Sean Kelly, the one-time 'king of the classics' and Vuelta overall winner, knows about rapid early career development after winning big in his teenage years. He was national junior road race champion in both his junior seasons.
He won the Shay Elliott Memorial aged 17 years in 1974, passing up the chance of continuing to compete as a junior again that season. And in 1975 Kelly claimed victory on a stage of the Tour of Britain. That day he beat into 2nd place Sweden's Bernt Johansson, who became OIympic road race champion a year later.
The accepted wisdom in road racing has always been that Irish riders should only go away to Europe to race, chasing the dream, if they are already among the best on the domestic scene.
It's a theory Kelly himself once subscribed to, but now he has told stickybottle things have changed for juniors, and even U16 cyclists, and the Irish must move with those changes.
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But he is optimistic a large group of our young guns was already making the right decisions. He said he was delighted to see more Irish riders now getting a chance with junior, U23 and development teams.
They include Liam O'Brien (Lidl-Trek Future Racing), Dean Harvey (Trinity Racing), Adam Rafferty (Hagens Berman-Jayco), Lara Gillespie (UAE Development Team) and Caoimhe O'Brien (DAS-Hutchinson-Brother UK), as well as Archie Ryan and Darren Rafferty before them - but now World Tour riders with EF Education-EasyPost.
Other junior and U23 Irish riders competing with international teams this season also include Ronan O'Connor (Global 6 United), Patrick Casey (GRENKE-Auto Eder), Niall McLoughlin (AC Bisontine), Sam Coleman (A.S.Villemur U19), Aliyah Rafferty (Tofauti Everyone Active), Seth Dunwoody (Cannibal B Victorious), Conor Murphy (Academy Région Sud pb Giant), Joseph Mullen (Zappi Racing Team), Tom Kinsella (Van Mossel Heist CT U19), Lucy Benezet-Minns (Tofauti Everyone Active), Jamie Meehan (CC Etupes), Killian O'Brien (Veleka Team), Conor Prendergast (Van Mossel Heist CT U19) and a trio of juniors - Cal Tutty, Max Fitzgerald and Willem O'Connor - with JEGG-DJR Academy U19.
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Kelly says because U16 and junior cyclists are now better educated and better trained than ever, and talents are being discovered by teams earlier than ever, it was vital our juniors, and even U16s, got experience abroad.
Gone are the days, he says, when riders should prove themselves at home until their late teens or early 20s. He believes if they wait that long now, they will lose opportunities with development or pro teams that are likely to have been mopped up by much younger riders from other countries.
"The riders we have going into development teams, that's something really interesting," said Kelly. "It's very nice to see that they are getting those places because we have a feed of riders now coming in over the next two or three years. And hopefully many of them will keep on developing.
"We can see in the last few years the way the riders are coming into the pro ranks so young, and doing these great rides, it just tells us they've gone away so young, as juniors and even at underage," Kelly said of very young teenagers now going through the development phase in Europe before becoming pros earlier than ever.
While that 'European development phase' had previously been reserved for those coming out of the junior ranks, everything had moved two or three years younger now, Kelly says.
"These very young riders are so well trained, they have their coaches and they're doing so much specific training that they're producing great results very young now.
"And the teams and the agents are signing these riders age 16 and 17 because they know if they're not in there, they're not going to get them because the other teams will snap them up.
"And that's also pushing our young riders to really put in a lot of work at such a young age to be noticed and to get into those development teams, but more and more Irish riders are doing that."
