Will Ryan was best finisher of the Irish in the junior road race at the European Championships in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, yesterday.
The teenager made the 23-rider group
that formed from the peloton after a five-man breakaway went clear to fight it
out for the medals.
It was a day of pure speed and crashes,
both combining to decimate the field with only Ryan and Nathan Keown finishing
the race for Ireland.
The other riders on the national team –
a group of real quality this year – suffered from crashes and punctures.
Finley Newmark, who has performed very well in Ireland and Europe this season, was a victim of a bad crash in the opening kilometres.
Kevin McCambridge, who won the TT
nationals and was 2nd overall in the Junior Tour of Ireland last month,
punctured shortly after Newmark’s mishap.
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National junior road champion Tom
Moriarty and last year’s Junior Tour of Wales queen stage winner Archie Ryan
were also impacted by crashes, which either took out many riders or ruined
their race.
With the tight and fast course barely
wide enough in stretches for vehicles to get through, the impact of the crashes
in holding up riders was very significant.
Will Ryan was one of those riders who got caught behind several spills, though he got past them in one piece.
And even when he found himself take off the back of the ever-decreasing peloton, he had the legs to get back on; a not insignificant task at this level.
As the five-man breakaway pulled out a
gap on the bunch, the peloton whittled down to just 23 riders at the finish,
with Will Ryan among them.
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Up front Andrii Ponomar of Ukraine
attacked the breakaway to win the race solo by 21 seconds from Maurice
Ballerstedt of Germany.
Andrea Piccolo (Italy) and Enzo Leijnse (Holland) were 3rd
and 4th on the same time as the runner-up.
Marco Brenner, a 16-year-old who has already proven very
prolific on the junior international scene this season, was 5th some 38 seconds
down on the winner.
Then just seven seconds after he finished came the 23-man
group that Ireland’s Will Ryan was in.
The sprint from that group, for 6th place, was claimed by Mathias Vacek (Czech Republic).
Ryan was 12th of that group, for 17th place on the day;
not the top 10 he was aiming for but a great ride in such a fast race run off
at 45km per hour.
Special mention too must go to Nathan Keown; a rider who
has relentlessly improved in recent years and is now among the very best in the
country.
He held the yellow jersey at the Junior Tour, made the
winning breakaway at the road race nationals and has won a string of races.
On a day when over the half of the field failed to finish
a very demanding Europeans race, Keown made the grade.
He was in 72nd place and some 7:49 down on the winner but
given the carnage on the roads, not to mention the speed, he put in a great
ride to finish his first ever UCI-ranked race.
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