Curse of the rainbow jersey? What curse?

Armitstead made winning a habit in 2015. Victories came consistently throughout the season, from the Ladies Tour of Qatar in February to the World Championships in September. But if winning was a habit last year, it’s become standard fare in 2016 – Armitstead has been dominant since pulling on the rainbow jersey in Richmond. That was a race which Armitstead left with not only a gold medal hanging around her neck, but the confidence to dictate a race.

“Getting it right on that one day and delivering what I said I wanted to, everything coming together under huge pressure and being able to perform was huge,” Armitstead tells RoadCyclingUK. At the time, she’d barely believed she’d done it, crossing the finish line agasp, hand across her mouth after winning the sprint from a nine-rider breakaway group.

“I’m excited to see Emma again and work together,” says Armitstead, who is an ambassador for Wattbike. “If we both get selected for Rio we’ll be quite an intimidating team.” While Armitstead will be Great Britain’s team leader for road race, Pooley will be among of the favourites for the hilly time trial, a discipline in which she won Olympic silver in 2008 and the world title in 2010.

“Emma would have been mad not to come out of retirement for this [time trial] course, it suits her perfectly,” Armitstead says. “And because we’re quite different athletes, our strategy going into the road race will mean we’d have two cards to play. We have every base covered between us, which is quite exciting.”

Saturday’s women’s race follows the same 135km course as stage two of the men’s event, which will take place later in the day. With a prize fund of £50,000 for the race, and a record pot of more than £75,000 on offer for the first RideLondon Classique in August, Armitstead is proud British events are providing a “blueprint” of how to run women’s races, but has challenged organisers to up the ante in 2017. What’s the next step for the women’s Tour de Yorkshire?

“A hard stage,” she says. “Either stage one or stage three of the men’s race this year – they’re pretty brutal.”

Women’s cycling is getting “stronger and stronger”, Armitstead says, and she believes the depth of talent is only going to grow as the sport gets more professional. “A harder parcours will allow the women’s peloton to showcase what we can do,” she says.

“It’s great that we have TV coverage but on a sprint stage I’m worried that it could look like women’s cycling is boring, because everyone’s waiting for a sprint finish. That’s inevitable, as it will be on the men’s stage, so it’d be great if it was on a more challenging course.”

Next stop: Rio

After the Tour de Yorkshire Armitstead will return to Monaco and re-focus for Rio with a “massive block of training working in the mountains” through May, which will also allow her to lose a couple of kilos to prepare for the particular challenge of the Olympic road race. She will then race the Women’s Tour, National Championships, Giro d’Italia Femminile and La Course. Each race is a stepping stone to Rio and Armitstead admits it’s difficult for Saturday August 6 not to dominate her thoughts.

“For me it makes sense that it’s so overwhelming,” she says. “It has to be.” But while Armitstead is determined to win gold in Rio, neither is she getting carried away with the idea standing on the top step of the podium.

Armitstead has some time until she can escape from cycling. This year is a particularly hard season, she says, due to the campaign extending into October with a late World Championships. In truth, however, Armitstead has had little opportunity to think about her season after Rio.

“I should, shouldn’t I?” she says with a wry smile. Just as she ended 2015 having achieved her goal of becoming world champion, Armitstead is now focussed solely on closing 2016 as Olympic champion.