Shattered: Rás yellow jersey Clemens Fankhauser on Seskin Hill yesterday. He put time into all of his rivals on the general classification apart from Ireland's Sean Downey (Photo: Ramsey Cardy)
By Shane Stokes
Race leader Clemens Fankhauser has said while he was pleased to extend his lead over his closest rivals, he still believes the gaps are too small to start feeling confident about winning the An Post Rás.
The Austria Tirol Cycling rider took time out of all of his main rivals yesterday bar Sean Downey, with the Irish An Post Chainreaction rider being the only one who could stay with him on the final climb of Seskin Hill.
The riders who had been second and third overall, namely Alex Peters and his Britain Madison Genesis team-mate Ian Bibby, were both distanced by Fankhauser.
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Peters lost fourteen seconds and slipped to 25 seconds behind, while Bibby went from third to fourth overall when he gave up 22 seconds. He is now 51 seconds back, and has been overtaken by Nic Hamilton (Canada).
Still, Fankhauser knows there is a lot of racing ahead.
“I did not see the time gaps so far [the updated results – ed.] but I think that as long as you don’t have five minutes lead, it is going to be hard,” he told stickybottle at the finish of Seskin Hill, Carrick on Suir.
“If you lose time here [in the race] you can lose a lot. Once you have a difficult day you will not just lose a few seconds, you will lose a lot of time. So it is still a hard piece of work here.”
Two stages remain in this year’s event and while Sunday’s stage to Skerries has tended to be a controlled affair in the past, there is no guarantee that this will be the case this time around.
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Before then, Fankhauser also had to cope with a tough climbing stage today, Saturday, and he is aware that his rivals will all try to exploit any weakness.
Still, he took encouragement from what happened on yesterday’s sixth stage.
“So far we have been able to defend it so we are quite happy about that. I have a very strong team and thanks to my team I was never really under pressure on the stage, except for the final climb. That was very hard and I am really happy that I could keep the jersey.”
His team had to ride on the front from early on when breaks went clear and opened up large gaps.
However he revealed that it was all part of their plan; in letting a move get away without the main contenders in it, less riders would have the stage win on their minds and things would – in theory at least – be more settled.
“We knew some guys from the breakaway,” he said.
“We had a talk yesterday evening with a friend of mine who was in the breakaway, saying that we were going to let it go. For us it was perfect if there is a breakaway. We knew that they were not going too fast and so it was good for us…we could control it pretty well.
“[The complication] was just that a lot of other teams tried to catch them because they wanted to go for the stage. Therefore there was a bit of pressure, but my team did an excellent job.”
In the video interview Fankhauser describes the finale and his tactics there, and also speaks about what lies ahead and why nothing is certain.
Clemens Fankhauser speaks to Shane Stokes
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