Deignan Archives - Irish Peloton

July 27, 2012

Irish cyclists at the Olympics

In London tomorrow, the cycling road race takes place over 250km and provides each of the competitors the opportunity to secure the first medals on offer at the 2012 Olympic games. Representing Ireland are David McCann, Nicolas Roche and Daniel Martin. Although Ireland have never won a medal of any sort in this discipline, the green jerseys are not without their history in this prestigious event. With Roche and McCann both having competed in previous games, Martin is set to be the 30th cyclist to represent Ireland in the Olympic games men’s road race.

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September 7, 2011

Merger, alliance, coalition – what a load of…

Leopard-Trek are due to merge with RadioShack to form yet another ‘superteam’ in the world of pro cycling. While it’s exciting times for all the major players in the merger such as Johan Bruyneel and the Schleck brothers, many riders are being left in the lurch.

Consider RadioShack rider Fumiyuki Beppu’s coy tweet on the day that the merger was announced:

They Don’t Care About Us”..Music By Michael Jackson

Beppu was not one of the riders announced in the press release who will be making the move from RadioShack to the new hybrid team.

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August 29, 2011

Dan Martin – Is he the first Irish rider to….?

On the first day for two years that an Irish rider wins a stage of a Grand Tour…I decided to skip the cycling and go to the pub to watch the football. Murphy’s law!

In fairness, there are worse games I could have chosen to watch instead of sitting in and watching the cycling. Arsenal’s humiliation was fantastic enough but then I heard the news that Dan Martin had won the mountain stage of the Vuelta and taken the king of the mountains jersey. And as a born and bred Dub, if I was inclined to get excited about the Gaelic Football, then it was just about the most perfect day of sport imaginable.

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April 14, 2011

A race named after a beer?

Of all the major races that make up the top tier of the professional cycling calendar there are relatively few which have not been won by either Stephen Roche or Sean Kelly back in the eighties. Roche was a thoroughbred stage racer while Kelly was an unstoppable all-rounder capable of victory on almost any terrain. Between them, they had all the bases covered.

Indeed, Roche had this to say in his book, The Agony and the Ecstacy:

When people compare what I have won to what Kelly has won my reaction is to ask them not to compare but to combine. Instead of asking what each has won, it is better to put our victories together and say, ‘Here are two Irishmen who between them have won almost every race in world cycling’.

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January 21, 2011

Irish riders prepare for big year ahead

Nicolas Roche and John Gadret cross the line together during the 2010 Tour. Roche was unimpressed with Gadret's refusal to lend him a wheel on Stage 15

The 2011 cycling season is already underway as the sprinters dominate in the Tour Down Under in South Australia. Closer to home though, the four Irish riders currently competing in the professional peloton have been preparing themselves for the current season in various training camps around Europe. The renaissance of Irish cycling continues as Nicolas Roche (AG2R-La Mondiale), Daniel Martin (Team Garmin-Cervélo), Philip Deignan (Team RadioShack) and new addition Matt Brammeier (HTC-HighRoad) will all be racing for ProTeams in the coming season. However, each of the four will be approaching the season with very different goals.

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December 1, 2010

A bad year for Philip Deignan

The past year has not been a good one for Irish cyclist Philip Deignan. After winning a stage and finishing 9th overall at the 2009 Vuelta a Espana, a combination of illness and injury scuppered his progress and prevented him from building on this success in 2010. To compound his woes, the Cervelo Test team of which he was a member since its inception in late 2008, folded, leaving Deignan scrambling to find a team willing to employ a rider with a severe lack of results over the past 12 months.

For Deignan the season started in sunny Spain at the Clasica de Almeria where he helped team mate Theo Bos take the win. This was followed by the Vuelta a Murcia where he finished a creditable 25th overall. It was then on to the Volta a Catalunya, an event which saw Deignan’s first of many race withdrawals throughout the year, this time due to illness. He bounced back at the Circuit de la Sarthe where he was in a ten man break on stage one, he ended up in 33rd place overall. Again, a solid performance but the year was about to turn sour for Deignan.

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