Lizzie Deignan: You don’t start a family to break boundaries

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When the subject of motherhood in professional cycling comes up in conversation, Lizzie Deignan is certain to be one of the first names mentioned. After taking a full maternity leave period in 2018 to have her first child, Deignan returned to great success, winning the Women’s Tour just weeks into her comeback and going on to win the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes. 

Having given birth to her second child in September last year, Deignan’s position as both a mother and a professional cyclist is back in sharp focus as she builds towards racing again after a year of absence. 

Speaking to Cyclingnews as she prepares for her second return to racing, Deignan discussed her comeback plan, the challenges, as well as the unexpected things that come with being both a parent and an athlete. 

It would be easy to imagine that Deignan might find some annoyance in being held up as a figurehead for mothers in cycling. She is, after all, one of the most successful riders in the current peloton, an athlete who is still at the top of her game - being a parent is not her defining characteristic.

However, as one of the rare examples of a female rider successfully balancing having a child and racing at the top level, she finds herself the unofficial spokesperson on the topic. This, she explains, was not something she particularly planned, but she takes the role in her stride. 

“The decision to have a family, for us, was not a decision based on trying to be a role model for people or break boundaries in our sport,” she says. “It was just simply a personal decision that we wanted to start a family, and all these things come as a byproduct of that. I’m lucky enough that I’m happy to take that on and to fulfill that role of showing what’s possible, but it was very much just a personal decision. You don’t decide to have a family to break boundaries.”

As well as giving advice to her fellow riders and dutifully engaging with interviews on the subject, Deignan tries to use her social media platforms to share her experiences and reality. It’s a fine balance between sharing and oversharing, Deignan says, but she deems it better to be honest, than only show the picture-perfect side of parenthood. 

“Having a social media platform or profile is kind of part of being a professional athlete now,” she says. “So I’d rather choose to be authentically who I am on those platforms and hopefully help somebody else try and combine motherhood and being an athlete, or just try and be a good example. I think it’s better to try and be authentic than just doing creative Instagram shots. I’m not very good at that, I’m better off just talking about babies.”

Maternity leave: an evolving policy

As well as the physical challenge of having a child mid-career, Deignan has also become something of an expert on the question of maternity leave for female cyclists. It’s something that’s still developing in cycling: the right to paid and protected maternity leave has only been in place since 2020, and teams are still working out how that looks in practice. 

“Maternity is a really different subject in every culture even,” Deignan considers. “What we would expect in the UK, what I’d grown up to know, is brilliant maternity. It’s normal to expect a woman to take a year off work and to be paid for that time and for her role to be kept open. But an American teammate might come from a point of view that they get 21 days in America, which is just insane to me.”

There may be something to be gleaned from the fact that three of the most recent examples of WorldTour riders taking maternity leave are Brits: Deignan, Elinor Barker and soon Joss Lowden. Of course, they are not the only women to do so - Lotta Henttala returned to racing this year after having a child, and Chantal van den Broek-Blaak announced her pregnancy over the winter - but there is certainly a culture among Brits and British cyclists that has empowered Deignan and Barker, as well as their compatriots on the track like Katy Marchant or Laura Kenny, to be able to mix having a family and a cycling career. 

In the broader cycling world, though, things are improving. Deignan points to the recent change to allow teams to hire ‘replacement’ riders for those on leave as a positive but underlines that there is still more to be done.

“Things like paternity clauses, they haven’t put those into men’s contracts yet,” she says. “It’s at a very early stage in cycling of understanding the best way to move forward with it. I think there are still obviously tweaks to be made, but it’s better than it was.” 

‘I’m definitely itching to race again’ 

Beyond all the off-the-bike concerns and her unintentional position as a motherhood expert, though, it’s clear Deignan’s mind has rarely strayed from racing. Pregnancy may have kept her from competing, but the training never stopped, and she had six weeks off the bike after the birth of her son in September.

“I did a full winter’s training [before becoming pregnant], and I trained all the way through pregnancy, and I’m still training,” she explains. “I’m definitely itching to race again. It feels like a long time.”

Deignan is keen to clarify, however, that the desire and drive to get back to racing - and hopefully winning - comes from within rather than any external pressure from her team or sponsors.

“I feel like the pressure is off in that sense,” she says. “I shouldn’t have felt like it, but I did feel like I had something to prove the last time around. Just because I felt like one of the first women to have done it, and I felt a bit of pressure to make sure that I proved that Trek had made the right decision to support me, et cetera. So no, in terms of pressure for that, no. I’ve proved again that it’s possible, and I’m sure it will be again.”

The comeback 2.0 

Deignan’s plan as it stands is to start her 2023 season in May at La Vuelta Femenina. Throwing yourself into an eight-day stage race - a pretender to Grand Tour status, at that - may seem like a bold way to start racing again, but it’s a decision Deignan has made with the benefit of prior experience.

“I started with the Ardennes the last time, and it was a bit of a jumping in at the deep-end scenario,” she says. “I would like to try and start with a stage race. Whichever way I look at it, it’s going to be a shock to the system, but I think a stage race might be a little bit of an easier transition back into racing than those massive Ardennes classics.”

Deignan’s results at those Ardennes classics in 2019 were nothing to sniff at - her first result was 19th at Amstel Gold Race, which she followed up with 7th at Liège-Bastogne-Liège a week later - but given the chance to tweak 

“The reason I wanted to start with a stage race was that I really noticed last time that although I was super fit on my return to racing, there’s no substitute for racing in terms of race rhythm,” she explains. “In a race, you probably accelerate 150 times, and in training, I just can’t do that. So race rhythm is really hard to get back.”

“I know it will be physically really demanding, but I expect that I’ll adapt really quickly as well. If I go to the Vuelta, I automatically have back-to-back days of racing. It’s about replicating as many race days as quickly as I can.”

After the Vuelta, Deignan’s focus will turn to the Women’s Tour, a home World Championships in Glasgow, and trying to make the Trek-Segafredo team at the Tour de France Femmes.

‘My career is going to be way longer than I’d ever expected'

There’s one point that sticks out in Lizzie Deignan’s journey with cycling, pregnancy and motherhood: at one point in time, she intended to return to racing after the birth of her daughter, but bow out after the Yorkshire World Championships and the Tokyo Olympics.

Just like it did at the end of 2021, though, retirement seems far from her mind now. Rather than push her towards stopping, Deignan explains how being able to be a mother alongside racing has, in fact, prolonged her career and improved her relationship with the sport. 

“The fact that I’ve had children during my career has enabled my career to be longer,” she says. “So actually, if I hadn’t had Orla in 2018, I wouldn’t still be racing, I’d have stopped thinking that I needed to stop to start a family. The fact that I’ve been able to combine them means that, actually, my career is going to be way longer than I’d ever expected.” 

Moreover, though the balancing act and the practicalities can be hard, it’s clear Deignan has a happier and healthier relationship with racing than she may have had earlier in her career.

“My life doesn’t revolve around cycling as it used to”, she says. “It was very one-dimensional before, and I did find that overwhelming at times. I think I’ve definitely got more balance in my life, which means that I am, I think, more successful than I was before.”

You can’t predict how you’re going to feel about each pregnancy, each comeback, Deignan admits. But it’s clear now that her primary focus is getting back to racing, not thinking about when she may stop.

“You don’t really know until you’re in the situation. But I think for me, going to watch the Tour de France was really good because I was like, ‘I’m not done yet’. I really realised that.”

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