Eddie Dunbar battles hard in the heat of Florence today, Saturday, to be Ireland's sole finisher in the junior race at the World Road Championships (Photo: Sean Rowe)
Junior Tour of Ireland winner and National Junior Time Trial Champion, Eddie Dunbar may have been listed as the last finisher of the Junior World Road Race Championships in Florence, Italy, this morning but his ride was a much better one that the result suggests.
With the commissaries taking an unforgiving approach to pulling dropped riders out of the race, Dunbar only found himself as last man at the finish because the many groups that littered the road behind him were forced out and robbed of the opportunity to finish.
The O’Leary Stone Kanturk man riding for Team Ireland had a slightly more eventful opening 60km than he would have liked, as the race made its way from Montecatini Terme into Florence, where the riders tackled five laps of a 16.6km course with two tough climbs each lap.
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“It was dodgy, everyone was nervous, it was very fast,” Dunbar told stickybottle of that opening leg.
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“Wheels were touching, rubber burning; all of that. Then my chain came off three times on the way into Florence. I spent most of my time chasing and it was one of the hardest chases I have ever done. It was unreal; half my energy was gone from it. I was fucked.”
“Coming through the park in the really technical part of the course in the town I was third wheel in the bunch. I had a brilliant position all the way. I got myself to the front. I grew a pair of balls and stayed up there!”
“I hit the climb the first time at the front, I felt good. The second time I was third wheel, at the back of the GB train and then third time up it, my legs blew to bits. It just wasn’t my day. I then just went at my own pace and plugged away to the finish. I was going to finish no matter what. I didn’t care if it was going to take me two or three hours!”
Dunbar said while his early mechanical issues did not help his effort, he was not making any excuses.
“On the day, it just wasn’t my day. I was beaten by better riders; simple as.”
“There was no recovery at all on the course and one of the climbs is very steep, it’s unbelievable. They said it was 16 per cent but it felt a lot worse after five laps! I expected to be as hard as it was, if not harder. But look, next year is another year, we’ll see what happens. I will be a year stronger.”
“I’m pretty disappointed, to be honest. Maybe I am being a bit hard on myself but it would have been nice to get a good result for the lads on the team and my family who came all the way over here to support me and my coach Danny Curtin who was out there on the course today spurring me on. It would have been nice to get a result for them.”
Downey came home in 129th place of 199 starters, some 17mins 44secs behind winner Mathieu Van der Poel of Holland.
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