Niamh Fisher-Black tells me that she felt “frustrated” when she crossed the finish line and became the first ever female under-23 World Champion. This isn’t the emotion usually synonymous with winning a rainbow jersey, but Fisher-Black hadn’t won in a normal race. She’d crossed the line in 12th place, left, like the rest of the riders in the front group, in slight disbelief about Annemiek van Vleuten’s surprise winning attack.
“I wasn’t aware straightaway at first when I crossed the line [that I’d won the under-23 race.] I was feeling a little bit of frustration because of the crazy finish of Annemiek,” Fisher-Black explains. “But then, pretty quickly, a few people came up to me, and they told me and I was like okay, that’s pretty cool.”
Fisher-Black’s immediate reaction to winning the U23 title affirms that this competition wasn’t at the forefront of her focus during the race. A rider who has been rubbing shoulders with the best climbers in the world in punchy one-day races and stage races for the last two seasons, the 22-year-old explains that she didn’t go to Australia with a focus on winning the U23 title, instead, she believed she had an outside chance to take a medal in the elite category.
“I wanted to be part of the elite race,” Fisher-Black says. ‘From the course I knew I could be part of it. The thing is with this under-23 jersey being within that race, it speaks for itself on such an attritional course like that. If you’re there playing with the big girls, then you’re also in with a shot for the under-23 jersey. I didn’t have to think about it too much.”
Image: Alex Whitehead/SWpix
When the race began to reach its climax in the final two laps of the Wollongong city circuit, Fisher-Black was close to keeping up with the front group of five riders who proved themselves to be the strongest on the short, punchy climb. In the last five kilometres of the race, Fisher-Black found herself in the second reduced group on the road – alongside the eventual elite race winner Van Vleuten – and put in a big turn on the front to try and reach the leading five riders in front. People speculated that she did this because Great Britain’s Pfeiffer Georgi was in the group behind, another U23 rider who would have challenged Fisher-Black for the U23 title.
“No, at that point, all I was thinking about was the real race. We were in the last five kilometres and there was a small bunch just ahead of us that we…