9 June 2016, 6am. The date and time are imprinted on Lizzie Armitstead’s mind. That’s when she received the phone call and her world came crashing down. It was UK Anti-Doping (Ukad), ringing to tell her she’d got a third strike: she had failed to be where she said she would be for drug testing three times within a 12-month period. Three strikes and you’re out. Armitstead, silver medallist at the London Olympics and 2015 world champion, faced a potential four-year ban.

Today, she still looks traumatised talking about it. “I went into a state of shock,” she says. “Visibly shaking. ‘No, no, no, this can’t happen.’ It was like being punched in the stomach.” We are in Monaco, where she lives with her husband, Irish cyclist and Team Sky member Philip Deignan. There are a lot of professional cyclists – about 60, including Chris Froome – living in Monaco, and despite being a proud Yorkshirewoman, Armitstead says she will remain here until she retires. It’s not a tax dodge (she rents in Monaco, and pays British taxes); it’s just the perfect place to train.

The sun is beating down, palm trees waving in the wind and Porsches lining the streets. This is where Armitstead was supposed to be when she received that phone call. In fact, she was in Ireland. Did she think the call could be career-ending? “Yes, I did. I was heartbroken. Devastated.”

She was provisionally suspended on 11 July 2016. At that point, the three strikes were not public knowledge. She appealed against the ban at the court of arbitration for sport, claiming that the first strike, received while she was staying at the team hotel on 20 August 2015, during the UCI Women’s Road World Cup in Sweden, had been unfair; she argued that the Ukad officer had not followed the correct procedures.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Celebrating her Olympic silver medal in 2012. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

Elite athletes have to declare an address where testers can find them for one hour every day. It emerged that, at 6am, the officer had asked at reception for her room number without explanation, and the receptionist had refused to give it to him. He didn’t ask any members of her team (her mechanic was working on bikes outside the hotel), and had called her mobile, which was on silent (she was asleep at the time).

The court ruled in her favour: the officer had not tried hard enough to track her down, it found, and she was where she had said she would be (though athletes are advised to provide room numbers). Armitstead knew it was a narrow escape, and breathed a mighty sigh of relief. There was barely a month until the Rio Olympics, and she was the favourite to win gold. The three-strike crisis had taken a lot out of her, but that was the past. Now she could get on with the job of racing.

But it didn’t work out that way. On 2 August, three days before the Rio opening ceremony, the Daily Mail reported that Armitstead had missed three tests, and claimed that the ban had been overturned only with the help of a crack legal team. The narrative suddenly changed: she was lucky not to be banned; the court had looked on her favourably because she was odds-on for gold; if she was Russian, we wouldn’t want her racing in the Olympics.

Armitstead released a defensive statement. She said that the first strike (in Sweden) had simply been unfair; the second, on 15 October 2015, was the result of an administrative error in the off-season (she had filled in the form incorrectly, saying she’d be in Monaco when she would be in Leeds); and the third had happened only because of family illness (Philip’s father had cancer; they had travelled to Ireland at the last minute and she had forgotten to update her schedule). She never failed a test, she pointed out; she missed them. But by now the press was on the warpath.

***

Rewind to 2012, and Armitstead was the darling of women’s road racing, not least because she brought home Britain’s first medal of the London Olympics, crossing the line in the Mall in the pouring rain only two bike lengths behind Marianne Vos of the Netherlands. But there was something more: her character. Armitstead appeared to be built in the mould of old-fashioned Olympians: straight-talking, gritty, grounded. She was a hard worker, didn’t think she was God’s gift, and hadn’t been made rich by sponsorship deals. She was one of us, only faster.

How that changed. There was no evidence Armitstead had taken drugs, but it’s impossible not to associate missed tests with doping suspicions. Surely you couldn’t mess up three tests in a year? After all, most elite athletes get tested only three times in that period. By the time of the road race in Rio, British sports writers were saying it would be wrong for Armitstead to win the gold for Britain, that it would carry a cloud of suspicion. Prominent British cyclists weighed in. Nicole Cooke said she had missed only one test in 14 years herself, adding, “It’s always the athlete’s responsibility to make sure he or she is available for testing.” Later, Bradley Wiggins told the Guardian “there was no excuse” for Armitstead missing the tests, and that her explanation was “ludicrous”. They looked as if they were hanging her out to dry. Armitstead didn’t win a medal at Rio: she finished fifth, lower than predicted but a considerable achievement in light of all that had gone on.

I was embarrassed because I had to wear Lycra and bright yellow tops. It was an old man’s sport. It wasn’t cool

Eight months on, Armitstead is smiling, lean and fit, dreaming of becoming world champion again. Since Rio, she has married Philip and written her autobiography with the Guardian cycling correspondent William Fotheringham (as Lizzie Armitstead, although she now mostly calls herself Lizzie Deignan). She says all the bad stuff is behind her, though of course it isn’t. She is only beginning to recover her reputation – ironically, at a time when that of British Cycling has reached its nadir, mired in scandals over sexism, cover-ups and TUEs, the “therapeutic use exemptions” under which athletes’ doctors prescribe substances that would normally be banned.

At 28, Armitstead feels as if she is closing in on the end of her career, but it doesn’t seem long since she started out. When she was 15, British Cycling’s Olympic talent team visited her school in Leeds, looking for promising athletes. Armitstead was pulled out of her maths class for a trial. She was involved in all the school sports, and had enjoyed cross-country running as a pre-teen, but had never competed at a particularly high level. They put her on a bike and she raced away. She didn’t have a clue she was so fast or strong.

Armitstead did well in her GCSEs, but by sixth form was too busy racing to focus on A-levels. Although she devoted herself to cycling, she didn’t adore it back then – anything but. “I was embarrassed, because I had to wear Lycra and bright yellow tops. It was an old man’s sport. It wasn’t cool.” When I ask what has given her most pleasure in her career, her answer surprises me: “The fact that now what I do is cool. I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years, and in that time there’s been a massive change. People can understand what I do now and respect it.” She says she stopped being embarrassed only when she was given her first Great Britain kit.

She started to love the strategy of it. She refers to racing as a game rather than a sport. “It’s like chess on wheels. Imagine your energy as a big block of sugar. You can only chip away at it a couple of times, and you need to use that energy at the right time. If you have the instinct and logic to attack 20km into a race, it might look like a strange move to somebody else, but if it pays off, there is nothing better. It’s very tactical. On the road, it’s not always the strongest person who wins.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Victoria Pendleton (on left) at the Track Cycling World Championships in 2008. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

She has always prided herself on her independence. At 17, she learned to drive, got herself a car and headed off to Belgium for the junior world championships. There was no nannying from her accountant father and teacher mother. Nor was there any romance to her cycling – this wasn’t a dream or a calling; she already regarded it as a job.

Does she find training dull? “If you’re just doing low-intensity long rides, it is boring, but the rest of the time you’re suffering too much to be bored.” She says she enjoys the pain.

We are sitting on the veranda of the Monte Carlo Bay hotel, overlooking the still, blue Mediterranean. A waitress gives us a cherry cake on a petite tray. Armitstead tastes it and grimaces. “Ugh… it’s got perfume in it!” She is surprisingly giggly. “It tastes like a rose. It tastes like my grandma’s perfume!”

Does she find it strange living here? “It’s a massive contradiction to my upbringing and who I think I am. But it serves a purpose.”

Why is it such a good place to be? “The climate. If you’re riding for between three and five hours every day in Leeds, you’ll inevitably get ill. The sport is challenging enough without that as well.”

Most days follow the same pattern: she and Philip treat themselves to a “massive” breakfast, go off cycling individually, exhaust themselves, get sore, return home, make supper, watch TV on the sofa, go to bed. At weekends, she leaves Monaco to race all over Europe with her Dutch team, Boels-Dolmans, then returns to more of the same.

I’m curious about the breakfast. How big is it exactly? “It’s a fancy porridge. We have an apple in it, almond milk, coconut oil, normal milk, raisins, nuts.” That doesn’t sound so huge. How many of those single-portion bags of porridge?

“Four. You’re talking about those Oat So Simple things? They’re ridiculous. For birds. Yeah, four!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With team-mate Nicole Cooke at the 2011 Road World Championships. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

Armitstead knows she lives in a bubble, and says that is part of the appeal. “My career is selfish.” If she were at home, she’d feel guilt-ridden. She talks about going to a friend’s wedding a couple of years ago and being incapable of enjoying it. “I was anxious the whole weekend because I was missing training, anxious that it was going to affect my performance.”

She has always been known for speaking her mind. In 2011, she accused former world champion and team-mate Nicole Cooke of “riding for herself” at the Road Cycling World Championships. Road racing is a strange sport, with its queen and worker bees. For the queen bee to win a race, the worker bees, known as the domestiques, must play their part, protecting the queen from attacks, setting the pace and then falling back, leading them out of the peleton when the time is right. In this particular race, Cooke was a domestique. After she was caught up in a crash, Armitstead said it was Cooke’s job to pace her back to the front of the peleton, then lead her out at the front of the sprint. Instead, Cooke sprinted off to finish fourth, ahead of Armitstead.

After the race, Armitstead, then only 22, said of Cooke, “I’ve never seen her ride for a team-mate.” It was a brave thing to say about the then Olympic champion.

There was also something sad about it. Cooke had been Armitstead’s hero as a young cyclist: she had a poster of her on her bedroom wall.” Did they resolve their differences? “It was resolved to a certain extent. Nicole is a fierce athlete. I’ve never seen someone with such a will to win. It’s inspiring, the way she is. She just wants to win so badly, and that’s why she was so successful. So she was never going to change.”

“Going into the Olympics in London,” Armitstead claims, “the resolve was that Nicole would have her own plan and the rest of the team would have a different plan, so in that way it was resolved, yes.”

But you’re also a fierce competitor? “I’m not as fierce as Nicole.” Do you wish you were? “I think I would win more if I was like that, yeah. There are many types of athlete. Nicole is fierce, as is Marianne Vos and Eddy Merckx. People who you think are down and out, 20km to go they’ve been dropped, they’re not coming back, and suddenly they’re back, and they’re winning the race, because they just want it so badly.” She sounds like a fangirl. “There are times in races where I’ve looked across at somebody like Marianne Vos, and I can see in her eyes, she wants it more than me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lizzie Armitstead: ‘I was heartbroken.’ This and top photograph: Rebecca Marshall for the Guardian

On the other hand, Armitstead says, she is goal-oriented. “I can go to some races and work for a team-mate and not even look at the results to see where I finished. I am driven by very specific goals. I can play Monopoly and happily lose.”

Do you see that as a weakness? “No, weakness is the wrong word. It’s just who I am. I can’t change it.”

Armitstead has always said that family means more to her than cycling, even if she devotes more time to the latter. Maybe that’s why we took her to our hearts before her fall.

It’s still less than two years since Armitstead was crowned world champion in Richmond, Virginia, crossing the line in tears after outsprinting the Dutchwoman Anna van der Breggen. Astonishingly, she reveals in her book that the British Cycling team manager, Brian Stephens, who had been appointed her coach, was not even there because he had prioritised the men’s junior team.

How did she feel about that? “I was really disappointed, because I’d done everything right going into that competition, and I just needed them to get it right for me on the day. And they didn’t. There was a lack of leadership. They let me down big time.”

Her book is at its best when documenting sexism in cycling, an issue that has come under scrutiny since fellow cyclist Jess Varnish alleged, in April 2016, that she had been bullied by then technical director of British Cycling, Shane Sutton. There are numerous examples in Armitstead’s book, including: women having to borrow helmets from men and being told they would be banned if they did not return them, and a lack of coaches.

She tells of one appalling experience on tour. It was 11.30pm, she was in bed and there was a knock on her door. One of the management team told her to go downstairs to the bar, where they were having an impromptu party for one of the male cyclists. She found she was the only woman there, and she was “left with no choice” but to take part in a dance competition with the birthday boy – a Wii game where you followed the moves on a computer screen – while all the other male riders sat on bar stools and watched. In the book, Armitstead, who was in her early twenties at the time, says she felt confused and foolish, but didn’t know why – surely they were just having fun? “It was only later, when I really thought about it, I thought, ‘No, that wasn’t a laugh.’” She’d been their plaything.

For Armitstead, the most important inequality has been pay. “My prize money for winning the 2015 world championship was £2,000, and the men’s was £20,000. But the good thing from that is this year it changed. We have equal money.” She agrees with critics who say women’s road racing is not competitive enough, but believes this is inevitable when women are given little incentive to compete professionally. “On the road riding side, we need a minimum wage. You need everybody to be a professional in every sense of the word. They need to earn a wage that allows them to recover properly. There are people petitioning for a Tour de France, which is great and should happen. But first of all you need a big enough pool of athletes who can train for the hardest race in the world full-time.”

I am human and I made a human error. It was not about lying or manipulating

Still, Armitstead resents being seen as a spokeswoman on sexism. “Ultimately, I want to be world champion again, and that is the best way for me to represent my sport. Win it fiercely, win it impressively and excitingly. The equivalent man isn’t sat at every interview defending his sex, so I don’t feel that’s what I have to do.”

I tell her about a friend who adores road cycling. Before leaving for Monaco, I asked her what she would ask Armitstead. “Why did you miss those tests? I’m fed up with riders ruining my sport,” she replied. Can Armitstead understand how she feels?

“Yes, of course, and I feel terrible for contributing to that cloud of suspicion. All I can ask is that people try to understand that one mistake on my behalf does not undermine all the good work I have done towards cycling. I will continue to win races and be one of the most tested athletes in the sport. That’s all I can do.”

Did she have nightmares about missing tests? “I did. Do. Yes. Missing-the-doorbell nightmares.”

I wonder if people would have been more forgiving if you’d shown more humility, I say. If, rather than simply explaining it away with cold logic, you’d just held your hands up and said, “I was an absolute idiot and I don’t know how I let it happen.”

“But was I an idiot for missing a box on a form?” she asks. “And I don’t think that would have been a good enough explanation for people. Because of the history of doping in the sport, it wouldn’t have sufficed. I needed to explain how that could happen – and it does happen to so many people.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Becoming world champion in Virginia in 2015. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

I’m convinced Armitstead is not a drugs cheat, but I’m still at a loss as to how she could have made such catastrophic slips. I can’t imagine anybody more organised.

“I could kick myself and kick myself about it, but at the same time I am human and I made a human error. If I’m going to hate myself for the rest of my life for something like that, then it’s not worth it. Because it was not about lying or manipulating.”

Did she take too much on? If she’d had a full-time coach or assistant, would this have happened? “If you’re balancing plates and something goes wrong, you look in the mirror and think, ‘I needed help and I didn’t ask for it.’ That is definitely the case. I should have had more help trying to manage things.”

How has she changed her life? “I travel less. I have fewer sponsorship commitments. I’ve simplified my life. I reach out to friends and family more, and explain that I’m stressed out about this or that. And we talk things through more than I used to.”

One of the problems with the strike in Sweden was that her phone was on silent at 6am because, she said, she didn’t want to wake her team-mate. Is it always on the loudest it can go now? “Yes! My phone’s always on loud!” She laughs, then says, actually, it’s irrelevant: “UK Anti-Doping aren’t allowed to ring us.”

What devastated her most was that, once news of the missed tests emerged, many people assumed she was a doper. “Inevitably, the headlines have doping in them. It wasn’t a doping story or doping situation, but obviously they come together. I’ve never even had a TUE. As an athlete, you learn to be criticised on your performance, and that’s hard. But when somebody is questioning who are you are, your upbringing, all your values, and you have no defence against it… It was a very difficult time.” She gulps. “All you can say is, ‘I don’t cheat.’”

Ironically, one of her fiercest critics is now the subject of much speculation himself, after leaks by the hackers Fancy Bears revealed Wiggins’ TUEs for the powerful corticosteroid triamcinolone to treat pollen allergies before three major tours in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Over the past six months, British Cycling and Team Sky (the team responsible for much of Britain’s recent cycling success, which shares a home and many of the same personnel with British Cycling) have been hit by scandal after scandal. Last month it was revealed that the then doctor for Team Sky and British Cycling, Richard Freeman, had failed to keep proper records of drugs given to riders. Varnish, meanwhile, called for the board of British Cycling to resign, after claims that the findings of an investigation into her allegations against Sutton had been sanitised.

As Armitstead says, the tests that she has taken have always come up clean. Does she think the public is now suspicious of British cyclists in general? “I don’t know if people are suspicious of cycling or more specifically of Bradley. It’s heartbreaking if they are, because there have been so many success stories.”

Is she surprised that British Cycling and Team Sky could not account for their medical records? “Yes. As an athlete, it’s really concerning to know that my medical records are not even stored properly. There was only one doctor working for British Cycling for 80 elite athletes. Perhaps that’s where it went wrong.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marrying fellow cyclist and Team Sky member Philip Deignan in her home town of Otley last year. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Right now, it feels as if Armitstead might ultimately ride out this storm more successfully than some senior members of British Cycling. Later this month, she’s back on her bike for the Amstel Gold Race in the Netherlands, a race she is determined to win for the princely sum of about €200 (her team share prize money). Before long, she thinks she would like to have children. But if she has a sporty daughter, she says she’d encourage her to go into tennis rather than cycling. “There are more equal opportunities. If she was going to choose a sport to be a professional in, tennis would be a better option.”

I ask if there’s anything else she’d like to talk about. Yes, she says, “I would like to say thank you to the enormous amount of people who did support me. Obviously, it’s easier to focus on the negative.” Who is she talking about? “People at home in Otley, friends and family, who were seeing it all.” Armitstead has been calm and measured all afternoon. Only now does she start to choke up. “It was awful for them. As a parent, my mum just said it was horrific… people being horrible about your daughter and you have no way of protecting them.”

I ask her if she thinks anything good has come of it. She struggles her way to an answer. “It’s just strengthened the values I already had. And it’s given me the confidence in who I am and the things I stand for.” How? “Because we got through it,” she says. “If you can get through that, you think, ‘We’ll be all right.’”

• This article was amended on 2 June 2017 to correct a personal detail.



• Steadfast: My Autobiography, by Lizzie Armitstead, is published on 20 April by Blink Publishing at £20. To order a copy for £17, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.