Jack Sadler - seen above riding earlier in the season - has taken the second stage of the Junior Tour of Ireland today, Wednesday.
Riding with a Munster selection he won the sprint from the greatly depleted bunch into Barefield.
The opening time trial stage winner, Mark Downey of the Nicolas Roche Performance Team has retained his yellow jersey. He leads this evening by five seconds from Eddie Dunbar and eight seconds from Dylan Foley - both of whom are on the Stena-backed Irish team.
Dunbar holds the climbers' jersey, Sadler is in the points jersey and Stephen Shanahan (Munster Sesna) will wear the first-year junior classification jersey tomorrow.
Today’s stage was a testing 118km trek in east Clare finishing in Barefield and featuring five categorised climbs, all of them cat 3 ascents.
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While there was plenty of jumping around in the opening kilometres, it was not until the riders had around 15km completed that the main breakaway of the day formed.
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It featured the ever-aggressive Dunbar, Dylan O’Brien (Munster) and French rider Traca Baptiste (Caen).
They worked very well together and pulled out a lead of 2:30 as they progressed along the lumpy route. However, the yellow jersey of Downey and his Nicolas Roche Performance Team-Standard Life squad never panicked.
When the last climb of the day, at Church with almost 30km remaining, was crested Downey’s team mates and the Devere Cycles team from the UK went to the front and gradually reeled the escape back in, recapturing the dangerous trio with around 8km remaining.
By that stage there were less than 40 left in the peloton and Sadler, a stage winner here last year, used his finishing kick to take the stage win.
The overall leader, Downey – celebrating his 17th birthday today – was in that bunch and so retains his overall lead going into tomorrow’s 103km ‘Cliffs of Moher’ stage.
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