The Irish junior team suffered some bad
luck at Gent Wevelgem today when three of the six-man team were still in the
front group approaching the finish.
One of their number, Adam Gilsenan,
would have been the team’s best bet in the sprint for placings but the Meath
rider crashed at a roundabout close to the line, which wiped out his hopes of a
result.
And in the finishing straight there was
another crash, which caused small splits in the bunch that the Irish were on
the wrong side of. However, both Con Scully and Liam O’Brien battled on the
finish, where a late breakaway survived to fight it out for victory.
Scully was 31st at 48 seconds while O’Brien
placed 60th, in a group at 1:03. Gilsenan got back on his bike after his late crash
and finished the 123.9km race into Ieper in 79th place at 2:23.
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Both
Scully and O’Brien were in the process of trying to position Gilsenan for the
final sprint from the reduced peloton for the minor placings when Gilsenan
crashed.
The other three riders in the national team
for today’s race – Quillan Donnelly, Patrick O’Loughlin and Oisin Ferrity –
were among a large number of non-finishers today on what was, for all three, a
debut ride for Ireland on the road.
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The race was won by Italian rider Thomas Capra from Denmark’s Tobias
Svarre and British rider
Jed Smithson. Their
breakaway got away late in the race after the climbing and cobbles were done.
In the women’s junior race, Irish junior
road race champion Aoife O’Brien put in a strong ride to finish in the bunch.
Riding for Torelli-Cayman Islands-Scimitar,
she suffered a crash on the first lap of six in the 77.5km which started and finished
in Boezinge.
However, the 17-year-old immediately got back on her bike and chased back to the bunch in a group. She regained contact, despite suffering cuts to her leg, but was forced into a second chase when her chain came off on the second lap on the cobbles.
The second pursuit she was forced into took a lot longer than the first, but O'Brien was able to get back on to the bunch once again. After that she was able to hold her place in the peloton to the finish, where she finished in 75th.
Erin
Creighton, the McConvey Cycles rider guesting for Torelli-Cayman Islands-Scimitar today, also suffered
a crash on the fourth lap of the race. She remounted and eventually got back
onto the bunch. However, her bike was damaged in the crash and she was eventually
forced to stop and abandon.
The race came
down to a 100-rider bunch sprint won by Dutch rider Nienke Veenhoven from Finland’s Laura Lizette Sander and France’s Maurène
Trégouet.
More
to follow.
