'It was only my third ever gravel race' – Lizzie Hermolle and Connor Swift win British National Gravel Championships

In just her third taste of gravel racing, Lizzie Hermolle (DAS-Hutchinson) won her maiden national title on Sunday at the British National Gravel Championships in North Yorkshire.

The event in Dalby Forest, held on a 113.6km course with more than 2,200m of elevation, also saw Ineos Grenadiers’ Connor Swift retain his crown, outsprinting his cousin and team-mate Ben Swift in the finale of the men’s race.

An autumnal chill descended on the forest over the weekend, compounding an already attritional route. In the elite women’s race, the event’s curtain-closer, Olympic triathlete Georgia Taylor-Brown rode for 90km in a solo move, at one point gaining a four-minute lead, before she was tagged on the last of four laps by a surging Hermolle.

“There were 16 climbs, and I was quietly confident I could hold a good pace until the end of the race, hoping that the others would start to tire,” Hermolle told Cycling Weekly.

“On the final climb, I was on my own and [Taylor-Brown] was in sight. I just put an effort in to pass her, make sure she couldn’t stay with me, and then it was pretty chill to the finish.”

The victory came 11 months after Hermolle’s gravel debut at an event in Spain.

“My coach is Sean Yates, and he told me to buy a gravel bike last year,” she said. “I did the UCI gravel race in Wales last week and came fourth, which was cool, but yesterday was only my third ever gravel race… It’s pretty cool that my first gravel win was National Champs.”

Connor Swift entered his title defence in the men’s race just three weeks after fracturing his elbow at August’s Renewi Tour. The 29-year-old bridged across to his breakaway cousin Ben on the final lap, and the race came down to a battle between the start list’s two WorldTour riders.

“Once I got across to Ben, it was just a case of, ‘How do you want to play it, mate?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, we’ll race it’,” the defending champion said.

“He used to do track, and in the end, he wouldn't give me a turn in that last kilometre. He laid off me and I was like, ‘He’s going to get a jump in a minute.’ So I thought if I went first, carried a bit of speed, hopefully I’d be able to hold him off, and I just managed to.”

The weekend also played host to the inaugural British Gravel Time Trial Championships, which were won by Abi Smith (Picnic PostNL) and Jenson Young (Ribble Outliers).