Irish cycling is spoilt for choice at the moment with a group of young guns looking for very likely to emerge as top pro riders. Eddie Dunbar, Mark Downey and Ryan Mullen have all gotten off to a great start and the likes of Michael O’Loughlin and others like him will no doubt show themselves in the weeks and months ahead. Spaniard David Muntaner has been the man driving the Cycling Ireland track cycling programme since he came on board after his retirement in 2015. The results since he was appointed have been incredible - but he believes Ireland is only scratching the surface of its potential.
By Brian Canty
Ireland’s high performance track coach David Muntaner has said he believes Mark Downey can go on to have a great road and track career, whichever he decides to pursue.
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The Majorcan-born 33-year old is a former World Champion on the track himself after winning gold in Cali, Colombia in 2014 and after retiring in 2015 he took up a post with Cycling Ireland, based on the island of his birth.
He lives less than a kilometre from where the Irish high-performance team spend much of their time training and he reckons Downey can go a long way.
“Mark is really good, he always fights for the races and I think he can be a really good road and track rider, even just a really good road rider if that’s what he chooses to pursue,” said Muntaner.
Indeed, despite still only being 20 years old, Downey has amassed three medals at UCI Track World Cups.
He won gold in the Points Race in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands in November and followed it up with another gold in Cali, Colombia just over a fortnight ago.
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Muntaner in his pomp in road TT mode. He is a former world champion on the track (Photo: Rafa Babot)
And in Los Angeles last weekend he won a gold medal in the Madison event alongside Felix English and that came a week after the pair took silver in the same event in Cali.
“I think Mark can still improve a lot, he’s young and getting better year after year.
“A good team is made firstly by being very strong,” continued Muntaner on what makes a strong Madison partnership.
“They need to be very good on technique; it’s the most technical endurance event so they need to work a lot on that and be okay together.
“It took us a long time (to get it right) because they needed to go around Europe racing.
“It’s hard to train the Madison without races so they needed to race and train a lot and now they are starting to understand how the races works and be in control of it.”
We’ll have a longer piece with Muntaner where he talks about his own background in Spain, how he started to work for Cycling Ireland and how he doesn’t want to leave.
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