Twelve months ago Matthew Walls finished second last on the opening stage of the Quanta Capital Junior Tour of Ireland. The highlight of his 2024 race was getting clear in an unsuccessful breakaway on stage 5. But what a difference a year makes.
He now leads the event, having won yesterday's stage 2 into Kilkee, Co Clare. That victory for the Cycling Leinster rider continues a season in which he has scored several one-day wins, made his Ireland debut at the UCI Nations Cup and medaled at the National Road Championships.
Yesterday he got clear in a three-man move - with Freddie Ausberger (Lee Valley Youth CC Team 1) and Nathan Riemer (Boulder Junior Cycling) - about 50km from the finish, pulling out a gap of a minute. Walls jettisoned his fellow escapees but was joined by Nathan Levitt (Lee Valley), with the duo fighting all the way to the line and Walls winning in a sprint.
Advertisement
"I got over the last climb and I got the points. And I knew it wasn't far to go, about 5km, to the finish. So you just have to give it everything," the Co Meath teenager told stickybottle. "I just drilled it down the descent. Yer man gave me the odd turn, but he was fairly light, so I just knew I had to do most of the work."
Coming to the finish with British rider Levitt, the bunch was bearing them on them and it was a question of maintaining full gas to give themselves any chance of staying away. It was only deep inside the last kilometre that Walls quickly switched his thoughts to victory.
"I knew that last corner from last year," he said. "It's sharp enough so I had to take it handy. And the lad I was with had a bit too much speed going into it, so he had to go on the brakes on the corner. That was perfect for me. I just came by him and opened it up and carried it to the line."
Asked how he felt as he raised his arms in triumph, in a race with 70 foreign riders among the 100-strong field, Walls said he barely had time to think or take it in.
"I was kind of thinking he'd come around me, to be honest, I'm not exactly known for my sprint," he laughed. "I knew I just had to dig deep and I knew the group was coming very close and they'd have lads drilling it on the front. I was swinging because I had 50 kilometres, maybe more, up the road, including (being clear for a time) at the start of the day."
Walls, who usually rides for Dublin club Lucan CRC, now holds the yellow jersey but having gained just three seconds on the bunch, most of the riders in the field are tightly packed in a long queue behind him, with four stages to come.
Related News
But he is very happy with how the race has gone so far, especially as the bunch yesterday came to within 10 seconds of him before he managed to pull out the gap again. And now Walls and his Cycling Leinster team - Darragh Byrne, Fionn Killeen, Callum McCaffrey and Luke Kehoe - will try and defend his race lead.
"It's nice to get it," he said of the yellow jersey. "But we can't really change our way of racing. Obviously, I won't be allowed to do the same kind of stuff as today, with those attacks. We'll have to see what happens and see how the other teams react. They could either try and sit on, or they could go on the offensive."
Walls was 2nd in the junior men's TT at the National Road Championships last month and was 4th in the road race, on a day when he was clearly one of the very strongest and really should have taken a medal from it.
Though he won some races in the first weeks of the season, he believes his form is better now. And he is really feeling the benefit of having ridden the Junior Tour last year, even though a crash on the opening stage was a rude awakening.
"When I was with the Irish team in the Czech Republic I was all right, but I wasn't anything special with my form," he said of his international debut at the UCI Nations Cup stage race, Course de la Paix Juniors, back in May.
"I haven't hugely changed anything since then. It's just a question of the racing bringing me on throughout the year. I remember last year coming into the Junior Tour… I was probably a bit too fresh.
"But this time I said to my coach, Conn McDunphy, 'look, I want to drive on a bit more, I don't want to take it too easy this week' so I'd be going well for the start of this race."
With a stage win and a yellow jersey in the bag, Walls was also first over the final climb yesterday and so took the climbers jersey. That came about after Levitt agreed to let Walls take maximum points, though the trade-off meant the Irish rider had to lead the way up the climb.
Any classification win for an Irish rider would be a good result in the modern era Junior Tour of Ireland - filled, as it is, with well-drilled teams from Britain and the United States, with the Irish very much in the minority.
However, though Walls is unsure how defendable the yellow jersey will be, he has produced plenty of evidence since the season began to prove he's one of the very best juniors in the country. In the form he's in, he has every right to think anything is possible over the next four days.
