Having finished best of the Irish at the An Post Rás, Sean Downey is now looking ahead to the national championships and Commonwealth Games road race (Photo: Gary McIlroy)
By Gerard Cromwell
The last time Sean Downey represented Northern Ireland at the Commonwealth Games, in Delhi 2010, he competed on the velodrome.
Alongside Martyn Irvine, David McCann and Philip Lavery, Downey took a surprise bronze medal back home to Dromore when the Northern Ireland squad caught the host nation in the ride-off for third.
“We hadn’t even ridden as a team before,” Downey says of the medal winning quartet in Delhi.
“Myself, Martyn and David McCann had ridden together on the Irish pursuit squad and I’d ridden the track with Philip when I was a junior though, so everyone knew how to ride the track.
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“We got entered into the team pursuit and were so happy to get a medal out of it. But we were quite lucky to get it too because a lot of teams didn’t travel to India.”
Named this week on a 14-strong Northern Ireland squad for the Glasgow Games in July, Downey will forego the track this time around to ride the road race.
“I’m just going to do the road race because I haven’t really ridden on the track since that ride four years ago.
“I haven’t been doing any time trials of that distance either, so there’s no point in trying to do anything that I haven’t been doing.”
Upon arriving home from Delhi, Downey was feted in his hometown where his bronze medal was celebrated for weeks afterwards.
Downey hasn't ridden on the velodrome much since his bronze medal winning ride in Delhi four years ago.
“When we came home everyone around my area had seen me on TV,” he says.
“Everyone was really supportive and there was a great buzz around the place.
“Riding the Commonwealth Games was a great experience because you got to see the other side of other sports and be mixed in with other athletes around the village.
“India was really like what you’d see in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Parts of it were really nice and then parts of it were really bad and rough.
“We went into town one day and it was an experience just to see what other people are living like.”
After a reconnaissance ride of the Glasgow circuit in February, Belgian-based Downey reckons the road race will be akin to a really hard Belgian kermesse event.
“It’s going to be a really savage hard circuit. It’s more like a kermesse than anything because its just laps around the city centre.
“But it will be really tough because there are three steep climbs every lap and you will have all the big names riding. It will be a savage race.”
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On the podium - far left - with the Northern Ireland team pursuit set-up taking Commonwealth Games bronze in India four years ago.
Having finished sixth overall and best of the Irish contenders at the recent An Post Rás, Downey says he is happy with his current form.
“I was quite happy with my performance in the Rás. I would have liked to have been better but I made do with what I could and with the situations we were put under.
“It was a very aggressive Rás this year, really hard.
“The New Zealand guy got the jersey by two minutes after stage 2 but he used his teammates quite early and then lost a couple of them because they were sick, so that made it more interesting.
“On the second day, at one point, I was right at the very back, in the last group and I thought it was game over. But then it all came back together before a group nipped off the front and got a minute on me.
“From then, I was sort of trying to play catch up the whole week. The way the race panned out, there were days where our team missed the split, so we had to ride at the front. There were other days where I was up the road.
“But it wasn’t until the third last day, when we got the big time gap, that you could see it was going to be between those 10 riders.
"It definitely was a roller coaster Rás. But we got a stage win and I was sixth overall so it wasn’t a bad Rás. I was quite happy with it.”
The national road race championships in Mullingar later this month are Downey's next big target.
After 10 days taking it easy, Downey returned to racing with An Post at the Boucles de Mayenne stage race in France last week but things didn’t exactly go to plan.
“It was a complete disaster because I missed my flight on the Wednesday,” he says.
“The race started on Thursday so I had to fly Wednesday night to Luton and stay the night there.
“I was up at half four in the morning to go to Charles De Gaulle Airport, get a train to the race start and ride the prologue that night.
“That just completely wiped me out for the race and I was just trying to get through it and survive.”
He will concentrate on Belgian races for the next few weeks before returning with a five strong An Post squad for the national road race championships in Mullingar on June 29th.
“The championships are the next goal. I don’t know what the profile of the circuit is like, but it will probably be just like the normal championships; a select group will go and they’ll fight it out on the road.
“There are a lot of strong guys in Ireland now and there will be a lot of teams there with numbers.
“Baku have three guys, we have five guys, Aquablue have a load of guys. It’s getting very team orientated at home so I think having five guys in Mullingar will really help.”
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