on 24 August 2014. An 8th-place finish in the Open de Suede Vargarda was enough to secure the overall title.
2015
For the 2015 season Armitstead stated again her intention to build towards the UCI Road World Championships. Armitstead claimed the first overall win of her career taking the Ladies Tour of Qatar stage race, as well as winning two stages. Armitstead then went on to take victories at the one day World Cup races Trofeo Alfredo Binda and the Philadelphia Cycling Classic, along with the Boels Rental Hills Classic.
In June, Armitstead was forced to pull out of the Aviva Women's Tour after colliding with a group of photographers seconds after winning the first stage of the tour in Suffolk. However, ten days later she had recovered sufficiently to win convincingly the British National Road Race Championships for the third time taking her to the top of the UCI world rankings. In August, she sprinted to victory in the final World Cup race of the season, the GP de Plouay, to retain her World Cup title ahead of her main challenger, Anna van der Breggen.
To cap her best season to date, on 26 September, Armitstead won the World Championships road race in Richmond, Virginia, USA, beating van der Breggen in a sprint from a small group of nine riders at the finish line, becoming the fourth British woman to win the world road race title after Beryl Burton, Mandy Jones and Nicole Cooke.
2016
Armitstead's stated aim for the 2016 season was the road race at the 2016 Olympic Games Armitstead started the season as she had finished off the previous one, securing a number of one day race wins, as well as a General classification victory, breaking any curse of the rainbow jersey. Armitstead took four victories in the inaugural UCI Women's World Tour; Strade Bianche, Trofeo Alfredo Binda, Tour of Flanders and the overall title at The Women's Tour of Britain. Armitstead also took victories in the Boels Rental Hills Classic and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. At the Games, she finished just outside the medals in fifth place.
Missed drugs tests
In 2016, Armitstead avoided a ban from cycling that would have prevented her from competing in the 2016 Olympic Games. The charges against her were that she missed three drugs tests within a 12-month period (20 August 2015, 5 October 2015 and 9 June 2016), an offence that could have led to a four-year ban. However, at the Court of Arbitration for Sport Armitstead argued that the first missed test was not a fault of her own but rather that of the testing authorities. She accepted the other two instances. The CAS agreed with her on the first count, and it was declared not to have been a missed test, clearing her to compete. The decision has drawn criticism from various quarters.
In a 5 August 2016 interview, she said she believes that people will doubt her status as a clean sportsperson forever. World squash champion James Willstrop wrote in defence of Armitstead, arguing that the complexity of testing procedures can easily lead to missed tests and noting that she had 16 clean tests in 2016.
2017
Deignan endured a difficult start to her 2017 season: after finishing third at Strade Bianche, she fell ill, which hampered her training. However, her form picked up for the Ardennes classics, finishing second to team-mate van der Breggen in the Amstel Gold Race, La Flèche Wallonne Féminine and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. She subsequently took her first win of the season on home ground at the Tour de Yorkshire in April, crossing the line solo almost a minute ahead of her nearest rivals. She took another solo win at the British National Championships on the Isle of Man in June, attacking from a small group with two laps of the 6.7 km finishing circuit remaining alongside Katie Archibald and Hannah Barnes: the trio caught and passed race leader Elinor Barker with 5 km to go, with Deignan breaking away immediately afterwards to take her fourth senior national road race title.
The following month she finished second at La Course by Le Tour de France, finishing behind winner Annemiek van Vleuten on the Col d'Izoard: she stated that she was "suprised" by her performance, having never enjoyed success on a mountaintop finish before. In August she took her first WorldTour win of the season at the GP de Plouay - Bretagne, breaking away from rivals alongside Pauline Ferrand-Prévot on the final climb, before outsprinting Ferrand-Prévot to cross the finish line first. She became the third woman to win the race twice, alongside Vos and Pooley. However, the remainder of her season was disrupted shortly afterwards after being struck with appendicitis whilst competing in the Boels Rental Ladies Tour.
Personal life
Armitstead married fellow professional road racing cyclist Philip Deignan in Otley on 17 September 2016. On 14 March 2018, it was announced that the couple were expecting their first child.
She splits her time between Otley and Monaco.
Major results
Road
Track
Classics results timeline
- - = Did not start
- DNF = Did not finish
References
External links
- Rider biography British Cycling
- Profile MTC (management company)
- Lizzie Deignan at Cycling Archives
Source of article : Wikipedia
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