By Shane Stokes
Ronan Dunne’s superb performances this season on the downhill MTB calendar have secured him three wins and, last weekend, the best-ever Irish result in the DH World Cup.
The Enniskerry rider raced to fourth overall in the series, a considerable improvement on his 12th place of last year and told stickybottle he was delighted with his recent form but now looking forward to a break.
Victorious in the Polish round of the World Cup in May, as well as in the Red Bull Hardline races in Australia in February and Wales in June, Dunne is arguably the most exciting young rider in the sport.
“Congrats to Ronan for his amazing season,” said Frenchman Loïc Bruni, the current world champion, world number one and World Cup winner.
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“It’s been really cool to see him progress and get better. He has always been quite a loose unit, just sending it and going for wins before it was actually I think possible. And this year, changing programme, he got a bit more consistent in training and a little bit more mature.
“His riding is still quite impressive and aggressive, I would say, doing a lot of things quite loose but a little bit more settled.”
Bruni competes with the rival Specialized Gravity team while Dunne is part of the Mondraker Factory Racing setup.
While they are rivals, with Dunne beating Bruni by 0.064 seconds to win that World Cup round in Bielsko Biala, both are sponsored by Red Bull.
Dunne was awarded backing by the company after that victory in Poland. And with Dunne just 22 years of age and years younger than most of his rivals, he looks set to have a very bright future indeed.
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Bruni lauds his talent, and also how he is evolving as a competitor.
“I think he understood how to make race runs a bit more consistent, and a little bit more efficient,” he said.
“It’s been cool to see he had it in him. His mindset was always quite fierce and stuff. Actually when he won his first World Cup this year in Poland I was second by a small margin, so it was really cool to be battling with him in that race and battling the whole season, pretty much.”
Other Irish riders are also shining. Former junior world champion Oisin O’Callaghan finished just ahead of Dunne last autumn to win the Snowshoe round of the World Cup. That was the first such success by an Irish rider at the elite level.
This year didn’t click quite as much as he hoped, but the 21 year old still took 13th overall.
Henry Kerr (Canyon CLLCTV) was eighth in the final round in Mount Saint Anne in Canada last Saturday, two places ahead of Dunne.
“It was a great season for me,” Dunne said after that event. “I am super happy with how it went, finishing fourth in the overall. I was coming into this last World Cup pretty nervous, sitting in third place. My goal was to finish top five and it is super easy to lose out.
“It was definitely a dream come true to finish fourth. The race went pretty well. I got fifth place in qualifying and then had just a slight mishap in my final run, but I still secured a top ten.
“That gave me enough points to finish fourth.”
He told stickybottle he was looking forward to a good break. Given his rate of improvement and his fourth overall this season, he will be aiming even higher in 2025. And so too O’Callaghan and Kerr.
