John Hodge wins the Masters 40 Irish title, having come back to cycling and gone from A4 to A1 in a season.
Having raced as a schoolboy before giving up the sport, John Hodge has capped his comeback today with an Irish road race title.
The Dungarvan CC man made his way into the winning breakaway in the Masters 40 event at the National Road Race Championships in Co Wexford.
With the main field bearing down on the leaders coming up the finishing straight, he had the beating of those he was with.
He took a clear win in the sprint, with Paul McCarter (Donegal Bay CC) 2nd and Anthony Doyle (Strata 3-VeloRevolution) in 3rd place.
Hodge goes home to Dungarvan a national champion and says he can’t quite believe it.
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Asked if he felt he was going to win in the closing metres he said: “To be honest I didn’t know. I was afraid to look around. I was just looking at the line.
“I couldn’t honestly say ‘I have this’. But I felt ‘I can’t beaten today’; you just wanted it so much. I wasn’t backing off until I got to the line and that was that.
“But certainly, coming into the last few kilometres there was no way I was saying to myself ‘this is mine’ or anything like that. The lads were strong too...
“I couldn’t believe I’d won; there’s a bit of relief too. In the build up all week you are thinking about it; playing the scenarios in your head. But of course it never plays out how you think it’s going to.”
A father of two – Sam (7) Grace (4); Hodge’s wife Neva and children were there today.
“They were over the moon; the wife couldn’t contain herself, so she couldn’t,” he laughed
Having raced U14 and U16, he was a contemporary in Waterford of Olympian and former top pro Ciaran Power.
But as Power hit the pro ranks Hodge drifted away from cycling.
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“I gave it up and got back into triathlons in my mid 30s,” explained the now 41-year-old.
“I was always strong on the bike so I got back into the road racing and got a few results; that was about three years ago.”
Asked if he thought then he’d be a national road champion within a few years he laughed: “Ah jasus no! You know yourself, you start off as an A4 and you’re looking at the A1s and you think ‘I could never get to that level’.”
But he progressed from A4 to A1 in a year and has steadily picked off result after result before today’s major win.
He had prepared for today’s race by making the journey to Wexford in recent weeks to ride the course with team mate and fellow strongman Damien Travers.
On riding the circuit they felt it was a very tough course. But John Hodge said the laps seemed faster today and went by very quickly.
The opening circuits of the six-lap 120km race were aggressive and he bided his time a little.
“There was a lot of attacking going on, as you’d expect from a national championships. But everything was getting chased down all day long; nothing was getting away.
“I went away a couple of times and you were just getting chased down the whole time, no matter what.
“Coming into the last lap Alan Bingham and Anthony Doyle went off the front. I saw them and said to myself ‘there’s two very strong lads, that might work’.
“They went away going down the finishing straight coming into the last lap.
“So I jumped across to them and McCarter from Donegal came with me. The four of us just started riding hard and getting the gap.
“We started getting the time checks; 20 seconds, 25 and then 30. We were putting time into the bunch; everyone riding.
“Doyle then attacked on the last climb. He went very hard up that and I got onto his wheel.
“But there’s a right downhill after that climb and the other two lads got back onto us.
“We got another time check with about 2km to go and we had 1:06. And then everyone just stopped riding; slow bike race into the finish.
“I said to them ‘you know lads, we’re going to get caught here’. It’s understandable; nobody wants to lead it out for anyone else.
“I was on Doyle’s wheel and the two boys behind me were looking back and telling us: ‘there’s a rider bridging across, there’s a rider coming across’.
“That turned out to be Dermot Radford. And with about 500 metres to go he got on and he went through us like a train. And then we just went; that was the start of the sprint, the wake-up call.”
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