Aoife O'Brien and Erin Grace Creighton have made their debut at the World Championships; the first-year junior riders competing in the junior road race today in Leuven.
Despite having no opportunities until this month to race abroad with the national team for the last two years, O'Brien and Creighton gave it their all today and banked fantastic experience for the future.
As both are first-year juniors, they will hopefully get a much clearer run at international racing next year - when the pandemic should have mostly passed - and so today's ride was an investment in the future for both.
O'Brien, from Westmeath and riding for Torelli-Assure-Cayman Islands-Scimitar on the home scene, finished the race today. That was a solid achievement considering this was only her second international race as a junior rider. She placed 81st and was in a group 11:51 down on the riders sprinting for the gold medal.
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Creighton who, like O'Brien, has already taken victories on the home scene riding against the elites, was among the non-finishers today. However, today's event was her first ever international road race and she is definitely one to watch for the future.
The 75km race - five laps of the lumpy Leuven circuit - saw the field split to pieces, with the strongest riders hitting out early. Eventual gold and silver medal winners - Zoe Backstedt (Great Britain) and Kaia Schmid (United States Of America) - attacked just after the halfway point.
They were a minute up on a chasing group of 20 in the finale, with Backstedt beating Schmid in the sprint for victory and Linda Riedmann (Germany) taking the sprint from the chasing group for bronze.
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Schmid will be well known to Irish cycling fans as she rode Rás na mBan two weeks ago and won a stage. Another of her team mates, Makayla Macpherson, was 5th today for USA and she also won a stage at Rás na mBan.
Today a combination of the Great Britain team and Dutch team put the pressure on the front of the bunch very early, with the peloton shredded on the first climb of Sint-Antoniusberg, though many riders managed to get back on.
As the race progressed, several groups got clear on the second and third lap, though it was Schmid and Backstedt who made the winning move deep into the third lap. While they had only a matter of seconds starting the penultimate lap, they rode hard - as their team mates blocked behind.
And while there were plenty of attacks from the remains of the peloton, not to mention continued crashes, the two leaders pulled away. Backstedt tried to drop Schmid with about 22km to go, but the American was too strong. They then worked all the way until the finale, where Backstedt had the edge in the sprint.
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