Lara Gillespie (UAE Team ADQ) has prepared for her first Tour de France with a "high intensity, high volume" camp in Mallorca under the watchful eye of her first coach, Martin O'Loughlin. She told stickybottle the 10 days away whipped her into shape as she needed to make up ground after missing a block of recent racing due to injury.
Gillespie is among three Irish riders in the field for the Tour, kicking off today in Vannes, Brittany, alongside Mia Griffin (Roland Le Dévoluy) and Fiona Mangan (Winspace Orange Seal).
They are the first Irish women to ever ride the race and the history-making step they take today was not wasted on Wicklow woman Gillespie.
"I'm super grateful and I feel really privileged," she told stickybottle just hours before the opening stage. "It's a great opportunity and it's a great team we have here.
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"I'm buzzing to be one of the first Irish girls to be at the Tour. It's really, really exciting to be a part of and I'm happy to see Fiona and Mia in there, and we can experience this whirlwind together."
Gillespie had a storming start to the season, with a 3rd place finish on a stage at UAE Tour, her first World Tour stage race of the season. She followed that up with a string of top results on the roads of Europe.
However, though she finished 12th at Elmos Dwars door het Hageland (1.1) in the Netherlands in mid June, she crashed in the final and remounted to take a result after a very hard day out.
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But the consequences of that crash were not shrugged off as easily as Gillespie would have hoped. Instead, lingering injury meant she was forced to rest for a prolonged period, forcing her to miss the National Road Championships and other races.
After her fall on June 14th, she did not race again until last weekend, when she rode two one-day races in France; making the breakaway in La Périgord Ladies (1.1) and finishing 9th in La Picto-Charentaise (1.1).
Those two outings appeared to confirm Gillespie had won the race against time to start the Tour in good condition and she credits the camp in Mallorca with helping her build that form.
"I had that unfortunate crash over a month ago now," she said. "I landed on my sacrum and I had fluid in the bone. So I didn't break anything but I had to really rest after that crash, a lot.
"But I had a really nice ten days in Mallorca with Martin motor pacing me. He was my first coach so that was really cool. And I knew if I left that camp sprinting well, after doing high intensity, high volume, then I could get through the Tour.
"And that's what happened and so I'm here now. And we've got that really strong team and really good energy. We're ready to fight for some stages, so it's really cool."
Gillespie’s team’s general classification leader will be Italian national champion, Elisa Longo Borghini. She does into the event having already won the recent Giro d’Italia and also claimed victory in UAE Tour earlier in the year.
Ireland’s Gillespie will not focus on the general classification at the Tour, as she is not a climber. However, her 4th place finished on the penultimate stage at the Vuelta in May shows where her best chance could come; a chaotic finish in a slightly uphill sprint from a group.
