By Shane Stokes
It’s long been a slickly-run event with a robust number of international fields attending each year, plus a strong domestic contingent. With stages becoming longer and harder, and a standard that is growing edition by edition, the organisers of Rás na mBan have now revealed an aim to secure world-ranking status for the event in the coming seasons.
“If we are looking at a vision for the race, one of the big objectives is to go UCI,” race director Valerie Considine told stickybottle. “We want to be the women’s UCI race in Ireland. That’s where we’d like to get to.”
Considine has long been involved in the sport and was part of the Cycling Ireland’s women’s commission for many years. She and others have done a huge amount to help women’s cycling get to the place where it is in this country, with the continuous notching-up of the standard leading to a number of riders regularly racing abroad, including some who are now with big professional teams.
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Thoughts of securing UCI status for Rás na mBan are at an early stage and depend on things falling into place, but setting out a clearly defined goal is an important step along that way.
“It could be a two, three year move,” Considine said. “It depends an awful lot on funding. Right now we’re keeping a steady ship. We’re putting the race on the road. We do get a lot of assistance, not just in cash terms, but in other ways.
"We have the use of cars from Johnson and Perrott, we have Pactimo jerseys, we have printing from Just-Print.ie, etcetera. We get a lot of that and very good will from the Gardai and the county councils. All that is really important and it’s all value added. But you still need cash at the end of the day.
“Ideally, a big cash injection would be needed to keep us going in the direction that we want to bring the race in, which is to raise up the standard all the time.”
Considine said that another motivation to step up to UCI status is to bring more teams of that level to the event. She notes that many of the teams who have raced Rás na mBan in recent years are now UCI squads, and that there seems to be a general shift in that direction within the sport.
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“We think we are pretty close to UCI race, standard-wise, in what we deliver here,” she said. “And so we’d like to get on that calendar, but there’s a bit of planning to do yet.”
Clearly funding will be a big determinant in how soon the race could move up to that level. Does Considine envisage the extra money coming from grants, or from one or more title sponsors?
“Ideally, it’s a mix of state money, like government money, of which we do get some” she said. “Sport Ireland back us, Cycling Ireland and the county councils back us. But the commercial side has been a really, really tough graft for us. We haven’t been successful on that front.
“We are trying. It takes a massive effort to put a pitch together, go through the pitch, and then wait for the result, which hasn’t really worked in our favour so far, really, in terms of big sponsors.
“Now that this year’s race is over we’ll to do another review, like we do every year. And then see where we’re going to go for next year.”
Considine believes that current level is ready for an upgraded race.
“The standard of domestic racing is at an all-time high, we have a record number of full time pros racing on the continent who we’d love to invite to race at home with their teams, and fundamentally our speeds are probably the equal of many 2.2s on the calendar.”
Having at least one UCI-ranked stage race on the calendar would be a big boost for Irish road cycling.
Ireland has not had such an event since the men’s Rás Tailteann stepped back from UCI 2.2 status after the 2018 edition.
