She may have only gotten serious about her cycling in the past year due to a combination of Covid-19 and injury, but Ella Doherty immediately laid down a marker by taking a coveted Irish title.
That she assumed
the Irish junior road race crown from Maeve Gallagher, and Lara Gillespie before
her, is fitting because Doherty – like Gallagher and Gillespie – is very much a
star in the making.
From Ennis in Co Clare, the 18-year-old has come up through triathlon; a sport she started out in as a 12-year-old before storming up the ranks in Ireland to represent her country in many parts of the globe.
However, last year the swimming pools were closed due to Covid-19 and triathlons, especially international competition, was wiped out. Doherty was also nursing a fracture to her foot and so cycling became the obvious outlet for her.
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She rocked up on
the National Road Championships start line in Knockaderry, Co Limerick, for the
junior women’s race last October with no real record in cycling but determined to
give it a go.
By the time the day was through she was headed for home over the country boundary with a smile from ear to ear and an Irish champion’s jersey and gold medal in her bag.
“I didn't really have any expectations going into the national championships,” she told stickybottle, adding the fact she had no cycling “pedigree” meant she was under no pressure.
“I knew the girls
I was lining up against were really good and I have a lot of respect for them. I was very calm. I wasn't nervous at
all. I was just ready to go;
basically just having fun with it all.
“I was more excited for it than anything else I guess. It was just fun. In triathlon I probably put a bit more pressure on myself, but with cycling I had no results behind me. So I was just going with that.”
Early in the junior championships road race she said she tried to go with every attack and when she put in a few digs herself she felt those efforts helped to split things up.
In the end it came down to an uphill sprint to the line with Doherty of Greenmount Cycling Academy first to reach the chequered flag from Caoimhe O'Brien (Weston Homes-Torelli-Assure) and Elia Tutty (Dungarvan CC).
Lucy O'Donnell (Velo Performance), who tried to break clear for a solo win on the rise to the line, was 4th and Ciara Kelly (North Pole Cycling Club) finished 5th; just eight seconds separating the top five.
“I was delighted,” said Doherty looking back now on her big win. “It's so hard to win any national championships in any sport and to do it in cycling… I was just over the moon.”
Asked how the
people around her reacted to her switching to cycling with near instant
success, she said: “My
parents were very surprised and I was very surprised as well.
“But coming up to the competition Vinnie Gleeson
and the other guys in Greenmount were telling me I needed to have more
confidence in myself. So I think they definitely felt I could do
something. But to win it
outright? I don't think anybody
expected that.”
However, an even cursory glance at her sporting background tells the story of a very strong athlete rising to the top since she first dived into a pool while she was in national school.
Local news sites
in Co Clare are peppered with stories of Doherty winning junior triathlons by a
couple of minutes and getting right into the mix at the front of elite events
even two and three years ago.
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Swimming was her first sport and from there she decided to take part in aquathons for kids, involving swimming and running. Aged 12 and 13 she was a repeated winner and as she got a bit older she competed in full blown triathlon. She took a number of juvenile national titles before progressing to international level.
Doherty made her
international debut, as part of Irelands’ European Youth Olympic Games team -
of just two girls and two boys – in Banyoles, Spain, in the summer of
2018.
Since then she has represented Ireland 13 times and in
2018, as a 16-year-old, broke into the top ten in the elite women’s sprint
distance national championships with 9th place.
A member of Ennis Tri Club, she has competed for Ireland
in the junior Europeans and Worlds. When first out of the water at the Europeans
she now laughs that she “didn’t really know what to do”.
The pandemic has put a dent in her international stride of late as her last chance to pull on the green of Ireland was in October, 2019, when she was part of a mixed relay team at the Europeans in Alhandra, Portugal, placing 9th.
Just a couple of months before that in 2019 she was selected for the Olympic trial event in Tokyo, with Maeve Gallagher also in that elite Irish team.
“That was
pretty cool because I was the youngest
person there,” Doherty said of taking time out of school for international
duty, as you do, and jetting out to Tokyo to compete on the elite Irish team.
“I was racing against professionals and it was so
cool because I’d seen all these
people on TV and
then you're racing against them… just
to be there was amazing.”
So to the big question then; what does the future hold for Ella Doherty, the Irish junior cycling road race champion and an Irish junior and elite triathlon international? Will it be cycling or triathlon for her in the long term?
Doherty takes the
question in her stride, saying she is studying for her Leaving Cert at present
and putting that before anything else, though right now she’s trying to “block
out the uncertainty” around whether the exams will even happen this year.
She’s continuing to train on the bike and to run "but it's more about getting some fresh air, not any really big sessions at the moment”.
With another year left at junior level in triathlon she says she is going to continue her development in that sport.
She’s hoping to make international selection again after seeing last year’s international triathlon season taken away, but making up for it by focusing more on cycling and winning the Irish junior crown.
She believes she can develop her cycling at the same time as continuing with triathlon and definitely wants to ride more bike races. Doherty sounds extremely enthusiastic at even the idea she could ride a race like Rás na mBan.
“I'm
definitely hoping to progress again
with my cycling; just to compete
again this year,” she says. “I'll
be a senior this year. So I just want to be competitive.
“I'd love
to race the Nationals again and see how I could do. I'd love to do Rás na mBan, that would be a
main aim of mine. And within Greenmount we're getting a good few girls
together now, so it would be great to do that race.
“The plan
is to reach the highest level of
competition I can reach and I want to keep progressing internationally. It's hard to say I'm ‘aiming for the Olympics’. Obviously, that would be
amazing. But it takes an awful lot of work and that's a long way
away.
“So for now, I just want to keep progressing and trying to get more international experience. And hopefully then that might turn into something.”
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