Three legends, two of them Irish, with very different stories and who met at the UCI World Cup in Los Angeles this weekend.
We love our Irish cycling here at stickybottle and when we saw this photo of three legends – one new and two from yesteryear – we knew you’d want to see it.
The shot – which contains a massive amount of cycling class and history – was taken at the UCI World Cup in Los Angeles last night.
In the middle is the young buck in the middle of creating a new legend; Mark Downey (20) who has won points race gold medals in the last two rounds of the UCI World Cup and a silver in the Madison with Felix English last weekend.
To the right of Downey is another Irish legend, of both road and track, Declan Lonergan.
Advertisement
And with the two Paddies is the biggest gun of the trio; Nelson Vails, the first African win to win a cycling medal at an Olympic Games.
Top, Lonergan with fellow Irish team member Robert Power and US star Greg Lemond at the Nissan Classic in 1990. Middle, Downey dabbing after winning points race gold in Cali at the UCI World Cup last weekend. Bottom, Nelson Vails in his racing days.
Related News
Growing up in the Harlem projects of New York, Vails was the youngest of 10 children and we to work as a cycle courier in the Big Apple.
But a means to making a living soon turned to competitive track cycling and Vails would progress to the USA team for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
He went on to win a silver medal in the individual 1000-meter Match Sprints.
Lonergan was history maker too. The Waterford man won the points race at UCI World Cup in Cali in 1996, a time when there was nothing like the track scene currently in Ireland.
Lonergan won a huge number of great races, including the Rás in 1994.
It’s great to see Downey coming in contact with these characters and appreciating the trails they blazed in the same game where he’s now in the ascendency.
To read more about what Declan Lonergan is doing now, follow this link. And if you want to know more about the story of Nelson Vails have a look at the film below.
We’ll have an update later about the Irish team currently in action at the World Cup in Los Angeles.
The Nelson Vails story
Topics
