Conn McDunphy said he left it all on the road in the U23 TT at the World Road Championships in Innsbruck (Photo: Sean Rowe)
Ireland’s Conn McDunphy and Michael O’Loughlin have posted solid performances in the U23 TT at the World Road Championships in Innsbruck.
However, it was a race in which one man really reigned supreme; Danish teenager Mikkel Bjerg winning the 27.8km event by a significant margin.
Last year as a first-year U23 rider, and when he was aged just 18 years, Bjerg took the title in Bergen.
On that occasion over 37km he won the gold medal by a massive 1:05 from America’s Brandon McNulty.
His winning margin was so large that the same time covered the riders placed 2nd to 13th, underlining the fact Bjerg was in a class of his own.
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Today in Innsbruck things were tighter at the top, but he still retained the title comfortably.
He had 33 seconds to spare over silver medal man Brent Van Moer of Belgium. And making it a 1-3 for Denmark, Mathias Norsgaard rounded out the podium a further five seconds back.
Like last year, the gap that Bjerg beat the runner-up by was the same as that covering 2nd to 16th place.
Once again Bjerg looked like he was on another level compared to even the best of the rest.
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O'Loughlin gets the power down. Bjerg drives on; later on the podium - his second U23 title in two years (Photos: SeanRowe)
Irish champion Michael O’Loughlin was 25th at 1:28. And Conn McDunphy came home in 38th at 2:06. Afterwards both riders said they were happy with their rides.
“I really didn’t know quite what to expect so I’m happy enough," said McDunphy of his first ever Worlds ride.
"I got it all out so you can’t really ask for much more. It was surreal rolling down the start ramp. It was quite a technical course; quite hard to judge.
"The first 5km were probably the most important because there was a headwind. I held back probably a little bit too much.
“So I lost a bit of time there but other than that it was good. I managed to keep the speed rolling.
"I wasn’t nervous leading up to it but this morning I was a little bit nervous. But you get nervous for every race.
“I just treated it as another time trial and tried to just go over the finishing line not being able to see; which is the goal of every TT."
O’Loughlin said he was “quite happy” with his performance on a technical course that tested the riders in all departments.
"I felt like it got the effort out on the course. It was a very fast course and had a couple of technical bits that you had to be wary of and two climbs as well,” he said.
While he has had a testing year, with illness and injury wiping out the first half of his season, he said things had gone better of late.
"Training went well. I haven’t raced in about three of four weeks, since Tour de l’Avenir,” he said, adding training rather than racing was the order of the day in recent weeks.
“Things are going well and I feel relatively fresh for the end of the season, because I missed a big chunk of the early season. The preparation was quite good I thought.
"Compared to the last few years I thought it was a more raceable course. And there were no laps either.
“Ii was a good course and if you look at the times; if you take a minute off of most times, you would jump up 20 or 30 spots. It was very close. There was only two or three seconds between every position.”
O’Loughlin will be back in action on Friday in the U23 road race where a really strong Irish team will hope to aim for gold.
Tomorrow Aaron Doherty and Ben Healy ride the junior men’s TT for Ireland. Eileen Burns and Kelly Murphy contest the elite women’s test.
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