Relaxed Lizzie Deignan hoping to 'duck and dive' at Road World Championships

In a parallel universe, Lizzie Deignan would have retired by now. The 31-year-old, who leads Britain’s women at the UCI Road World Championships in Imola on Saturday, always said she intended to bow out after the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. But plans change. As do sports.

For Deignan, taking time out from pro cycling a couple of years ago to start a family — daughter Orla turned two this week — “completely renewed” her love of a sport with which she was for a while on difficult terms. When she returned last year, she found not only had she changed but cycling had too. “It's funny,” she says. “I should probably stop talking about retirement because no one will believe me when I actually do. I always had in mind that Tokyo would be that ‘retirement race’ but life changes and moves on.

“I have a family now and the break from cycling completely renewed my love for the sport. I don't see Tokyo as the finish line any more. I'm very open-minded about that.”

Deignan is a different person now to the rider who at the 2016 Olympics tearfully expressed her fears that some members of the public would forever doubt her integrity. Then, she was still reeling from her experience of going through the Court of Arbitration for Sport to have a ban for missing three out-of-competition drugs tests thrown out. She felt frustrated, impugned. Now, she is calmer, more phlegmatic. “Motherhood makes me much more relaxed than I used to be,” she says, adding: “Orla has no idea what I'm doing and couldn’t care less.

“The main thing I'd like to pass on to her as a woman is there are no boundaries, no limitations. I hope she just grows up in a house where her gender doesn't dictate what she does in her work.”

Deignan is hopeful on that score, encouraged by the way women’s cycling has grown in the last few years. “The opportunities I have now…” she says. “I'm in a fantastic position where I'm able to support my family from being a bike rider and that wasn't where I saw [cycling] being 10 years ago.”

There is still a long way to go. The recent Giro Rosa — the only ‘grand tour’ in women’s cycling — had no live television coverage at all, a fact Deignan describes bluntly as “not good enough”, not least because she finds it exhausting to have to fight simultaneous battles: on and off the bike. “That is the opportunity we're all searching for as athletes,” she says. “To just focus on the racing aspect.”

But in general she is encouraged by what she is seeing. The announcement earlier this week of the route for the first ever women’s Paris-Roubaix, on Oct 25, was another milestone. Deignan says she hopes to go well over the cobbles, although her “lightweight” frame may have other ideas.

Deignan’s physique should be well suited to Saturday’s course around Imola which comprises five laps of a 28.8km circuit, totalling 143km, with 2,650m of climbing. The Dutch, as ever, will be the team to beat. Annemiek van Vleuten, the reigning world champion, has announced that she will ride despite the broken wrist she sustained at the Giro Rosa. “Obviously she's the strongest rider in the world right now,” Deignan remarks. “She'd be the favourite whether she has a broken wrist or not.” Marianne Vos and Anna van der Breggen, the latter fresh from her victory in Thursday’s time trial, are also major threats.

But Deignan has high hopes that a British team which includes the in-form Lizzy Banks and Hannah Barnes, can do something if all three can make the final laps.

She herself feels blissfully relaxed, certainly compared to this time last year, when as the home favourite in Yorkshire, she felt the weight of a nation on her shoulders. “I just feel like it's an opportunity and I have nothing to lose,” Deignan concludes. “I think I rode like somebody under pressure last year. Tactically I wasn't very smart. This year I don't feel like the race rests on my shoulders. I can duck and dive and come out with the best result possible.”