Cycling Ireland head coach Brian Nugent with Cormac Clarke; the Newry Wheelers man is one of a new breed pushing for inclusion in the Olympic picture (Photo: Guy Swarbrick)
Cycling Ireland’s high performance coach Brian Nugent has said the door is open for new riders, male and female, to enter the governing body’s track programme in advance of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Nugent said that when the next round of the UCI World Cup in Colombia on January 18th and the World Championships a month later are completed, he’ll spend the summer watching riders with a view to bringing more into the set-up.
Asked if the door was closed for possible recruits he said: “Absolutely not. This is a long-term federation objective to get as many people as possible doing road and track.
Advertisement
“Ryan (Mullen) does it, Martyn (Irvine) does it; we’re trying to get the Sean Downeys back.
"We’re trying to deal with it like all the other major nations and have a transferrable process across track and road.
Ryan Mullen has excelled at road and track and Nugent believes others, including those who have done most of their racing at home to date, can do the same (Photo: Kevin Monaghan)
“We had to work really quickly and get our best riders to do the job," he said of filling the team pursuit line ups for the recent UCI World Cup meetings in Mexico and London.
"But once the World Cup and the World Championships are over in February - we can’t change much before that; we’re going to spend the summer looking at the next group of riders that we think could compliment this team.
“I’m not going to lie to you, of course we’d love to be taking these guys to Rio but it’s a really big ask.
“That is a brand new project but we’re ambitious. We’re not going to tell you we’re not looking for guys.
Related News
"It is an ongoing project and it’s going to keep building and building.
"No matter how good or how bad the results are, we’re going to keep going with this and we won’t stop until we get there."
Nugent mentions the name of Mark Downey - above, a junior this year - just as readily as his brother Sean - who competes for An Post-Chainreaction - when thinking out loud about the kind of riders who could force their way into Olympic reckoning (Photo: Sean Rowe)
And he suggested if some of the young riders who have recently featured in the team pursuit line ups slipped out of the reckoning for a short period, they could return again very quickly during the Olympic cycle.
“All the juniors and U23s on this programme are people I’ve watched domestically," Nugent said.
"We’re talking Junior Tour; the likes of Mark Downey and Thomas Fallon came from there.
"We’ve been watching them all domestically and brought in the people who we think have the right attributes.
"That’s going to continue because it’s been successful. We put our young riders in the Tour of Ulster and Rás Mumhan and see how they do.
"There’s a lot of very good domestic races here at home we’re keen to support and that will continue.”
Topics
