Connor McConvey, seen here leading a small group in the CiCLE Classic in the UK last month; he's hit some great form and is full of confidence
Connor McConvey arrived back home in Belfast on Monday night after a gruelling week at the Tour of Azerbaijan - a race that saw him take the climbers’ classification jersey while also notching second place on the queen stage.
And it was a superb week for his Synergy Energy Baku team in their home race as they took a stage win on the opening day through Christoph Scweizer. The same rider took the points jersey while Elchin Asadov won the flame jersey for best placed Azerbaijani.
Little wonder then that the 24-year-old Belfast strongman was so happy.
“Yeah it was a great week,” said McConvey.
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“Riding the race was kind of like riding the Rás with An Post. It’s the same kind of pressure and expectation so to actually deliver the way we did, was really good. We went in with the same attitude – like the first day was a really big thing for us, to win that first stage was a big thing. The organisation, in terms of the effort they put in and the scale of it, it was massive so for us to come away with that first stage was brilliant,” he added.
“And to deliver like we did for the rest of the week with Olexsandr (Surutkyvoch) in the GC, me in the climbers' jersey and Christoph and a couple of the others being up there on stages, was really good.”
McConvey illustrated his undoubted class on a few occasions, making the break on the opening day but when defending their second place on GC became a priority, his options were limited. That is, until the penultimate day when he took off in an early break and stayed away to the finish – atop the mercilessly steep Tedris Merkezi ‘hors categorie’ climb.
“I saw it from the night before and I thought it was all just going to be riding for Oleksandr, looking after him, shepherding him on the climbs and making sure the GC didn’t change or maybe we could move up. But I got the go-ahead to go in the break and I was pretty determined to make it happen. The GC for me was over so I just followed the move and then made my attack on one of the climbs and brought the break away. I rode my own tempo on the climbs and that was sort of good enough to whittle the break back more and more as the day went on,” he explained.
Though the stage itself was only 116 kilometres, it featured three climbs and by the final one – a 45minute leg snapper - McConvey was still away.
“There were eight of us at the bottom of that last climb and then the attacks happened and I knew it was going to be a 45-minute climb so I just tried to ride it tempo. I followed the guy from Leopard (Jan Hirt) a couple of times and his one attack just blew me. So after that it was a war of attrition."
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"That left me and a Rabobank guy (Jasper Bovenhuis) and we rode to try and get him back, then a Spanish guy (Dario Rubio) came back up and attacked and he was in front so it was me and the Rabobank guy. Then I attacked over to the Spanish guy, got across to him, attacked again and rode the last six kilometres alone."
“I felt really good on the second half of the climb, it was around 8 per cent average; nothing too bad and the longer it went on the better I felt, so I rode tempo suffering to the line.”
In his current form, McConvey must be looked at as a serious contender to improve on his fourth overall in the 2010 Rás
“I don’t really know to be honest. Physically I feel good and pretty on top of it but I’ve just been going well, I’ve been lucky and things have been coming off. I am in good shape physically, and mentally I have a different approach; where I’m racing at the moment the emphasis is just on winning and nothing else matters."
"So I suppose, mentally I want to win more as opposed to just settling for just a good ride, like fourth or fifth or being in contention all the time. And I think that win or bust attitude is starting to pay up a bit more and we’ll see later on in the year but it’s starting to reflect more on my results so it’s brilliant.”
So can he, or the team, replicate their performance of last week in less than two weeks?
“The Rás is my home race more than anything. It’s always an important race for me and a special race for me. You know with the Rás, it’s impossible to go with one rider and say we’ll ride for him so the team we have going to the Rás is a really good team and no bullshit – any one of us could win the race. We’ll just take our chances and see how it pans out on the road. Everyone’s pretty fired up for it.”
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