After winning a whopping 21 Irish titles at youth level - across road, cyclocross and MTB - Áine Doherty added the most significant gold medal to her collection on Saturday when she claimed her first senior title at the National Criterium Championships in Limerick.
Now a first-year U23, the 19-year-old from Belfast is combining her cycling with a demanding pharmacy degree course at Queen's University. And she celebrated the end of her first-year exams in style with the first senior win, of any kind, of her career on the King's Island city centre course.
"I'm delighted… a first senior title, it's really good," she told stickybottle of upgrading her bronze of 12 months ago - as junior riding the senior race - to gold this time around in the Greenmount Cycling Academy-promoted nationals.
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"It definitely felt so good to win. And I hadn't won a big (senior) race before. Even with the National Series races in Ireland, I've not actually won as a senior. So this is my first proper win and it's really nice to see the progression. To get my first title just felt really good.
"I went down there and I really wanted to win it. When they released the circuit and I saw it was a nice town centre course, I thought it could suit me. So we travelled down, and it's 3½ hours... I wanted to make the trip worth it. It was a great circuit, and with the atmosphere and the weather... it was also so well run. It was definitely worth the trip."
Doherty - who came up through VC Glendale and is now riding for Dan Morrissey Pissei - won it well in the end, from Abi Conway (Westport Covey Wheelers) and Gabrielle Fox (Greenmount Cycling Academy). However, she was under pressure to beat them, and had the most to lose, given her background as such a successful rider coming up through the ranks.
"At the start, I made it hard just to whittle the group down and it came down to three of us; men, Abi and Gabrielle," she said of that lead trio pulling clear shortly after the start of the race on the city centre course, over 35 minutes plus five laps.
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Though all three contributed to the workload, road and cyclocross international, Doherty, was the most established rider of the trio. And so it fell to her to take more responsibility for driving it on, ensuring the group would stay clear to fight for the medals.
"I felt like I was gaining a lot on the corners and doing a few attacks, and so was Gabrielle. It got cagey at times, but it was a good race. I tried a couple of laps before the finish to see if I could get away and it didn't really work.
"On the last lap I knew I had to be into the final two corners first because it was about 50 metres to go from the last corner. So I attacked on the last straight and I got through the corners and didn't look behind. I just kept going to the finish."
Describing the victory as "definitely my biggest win" one of her other memorable title victories was claiming the U14 gold the National Cyclocross Championships in 2019. On the same weekend, her father, and former top A road rider Brendan Doherty, won the masters men's title.
Doherty said while her college degree was demanding, with attendance compulsory for much of her course work, she had found it easier to balance university life with cycling compared to school. She now had time during some weekdays to go training as opposed to squeezing in her sessions in the evening when she was in school.
And now that she's free of study until mid September, she is hoping to go to Belgium to race on the road for the first time, with Rás na mBan - which features a criterium in Kilkenny City as the final stage - also a big target.
"I've nothing set in stone at the moment but I'd definitely like to get over to Belgium for summer and get in a different kind of racing," she said. "I've never raced in Belgium.
"I did the Lincoln GP in Britain a couple of weeks ago and that was a great experience, with nearly 100 girls. So I'd definitely love to get over to the UK or Belgium. And Rás na mBan would be a big goal."
