An Irish woman has never ridden the Tour de France. But tomorrow, when the 2025 edition rolls out of Vannes for nine stages of racing, no fewer than three Irish riders will be in the peloton. They are blazing a trail and forever securing their places as true pioneers in Irish cycling, indeed Irish sport.
Fiona Mangan (Winspace Orange Seal), Mia Griffin (Roland Le Dévoluy) and Lara Gillespie (UAE Team ADQ) are the riders who have made the grade. Others will come in their wake in the years to come. And the Irish cycling community will will them on just as much. But these three will forever be ‘the first’ to take on the iconic event. Nobody will join their exclusive group. Ever.
For Limerick’s Fiona Mangan, this is a sort of homecoming. Her mother, Armelle, is French and Mangan’s maternal grandparents live in Angers, where stage 3 finshes on Monday.
“My parents have a little camper van and they are going to travel around France,” Mangan told stickybottle of Armelle and John following the race. “My grandparents live, literally, 400 metres from the finish line of stage 3, and they’re in their mid 90s. They can literally walk outside the door and see the race and my sister will go with them.”
Mangan’s cycling journey has been rapid. The 29-year-old Limerick woman played Gaelic football in a previous life, with Mungret St Paul’s GAA, before she moved into triathlon. That transition only came about when she went to Atlanta in the US for college – to study to be a biomedical engineer.
On a trip back to Ireland in 2020, with sports facilities closed due to the pandemic, she focused on her cycling, training with Greenmount Cycling Academy. She says the club’s two driving forces – Alan Loftus and Vinnie Gleeson – pushed her on then and continue to do so now, going out of her way to credit them.
She entered the National Road Championships in 2020 and finished 10th. The following season she went to Spain at the start of the year but only got in one race before the pandemic closed down the scene there. Back home, later in the year, she won Cycling Ireland’s National Road Series and the Newcastle West Stage Race, taking three of the four stages.
Since then she has ridden for three UCI Continental teams; IBCT in 2022, Soltec Team in 2023; Cynisca Cycling for half of 2023 and all of 2024. And this year she stepped up to French ProContinental team, Winspace Orange Seal after winning the road race and TT at last year’s National Road Championships in her native Limerick.
Though a crash at Omloop Nieuwsblad WE (1.WWT) on March 1st wiped out her spring classics, due to broken bones, she got back in time to ride Paris-Roubaix. More recently she won a stage at Volta a Portugal Feminina (2.2), her first international victory.
And though this year’s Tour will be her first appearance in the iconic race, it won’t be her first Grand Tour. She rode the Vuelta two years ago with Soltec Team.
She said she wasn’t assured of her place on the Winspace Orange Seal team in the Tour until very recently. However, as her form improved, her team’s confidence in her grew. And she was told she was picked for the Tour, just before the National Road Championships in Meath at the end of last month.
“It hasn’t really hit me that I’m doing it,” she said. “Once I’m amidst the chaos, in the buzz of it all, it’ll hit home then. I think, as a cyclist, you’re looking ahead week-to-week. And in one way, it’s just like another race. And I want to keep it like that too, so I don’t get too carried away.”
She recently went to see some of the men’s Tour de France and was in Le Mont-Dore Puy de Sancy when Ben Healy took the yellow jersey there on stage 10.
“It was unreal,” she said. “And seeing that… I said ‘fuck I’m actually doing this in a few weeks time’… not to that extent, but that was a good reminder. And I’m glad I went to see that stage because you realise how big the Tour is.”
Looking ahead to the nine stages in the women’s race, Mangan said, for the most part, she “really likes” the courses.
“There’s a couple of stages that are really, really hard and I know for a fact that I’ll be in the groupetto,” she says. “And I think I’m just preparing myself for some really hard racing.
“I’m lucky in the sense the team is really supportive, it’s very much family-based. And when you’re in the bubble of the team, it’s the same little bubble that it I was in in January, February… in every other race through the season.
“So it’s like a little safe haven being with the girls and being with the staff. And I know I’ll find familiarity with them. But I think I’m just going in with a bit of naiveity, which is maybe a good thing. That’s how I feel I’ve been in my whole career, in some ways.
“Yes, I would say I’m a bit more nervous than with other races, just because I know the level is going to be hard. But having done World Tour races this year, I sort of know what to expect from them. And I know the Tour will be even harder than that.”
