Carys Lloyd is on her half-term holiday. She’s sitting her A-levels next month and is meant to be spending this Easter period revising. Instead, she’s just ridden and finished Paris-Roubaix while still at school. “It’s kinda crazy: I’m still learning, sitting with my peers, but also doing stuff like this. It’s just amazing.”

Having turned eighteen on New Year’s Eve, Lloyd joined Movistar on a three-year contract and has already ridden some of the biggest Classics: Omloop Nieuwsblad, Brugge-De Panne, Gent-Wevelgem and now the Hell of the North, unsurprisingly as the youngest debutant. This is not what 18-year-olds do. “It’s hard to sometimes think about it. Like when I go away, I have to tell my teachers, ‘oh yeah, I’m just off to the UAE’. They’re like, ‘oh, what are you doing there?’ and when I say I’m racing, I think some of them can’t get their head around it.”

Lloyd, who hails from Maidstone in south-east England and is another VC Londres alumni, was thinking that her maiden Roubaix was “going to be nice and chill for the first 60k, and then maybe once we’d get to the cobbles we’d absolutely go for it.” She was right about the second part, but very wrong about the first part. “It was a helluva lot harder!” she laughed.

This article was published by Rouleur during the 2025 Paris-Roubaix. You can read the full article here.