“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.
