By Shane Stokes
Irish rider Archie Ryan goes into the final stage of the Tour de l’Avenir on today with his sights firmly focused on two targets: taking a stage win, and finishing in the top three of the race.
Ryan put in the best performance of his career thus far on Saturday’s penultimate stage of the event, which is regarded as an under 23 version of the Tour de France and which has been won by some of the biggest names in cycling.
He and the Belgian rider Cian Uijtdebroeks were the strongest out of the field on the tough mountain stage, with the two of them leaving the rest of the field behind before the finish atop the famed climb of La Toussuire.
Uijtdebroeks proved best inside the final 500 metres, hitting the line two seconds clear of Ryan, but the 20-year-old Wicklow rider’s performance was hugely impressive.
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He had mixed feelings afterwards.
“It was a really good day. Happy enough…well, happy and disappointed, because it was pretty close to a win, which would have been nice," Ryan told stickybottle.
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"But I can’t complain at coming second at this sort of level, so I’m happy enough. And especially from where I’ve come from with injury, etcetera.”
Ryan was dogged by knee problems in 2020 and 2021 but recovered and has had a strong season with the development team attached to the Jumbo-Visma World Tour squad.
The Tour de l’Avenir is for national teams and he is competing in the green of Ireland. He jumped up four places to fifth overall as a result of his performance on Saturday. He is two minutes and 54 seconds behind new race leader Uijtdebroeks, and just 54 seconds off a place on the podium.
He is ruing time lost earlier in the race, knowing he might otherwise be far closer to the race lead, if not heading up the general classification.
“The GC position is good too. I lost a load of time in the TTT and on the medium mountain day, stage 6,” he said. “I lost 30 seconds on all the GC (general classification) boys because of bad positioning on the final climb before the descent to the finish. So it put me in a bad position when I was three minutes down before today, and now I am (at) 2 minutes 50.
“I’m sitting fifth overall, which is nice. I’d love to make it onto the podium, but tomorrow’s stage is a weird one where there is a really, really big climb, and then a super long descent off the back of it, off the Iseran (the Col de Iseran), and then a three k climb up to the finish.
“I will try to make up some time again, but I don’t know if a shorter finish will be enough to gain a minute on the guy who is third and 30 seconds on the guy who is fourth. It will be interesting anyway, I’ll give it a good crack.”
He knows exactly what he wants from the day. “The goal tomorrow is to move up GC or try to go for the stage. It was pretty close today, so it would be nice to try and go one better.”
