Connor McConvey (leading) knows how to ride the Rás and says despite coming very close to winning last year, there is little he would change if he rode the same race again. This year he's hoping to go one better and win it outright.
By Gerard Cromwell
At the end of the 2013 An Post Rás, Belfast rider Connor McConvey was tied on time with Polish pro Marcin Bialablocki.
Bialablocki, however, went home with the final yellow jersey after the race was decided on countback due to his higher stage placings over the eight days.
“On the first stage, I led my teammate out in the finishing sprint and because of that I lost about 40 places on the stage,” McConvey said at the launch of the 2014 race route at the GPO in Dublin yesterday.
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“If I hadn’t led him out I would have won the Rás.”
Ironically, McConvey was given the yellow jersey of race leader to wear as he posed for photos at yesterday’s route launch.
Looking back though, he knows he could have been given one for keeps last May. Stage five in Mitchelstown was another chance lost.
Having gone clear with Dane Rasmus Guldhammer and Belgian Moreno De Pauw in the final kilometres, McConvey rode hard to gain time on his rivals in the peloton.
But he hadn’t the strength left to hold on when track star De Pauw kicked out of the final corner to finish a single second clear of the duo and win the stage.
“If I had ridden less in the break, took it easier, then maybe I would have got that one second and would have won the Rás. But that’s alright in hindsight.
“If I was in the same position in the race again I’d probably do the same thing because it’s the right thing to do at the time. There’s nothing more I could have done. It was just really tight.”
This year, he expects to be back with his Azerbaijan-based but Irish-run Synergy Baku team.
Alongside national road race champion Matt Brammeier, under the watchful eye of two-time winner David McCann in the team car, and with David McQuaid as team general manager, McConvey hopes to challenge for the jersey again come May.
“I’ve been seventh, fourth and second in my three times riding it but the only thing that matters is winning. So second overall, while it’s something I can be proud of, it’s very much a missed opportunity.
“I think the Rás will always suit me. It’s an aggressive type of race and I can get over pretty much any terrain. I’ve had a good schooling on how to ride the race from Kurt Bogaerts on the Sean Kelly team at the start, and now I have David McCann in the car at Baku.
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“The advice and experience he brings from his days racing is pretty unmatched. He’s a smart guy and he’s a good guy to listen to. If you listen to them and you have the legs you’ll be there in May.
“There are a few key stages on paper, down around Kerry and the one up Seskin. The middle chunk of the race will be important this year. But at the same time it could be won on the flat, it could be won in Skerries on the last day.
“It’s the sort of race you win by being active all the time, being alert and getting in the breaks. I’ve plenty of other good results but because it’s the Rás it gets plenty of publicity here.
“I’ve done it three times and I’ve been top Irish rider three times, not that that matters, but what it means is you get more publicity out of it.”
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Now recovered from the broken pelvis that forced him to miss out on the national championships last June, McConvey is currently training in Girona ahead of a hectic early season racing schedule.
“I was supposed to ride the nationals and then take a holiday because I’d been going since February and hadn’t stopped so it didn’t really matter,” he says of his forced lay-off last year.
“It was a break of the pelvis that wasn’t displaced. They initially thought it was a detachment and I might have needed a graft but then I got another scan and they said it wasn’t, so basically it needed to settle down for a while and I could start (cycling) again.
“I probably had a week or ten days off the bike and that was all. It maybe took a month for all the tightness to go away and a bit longer than that for it to be sort of 95 per cent healed. But I came back into good shape at the end of the year.
“The races we had didn’t suit me and I ended up doing a lot of work for teammates but I came back and was going grand. The only bad thing was that I missed the nationals.”
He added he was looking forward to getting the 2014 season underway. “I start in Croatia with two one-days and a week-long stage race. It’s a very hard race with 10km long mountain top finishes and stuff. A week later I go to the Tour of Brittany for a week and then I go to Normandy, Africa, Loire et Cher and maybe Azerbaijan and then the Rás.
“I want to win a couple of races this year. I’m at the point where I can win a few good races and I need to win a few good races. I need to do that to move on to a higher level, whether that be moving on with Baku to pro continental, or moving on elsewhere.
“I was pretty close last year. I spoke to a few people and it was more to do with the financial climate of the teams that it didn’t happen than anything else. To really secure it I need to win a couple of races.
“It doesn’t matter what it is or where it is, it’s about being consistent and getting a few good results. Then everything else will look after itself.”
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