Fiona Mangan was playing Gaelic games for Mungret St Paul's in Co Limerick not so long ago. But yesterday she was up the road for 100km on stage 7 of the Tour de France, with some of the biggest names in cycling for company.
She's come a long way and, far from satisfying her hunger to make an impression, her breakaway ride yesterday only stoked her ambitions further. She told stickybottle she wanted to come back to the race and get in a breakaway again, but next time have the legs to go much further.
"It was a nice experience to spend a day in the breakaway and hopefully one year I'll have the legs to stay with them on the climbs and maybe get a good result in a stage that way, who knows," she said.
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"But it was good to get the Winspace jersey out there, good for the team. It was fun. Today went really quickly as well, there was less stress. Because you're not in the peloton, you don't have to worry about positioning. You're just flowing through the race when you're in a big break like that. It's ideal. I had a lot of fun."
Mangan got into the move after about 25km, though it began to form from 0km. It grew 17-strong as riders gradually got across, eventually pulling out a gap of five minutes. Mangan was not caught by the bunch until the second climb of three; about 35km from the finish of the 159.7km stage to Chambéry.
The breakaway included, among others, world champion Lotte Koecky (SD Worx Protime), Belgian champion Justine Ghekiere (AG Insurance-Soudal Team), French champion Marie Le Net (FDJ SUEZ) and now two-time Tour de France stage winner Maeva Squiban (UAE Team ADQ).
Mangan began this race, with Mia Griffin (Roland Le Dévoluy) and Lara Gillespie (UAE Team ADQ), as the first Irish women ever to start the Tour de France. Gillespie made another piece of history by taking 3rd on stage 4 into Poitiers and Mangan yesterday became the first Irish woman ever to make a breakaway on the Tour.
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"I really wanted to get in the breakaway on this stage," she said. "When we did the recon a few months ago, I was thinking this would be such a nice day for a break. So when that actually happened, I was thinking 'oh wow'".
Mangan added eventual stage winner, Maeva Squiban (UAE Team ADQ), attacked immediately the race started, with Lucinda Brand (Lidl Trek) going with her. Once they went clear, others went after them, including Mangan, with a big group gradually forming and gaining a gap.
"We just rode really, really hard for about 15 to 20 minutes; everyone working really well together. And that just established then gap. And then, honestly, it was a really nice ride because, while the pace was still high, you weren't suffering because there was 17 of us."
Mangan picked up a bonus sprint along the way. And when the breakaway reached the first of three climbs - the 3.8km Côte de Saint-Franc at 7 per cent gradient - Brand did a massive turn on the front for team mate Shirin van Anrooij. With the hammer on, a chunk of the breakaway was dropped, including Mangan and Brand.
"I dropped about halfway through that climb and then I was in the middle between the break and the peloton for a really long time until the next climb," she said of the Côte de Berland, about 15-20km further down the road.
"Then the peloton caught me and I helped my teammates a bit with positioning. And then I got dropped on the last climb and just rolled in to the finish."
She told stickybottle earlier in the week she had tried on two of the stages to get clear in a breakaway. And though the moves she went with did not stick, she felt that seeing how the breakaways formed, and getting a feel for that part of the race, was a great learning experience. And she used that experience yesterday.
"I've noticed this week, it takes a while before the break actually forms, as it usually does I suppose. So I said I'd follow wheels today. Initially I followed Alison Jackson's wheel for ages because I knew she would try and get into the breakaway. But once I saw there was a big enough group going I jumped onto that, and I just happened."
