“It still hasn’t quite sunk in,” says Carys Lloyd. It’s the morning after the Ronde van Brugge, and the 19-year-old, still in awe, has woken up a WorldTour race winner. Her phone has been pinging with messages. Her eye is sore, swollen from the grit and mud of rural Flanders, but the pain hasn’t stopped her reliving the memory. “I’m watching back the videos like, ‘Oh really? This actually happened?”
The odds were stacked against Lloyd at the Belgian Classic – she rode without a leadout, having never won a pro race before, against a field of the best sprinters in the world – and still she won by almost a bike length. Afterwards, she cupped her mouth in disbelief. “I felt pretty good, but I never really imagined that happening,” the Movistar rider tells Cycling Weekly.
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Lloyd starts from the top, with a conversation she had with her team-mates ahead of the stage. “We were all joking about winning,” she says, “but we didn’t really believe it, because it was Lorena’s race to win.
“I knew that I was a relatively good sprinter, but for a race like this, I kind of imagined that maybe in five years’ time I would be able to win it, after Lorena had had her peak couple of years.”
Lloyd was taken to the podium in a golf cart.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Last season, Wiebes won 25 times on the road. Lloyd was a first-year pro, the youngest rider on the WorldTour, juggling her final year of school with racing for Movistar.
After a stage top-10 at last month’s UAE Tour, the Briton began the Ronde van Brugge with hopes of a strong result. She kept herself near the front of the peloton, and when the storm clouds drifted overhead and hail began, she felt she might be on for a good day. “Being from the UK, it’s something I’m a little bit more used to,” she says.
“I could see people losing their heads a little bit and getting really, really cold, thinking about the weather more than thinking about the race. For me, it was a bit painful with the hail for a bit, but once you get into it, it’s OK. I was actually a bit upset when it started to get sunny again,” she says. “It meant everything came back together.”
The bunch was packed 10-wide across a residential road heading into the finale. Inside the last kilometre, Lloyd felt a gentle elbow in her right side, and nudged back, “then I realised who I was barging shoulders with,” she laughs. It was Wiebes, dressed in the Dutch tricolour, and threading her way through to the front. “I was like, ‘Actually, I can sit on her wheel rather than elbowing her’,” Lloyd says.
Wiebes veered to the left of the bunch to tag onto the Lidl-Trek sprint train of former world champion Elisa Balsamo. Lloyd stayed right. Why didn’t she follow? “The lap before, my team-mate had said there was a slight headwind coming from the left, so [I should] maybe sprint towards the right. I took her advice,” she explains.
The move, as astute as it was, also exposed the teenager to the wind. She could have panicked, nestled back into the pack, but instead Lloyd spotted a clean run to the line. “It’s now or never,” she thought. A three-time junior track world champion, she trusted her kick was strong. “If I was going to use the energy anyway, I thought I might as well see if I could get the jump on some people,” she says. And so, with 200m to go, she rose out of the saddle and split the air in two like a thunderstrike.
What was going through her head at that moment? “Just try and sprint and see if I could hold on for a top-three,” she says. Nobody came around. Lloyd raised her right arm in victory across the line, but so drained from the effort, she dropped it straight back down to her handlebars. She then ground to a halt, and her team-mates mobbed her in celebration. What began as a far-fetched joke had come true.
Chiara Consonni (left) and Elisa Balsamo (right) were stunned by the teenager’s win.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Lloyd’s post-race interview soon went viral for its authenticity. “Oh f***, I actually won,” she said, smiling and apologising for the expletive. “My mum texted me afterwards and said, ‘You need to maybe mind your foul language next time’,” she says.
The teenager also told the interviewer of her mechanic, who had pledged her a new LEGO set if she crossed the line first. The store in Bruges was only a 15-minute walk away. Did he hold his promise? “He bought me the Ferrari F1 car to add to my growing collection,” Lloyd says. “Weirdly, I don’t know if he knew this, but I have the Aston Martin, the Red Bull and the McLaren, and now I have the Ferrari, so we’re up to four. Maybe I can get all 10 at some point.”
A race car, in the end, felt a fitting price for the fastest rider on the day. Six more wins, and she’ll have the full set. What race is her mind on next? “I think [Paris-]Roubaix is something I want to look towards,” she says. “But then again, it’s a very demanding race, and anything can happen… We’ll see in the rest of the Classics and maybe later in the season as well.”
Buoyed by victory, with newfound belief and fearlessness, the 19-year-old is ready to take on the best.
