Carys Lloyd is on her half-term holiday. She’s sitting her A-levels next month and is meant to be spending this Easter period revising. Instead, she’s just ridden and finished Paris-Roubaix while still at school. “It’s kinda crazy: I’m still learning, sitting with my peers, but also doing stuff like this. It’s just amazing.”
Having turned eighteen on New Year’s Eve, Lloyd joined Movistar on a three-year contract and has already ridden some of the biggest Classics: Omloop Nieuwsblad, Brugge-De Panne, Gent-Wevelgem and now the Hell of the North, unsurprisingly as the youngest debutant. This is not what 18-year-olds do. “It’s hard to sometimes think about it. Like when I go away, I have to tell my teachers, ‘oh yeah, I’m just off to the UAE’. They’re like, ‘oh, what are you doing there?’ and when I say I’m racing, I think some of them can’t get their head around it.”
Lloyd, who hails from Maidstone in south-east England and is another VC Londres alumni, was thinking that her maiden Roubaix was “going to be nice and chill for the first 60k, and then maybe once we’d get to the cobbles we’d absolutely go for it.” She was right about the second part, but very wrong about the first part. “It was a helluva lot harder!” she laughed.
The torment began before the first of the 17 cobbled sectors was even ridden. “I crashed in the first half and then having to sprint back on definitely made it a lot harder. When I was chasing back on, my handlebars went into my stomach and I was like, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’, and then we went straight onto the cobbles. Unfortunately I found myself falling behind but we got into this really good group where we just kept catching riders and I managed to survive.”
What didn’t survive was her Garmin, the head unit sporting multiple cracks and rendered unusable after the crash. “I had to ask one of the EF riders how many kilometres we had done because the Garmin isn’t touchscreen anymore, nothing’s happening.” Normally sixth-form students would have to dig into their own pockets to replace the item, but Lloyd is a pro as well as a school pupil these days. “I was thinking that if this had happened this time last year, I’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know how much money I’m going to have to ask my parents to borrow’, but now I can give it to the team and say I’m really sorry!"
The Garmin wasn’t the only damaged property. “Oh my god!” she said, pointing at her palms. “I got this blister [on her left hand] in the first 10k! I was wearing gloves the whole time, but after a while because of the impact wearing gloves has no impact. You get to the last three or four sectors and genuinely you have to dig deep because it’s just so mentally hard going with that much pain in your hands. You can barely hold the handlebars, you’re so tired, but you’ve just got to keep going. Honestly, props to the winners – they manage to do that and make an actual effort, but I was just balls-to-the-wall going as hard as I could.” When she rode past her parents on one of the cobbled sectors, she spotted her father “making a grimace because he could see how much pain I was in.”
In spite of her her battered hands and fatigued legs, Lloyd made it to the Roubaix velodrome, almost 20 minutes behind the winner Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, and was even able to win a six-person sprint. She did, after all, win three gold medals at last year’s Junior Track World Championships – the Roubaix velodrome may be concrete and not wooden, but this is her territory. “When I came in here I was like, OK, I know what I’m doing, it’s like a track race. I was watching some of the sprints going on in here and I was thinking: ‘it’s track, you’re not using the bankings, use them!’. It was really fun even if I was sprinting for 100th-odd place. And I won!”
Lying on artificial grass in the middle of the fabled velodrome, Lloyd started to dream about future editions of the race, when she’ll be free from studying and exams and able to concentrate fully on riding her bike. “It’s definitely an amazing race and I definitely want to come back, even if it’s probably the hardest race in the world.”
