LONDON — British cyclist Lizzie Deignan, a former world champion who won the ‘triple crown’ of monuments, is retiring with immediate effect because she is expecting her third child.
Deignan, who was the first British athlete to win a medal on home soil at the 2012 London Olympics, had previously announced that she would call it quits at the end of the season.
But she brought forward her retirement, her team said.
“The Deignan family is growing,” the Lidl-Trek team said. “The former world champion, who announced at the end of last year that 2025 would be her final season, has shared the joyful news that she is expecting her third child, a moment that subsequently marks Deignan’s immediate retirement from the peloton.”
The 36-year-old Deignan competed in her fourth Olympics in Paris last year and was 12th in the road race. She was successful on the track first and then morphed into a one-day race specialist.
Deignan won the rainbow jersey at the 2015 world championships, one of her many professional road victories at the biggest races.
She’s won all three women’s monuments: The Tour of Flanders in 2016, Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2020 and the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes in 2021.
Deignan put her career on pause in 2018 when she had her first child, and planned to retire earlier but was convinced to carry on by her team.
She made a successful comeback in 2019, winning The Women’s Tour in her first year back to top-level competition. She missed the 2022 season to welcome her second child before returning for a second time in 2023.
