"The stars all need to line up for it to work on the Rás, but we should have stayed away"

Bryan McCrystal (leading) in the breakaway on the road to Roscommon today; while pleased with his form he believes had the break been a bit more organised it may have made it all the way (Photo: Mark's Photo Blog)

By Brian Canty

Bryan McCrystal has said he was gutted that his bid for a stage win on the An Post Rás today was foiled late on, but insisted he had not regrets.

Though he told stickybottle last week a stage win was beyond the average county rider, he came close today to proving himself wrong on the rain-soaked run from Dunboyne to Roscommon.

“I was gutted we got pulled back” he said of his late bid up the road from the 10-man breakaway accompanied by fellow county man Eoin Morton (UCD CC) and Italian rider Davide Ballerini (Italy Team IDEA 2010 ASD).

“But look, that’s racing, that’s the way it goes, there’s a lot of quality here. A lot of guys can ride hard and they race at higher levels than us and they are better prepared than us.

“All the stars must line up for it to work; we just needed lady luck today and didn’t get it.”

McCrystal made the decisive break when he went clear with Fraser Duncan (DID Dunboyne) and Peter Hawkins (Madison Genesis) after around 50km.

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“It’s always the plan to get into the move,” he said of the opening stage.

“Something just rolled off the front; myself, Fraser and Hawkins got a gap and kept the pressure on. We went through a town, there were a few bends, that broke the peloton up. So seven lads came across to us and we were gone.

“We worked okay, it really should have stayed away to the line though, it really should. We didn’t work well enough. There was also a couple of big teams missing so that cost us.

“Some guys began to sit and others soft-tapped through so when the roads started to widen coming into the finish the bunch could see us up ahead.

“And when you give them the carrot they can see you they’ll ride harder. We were probably missing one or two bodies from other teams; maybe if we had a Baku guy...,” he said referring to the Synergy Baku team that took on much of the responsibility for closing down the move when the gap got to three minutes.

“But look, it didn’t happen that’s bike racing, there’s no point dwelling on it. We’ll just try again tomorrow.

“The legs are there, there’s plenty more with good legs too though. Today was just about waiting for the right moment. Hopefully there’ll be more days where I can have a go.”