The Good Old Days

I recently came across this photo of  myself on a friends Facebook gallery. It is taken during the Rás in 2002. The Rás is a UCI 2.2 ranked 9 day tour of Ireland. It has been run every year since 1952, so 2011 will be the 60th edition. The race is usually run in the last week in May. As you can see from the photo it is usually cold, wet and windy. Half the riders in the race were like me, amateurs riding for an Irish club team and the other half a mix of professionals and national team selections. For the first 50 years the race was amateur, it became part of the UCI European tour in 2000. Previous winners have included Stephen Roche and current German star Tony Martin. The last amateur to win was Philip Cassidy in 1999. In 1987 after Roche won the world championship, in an after race interview he was compared to the great Eddy Merckx who was the only other rider to win Giro, Tour and world championships in the same year, Roche commented that while that was true “Merckx never won the Rás”. In my inglorious cycling career I rode this race only twice, the first time ended in the back of an ambulance and the second in 132nd place out of 134 finishers. It is a week of the most unimaginable suffering and groveling in the gutters trying to hold the wheels of professional riders that left me at the end wondering why. What was the point? It had been an ambition for years to ride it and when I had finally finished it, it was a huge anticlimax. In the years that have passed since then many of the pros that rode the years that I did have been caught for doping. As an amateur race it was unique as a 9 day long national tour for amateur riders, now it is just another UCI race, with all the problems that go along with that.

Cold, wet & windy for 9 days around Ireland.

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Tagged as: Cycling, ireland, ras