Delaney sets out his four-year plan as Aqua Blue set out on the long road to Le Tour
RICK DELANEY grew up across the road from the Turner’s Cross stadium. When he was a child, it was home to Cork Celtic and, ever so briefly, George Best, Geoff Hurst and Uwe Seeler among others.
Soccer is only one part of the sporting fabric of that area, though. Nemo Rangers catered for GAA fans while rugby clubs Sundays Well and Dolphin shared nearby Musgrave Park. None, however, flamed Delaney’s sporting passion. Instead, it was cycling that transfixed him even though, he came relatively late to it in his mid-twenties.
‘I have been interested in the sport for probably 20 years,’ says the 48-year-old businessman, behind Ireland’s first professional cycling team, Aqua Blue Sports.
‘It is a fascinating sport, such a brutal sport given what the riders put themselves through, the mental and physical torture. It is incredible, really, and I think it deserves huge respect.’
Delaney’s obsession with the sport led to him creating the team, which is named after the Aqua Blue drinks distribution company he owns. And as they got their first taste of the big-time in the early hours of this morning in the Cadel Evans Road Race, Delaney doesn’t disguise his ambition when it comes to the team.
‘We want to be part of the peloton in the Tour de France within four years,’ he said down a phone-line from Monaco, where he is based. Twenty-two teams get invited to the sport’s flagship event each year so competing against the likes of Chris Froome and Sky today will give the team some idea of where they have to go.
Coaxing former world track champion Martyn Irvine (who can’t race until April) out of retire- ment means that even the casual fan will keep an eye on their results, but there is plenty of other talent in the 16-man team includ- ing current UK road race cham- pion Adam Blythe, five-time Irish national champion Matt Bram- meier and Norwegian rider Lars Petter Nordhaug, who was for- merly at Team Sky.
The team will also compete in the Dubai Tour which begins on Tuesday. They are one of four Pro Continental teams to compete in the race which will include 10 UCI World Tour teams. Blythe, Brammeier and Nordhaug are among those who will race in Dubai.
The wider cycling community have taken to Aqua Blue Sports as a team. They have also secured an invite to the Tour of Britain while, before Christmas, invitations for various races were coming in on an almost daily basis.
‘Our first event is a World Tour event, the Cadel Evans, so we are diving straight in at the deep end. And we want to make an impact in these first races. We aren’t there to just sit at the back of the peloton, happy enough to be part of it all. We want to make an impact, we want to be a credible part of the race,’ Delaney explains.
‘A lot of invites have come in and we are still sifting through them. A lot will depend on how we go in our first few races, we want to go out there and perform with some credibility. And I think we will, we have some heavy-hitters on our team, the British national champion, five-time Irish national champion, and some riders who have dropped down from the World Tour and they have a point to prove.’
In a week when British Olympian Nicole Cooke added to the pressure on Team Sky principal David Brailsford and those at UK Cycling, it is hardly an ideal moment to forge links with the sport. However, Delaney takes issue with that.
‘I don’t think it is a strange time to want to come into the sport,’ he counters. ‘The sport has come on leaps and bounds from where it was a few years ago. People should acknowledge that, instead of constantly painting it in a negative light. We are a good news story. From an Irish perspective, for the country to have a professional cycling team is huge.’
Delaney says that Aqua Blue Sports’ marketing team have sent out ‘reams and reams of press releases’ since their launch. ‘However, RTÉ, our national broadcaster hasn’t picked up one. They did one story on us when Martyn came out of retirement. Instead, they would rather focus on Bradley Wiggins and TUEs (therapeutic use exemptions). We are an Irish team and we have an academy in Cork city with 12 talented young riders, which we hope would offer a pathway to professional ranks.
‘Is that not worth doing a story on?’ Delaney wonders.
He apologises for ranting, but his passion for the sport, and what he hopes to achieve with the team, is clear. The academy will help develop teenage riders in Ireland while the professional team is stacked full of gifted riders.The hope is to have even more Irish riders in the next few years to join Irvine, Brammeier and Conor Dunne. And Delaney knows where he wants his team to go. ‘We have the Irish Corner in Tour de France and our ambition is to be in that tour within four years so that Irish corner at Alpe d’Heuz has an Irish professional team to cheer on. That is our ambition and we believe we can achieve it.’