She may have been making history today at the Tour de France, but that fact didn’t insulate Fiona Mangan (Winspace Orange Seal) from the harsh realities of the day; fighting for position in a bid to avoid crashes and splits that saw many left behind a long way before the finish.
Mangan told stickybottle the opening phase of the race was as one big battle for position on the road and where the collective strength of the bigger teams, moving around in formation, was hard to compete with.
However, when the terrain got lumpier as the short sharp 78.8km stage from Vannes to Plumelec progressed, Mangan felt she was better able to cope as moving up the field became a little easier.
“We had three girls who crashed, unfortunately,” she said of her Winspace Orange Seal team, a French ProContinental outfit riding its first Tour de France. “It was just absolutely chaotic to be honest, very nervy from the beginning.”
However, despite those crashes, with two of Mangan’s team mates coming down in the same spill in the final, they all made it to the finish “safe and sound” ready to face tomorrow’s 110.4km from Brest to Quimper.
“Today was very, very hard to position in the first 50km or so. Once it got really hard, and we had those climbs, I was able to move up a bit more. But I think I wasted a lot of energy at the start with just positioning.
“Unless you were a big team drilling it, being able to be in a train, it was just really hard to be in the front. But I was happy to get day one complete and it was great to see the other two Irish girls getting around safely as well.”
Limerick’s Mangan is one of three Irish women in the race, competing alongside Kilkenny’s Mia Griffin (Roland Le Dévoluy) and Lara Gillespie (UAE Team ADQ). They are the first Irish women ever to ride the Tour de France.
