Conn McDunphy, the Irish elite men’s TT champion, has bounced back from his horror crash at the end of last season and definitely found his feet again today in the French peloton.
McDunphy, who has just turned 24-years-old,
was racing for his French team CC Nogent-sur-Oise in the Arbent-Bourg-Arbent –
a 166km Coupe de France N1 race – last October when he crashed hard with about
30km to go.
He was knocked out for a time on the roadside and was
airlifted to hospital. He suffered a skull fracture, in the occipital bone at
the bottom of the back of the skull, and had to wear a rigid neck brace for a
long period after the crash.
However, he has since been cleared by his neurosurgeon to
race and returned to France recently. He was in action today again for CC
Nogent-sur-Oise and contested the mass bunch sprint at the end of Grand Prix
Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët.
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The National Elite-ranked event unfolded in the Manche department of Normandy in north-western France over 135km; some 12 laps of an undulating circuit and where Irishman Darragh O’Mahony won two years ago.
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McDunphy told stickybottle he was intending to lead out
his team mate but when they lost each other he persisted in the sprint himself,
taking 10th place from a field of over 200 riders.
He was relieved to report he had no reluctance or
nervousness getting into such a big bunch, and contest a big sprint, after his
crash five months ago.
“I was happy with the result, to be
fair, considering I'm not exactly known for my sprinting powers,” he said. “I was
really surprised that I’m not scared at all in the bunch to be honest.
“We had 200 riders on the start
today and the breaks were going and coming back all day but it was always going
to a bunch sprint. It just wasn't hard enough. Normally the wind splits a race
like this up but it wasn't strong enough to do that today.
“I was leading out my sprinter but
he lost my wheel. I looked around at 200m to go so I wonder if I could have done
a bit better in the sprint of I hadn’t done that, but still I was happy enough
with the result.”
The race was won
today by Adrien Garel (Sojasun Espoir ACNC) from Kévin Boyer (Cotes d’Armor Cyclisme) and Florian
Dauphin (VC Pays de Loudeac).
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