It’s clear that heading into the New Zealand Road National Championships having already captured the road race title twice and the time trial title thrice doesn’t make Georgia Williams want another any less. In fact the 28-year-old BikeExchange-Jayco rider says it is still the one race each year she probably heads into with the most nerves each year.
The rest of the season she’s racing either for her teammates or with their support, but when she lines up in the competition for the national title it is by herself, and for herself, which means the pressure falls squarely on her shoulders.
“I’ve just got to enjoy the pressure and do what I can,” Williams told Cyclingnews on the eve of the time trial.
“I have to be really smart. There are girls that have teammates so they can use that to their advantage whereas I just have to be really onto it, have a clear race plan going in and focus on my race.”
Doing what she can has delivered results in recent years, with the rider sweeping up both the time trial and road race title in 2018 and 2021 plus the time trial in 2019. The only year where she hasn’t walked away with at least one jersey emblazoned with the silver fern since 2018 was when she couldn’t race in 2020 after suffering a concussion in the weeks before the event while starting her season in Australia.
In some ways, she thinks that year off may have played into her hands for 2021, when she took the victory after going away on a two rider break in the very early kilometres of the race and then winning a two-up sprint to the line.
“Coming back I maybe wasn’t looked at so much,” Williams said. “I had won before but not in the previous year so there weren’t all eyes on me. This year it is probably going to be all eyes on me, watching my every move which will be really hard.”
Another difference from last year too, has been the training run in. Williams had to work her way back after a crash causing concussion at the Giro d’Italia Donne last season and no sooner did she return to racing at the Paris-Roubaix Femmes than she again crashed and hit her head. That ended her season and left her facing up to another long and complex recovery process, with a return to the bike that couldn’t be rushed.
“I would have liked a few more weeks of training to be at where I was last year, but I’ve had nearly three months at home over summer which has been great,” Williams said in a Cycling New Zealand release.
The New Zealand Championships will be Williams first race in four months with the rider, who is heading into her sixth season with BikeExchange-Jayco, lining up for the 32.5km time trial with a climb of Te Miro on Friday and then the combined U23 and Elite race on Sunday. The women’s road race covers 109km taking in three laps of the circuit which starts and finishes in Cambridge and includes the Maungakawa climb, which contribute more than half of the 488m of elevation gain included in each lap.
