Back to good old days as Rás escape gains ten minutes; Sean Downey is big Irish mover

Sean Downey was the big winner from an Irish perspective on the 169km stage 5 of the An Post Rás today between Cahirciveen and Clonakilty (Photo: Stevie McKenna)

The professional era of the An Post Rás may have brought more controlled racing as teams riding for time let breakaways go clear and gradually reel them in, but that model was thrown out the window on stage five today as a breakaway of 12 men gained at staggering ten minutes.

The big winner on the day from an Irish perspective was Sean Downey of the An Post-Chainreaction team, who was the only Irish man in the breakaway on the 169km stage from Cahirciveen to Clonakilty.

He is now 8th overall, some 58 seconds down on yellow, having started the day 19th and three minutes in arrears. His escalation up the standings came just a day after his team suggested he was in a position and strong enough to make a bid for general classification glory.

Clemens Fankhauser (Austria Tirol Cycling Team), who was second overall starting out this morning and had an apparently insurmountable 1:55 to make up was in today’s winning escape and now leads the race.

Such was the breakaway’s advantage on the vast majority of the field today that the men who made that move now dominate the head of the general standings.

The biggest loser was Kiwi yellow jersey Patrick Bevin who had looked invincible in recent days as he won two stages and put in an especially epic ride to close down everything ahead of him on the road in final into Cahirciveen yesterday and yet still have the strength to win the sprint for victory.

But with a second member of the five men New Zealand team forced to leave the race today, apparently due to the vomiting bug now spreading in the peloton like wildfire, when the escape got clear today the big man in yellow was isolated.

The vomiting bug combined with the huge number of crashes so far this week may see the field shrink dramatically before we reached the finish in Skerries, north Co Dublin, on Sunday.

Once it moved clear today the escape simply never looked back, with last year’s race winner Marcin Bialblocki demolishing the sprint for stage victory in Clonakilty

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The popular Pole won after a tense finale in which cat and mouse was the order of the day as the final kilometres ticked by. The tension was matched only by bursts of power as the stronger men in the lead group attacked in search of the win.

Among those to go clear late on was Downey, who put in a decisive surge with 5km remaining and got a gap before being hunted down.

An early large escape had moved clear - featuring two Irish men in the shape of Jack Wilson and Andy Roche – but after a regrouping with around 110km covered the key move of the day went clear.

It featured: Marcin Bialoblocki (Britain Velosure Giordana), Clemens Fankhauser (Austria Tirol Cycling Team), Riccardo Pichetta (Italy Team Idea 2010 ASD), Nic Hamilton (Canada National Team), Alexander Wachter (Austria Tirol Cycling Team), Christoph Schweizer (Azerbaijan Synergy Baku Cycling), Peter Williams (France Bretagne Velotec), Mirko Tedeschi (Italy Team Idea 2010 ASD), Alex Peters (Britain Madison Genesis), Ian Bibby (Britain Madison Genesis) and Sean Downey (An Post Chainreaction).

The gap immediately rocketed, and with 25km remaining to the finish the breakaway men had almost seven minutes and it was clear that even the classy Bevin was not going to bring this one back.

He had told stickybottle after yesterday's win he was going better than he ever has, having been pre-selected for the Commonwealth Games and using the Rás as part of a racing and training programnme towards those Games.

While there were riders that finished between the yellow jersey group and the winning breakaway, the escapees gap of 10 minutes over the vast bulk of the field remained in intact at the end of a swashbuckling day’s racing.

Downey was best of the Irish in 8th place and is now 8th overall. James Davenport of Dublin South Alimay took the county prize while Damien Shaw of Aquablue still leads that classification.

Bevin may have lost the yellow jersey but he retains the green of the points classification leader and Alex Peters of Madison Genesis, who was in the escape, retains his lead in the U23 classification and is now 2nd overall.