MUD MASTER
The hills of south Dublin have been a perfect training ground for Greg Callaghan’s lifetime quest to rule the roost in world mountain biking
‘WHEN THE RAIN STARTS, I AM THE ONE WITH A SMILE ON MY FACE’
RAIN can be Greg Callaghan’s friend. The Enduro World Series takes the Dubliner from the Swiss Alps to the lunarlike landscape of the Andes in Chile. But he likes nothing better than to see a cloudburst just before the start of an event, as some of his rivals will be cursing the weather gods.
‘Being Irish, I have a liking for the mud,’ Callaghan explains.
‘If I didn’t ride in the wet, I wouldn’t ride very much at all because it rains so much here.
‘So whenever we are away at a race and it starts raining, I will be one of the few competitors with a smile on his face.’
The 28-year-old grew up in Rathfarnham, a stone’s throw from the Dublin Mountains. On clear days, it’s said that the hills of Wales can be spotted from the summit of Three Rock, but Callaghan is rarely up there to admire the view. His journeys up and down its terrain is for the purpose of developing and refining his skills as one of the top mountain bikers in the world.
Callaghan is one of those talented Irish sportspeople who has gradually been climbing to the top in his sport without his name being widely known. Or maybe, you do know. Perhaps, you were on the side of Carrick Mountain in May 2015 when he shook up the Mountain Biking world by claiming the Emerald Enduro, the first world series event held in Ireland.
‘That was absolutely insane,’ Callaghan exclaims over a Zoom call during the week.
‘I was hoping for a top 10, maybe even top five. But when I finished the last stage, my dad told me that
I was in the lead, I didn’t believe him. It took me a while to actually believe that I won it.’
The cream of the mountain biking world returned to Wicklow the following year and Callaghan successfully defended his title. By the time the Enduro World Series came back to Ireland for a third time in 2017, the Dubliner was considered among the best riders in the world and was at the top of the rankings.
‘I was leading the world series at the time, so I was the last one to come down the hill and the crowds were insane. I couldn’t hear myself think. It was incredible.’
The race itself was won by France’s Adrien Dailly, just ahead of Australia’s Sam Hill, who is the dominant force in the sport.
By the end of that year, Hill had won the first of his three world series titles. But Callaghan wasn’t too far behind in third.
‘To lead the rankings that season for quite a bit and to finish in third was incredible. It was amazing to have my name alongside my heroes at the top of the sport. And that is where my sights are still set, I want to get back up there.’
Following his third-placed finish in 2017, the past two seasons have been a bit of a disappointment, although last term was disrupted after breaking his foot in April.
Having signed with a new team, Unior Devinci Factory Racing at the start of the year and being backed by Red Bull, the 28-year-old is determined to get back to the summit.
Enduro is one of the more technical disciplines in mountain biking with a typical race involving a series of stages combining timed downhill sections with untimed uphills. The winner is the one with the fastest time over all stages combined.
Of course, mountain biking, like all sports, has had to reconfigure its season because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A truncated world series hopes to start at the end of August in the shadow of Matterhorn.
From the Swiss Alps, the riders will race in Italy’s Liguria region, the Pyrenees and Austrian Alps before ending up in the Andes’ dusty terrain in November.
‘They have just released the revised calendar, so we are starting in Switzerland on August 30 and between then and November, we will have six races, It is not too bad, we only lost two races, so we still have a pretty full season.’
Like everyone else, Callaghan had to adapt to a new normal during the lockdown and that meant going a couple of months without getting on his bike.
Living in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, he has plenty of forest on his doorstep.
‘In the 2km radius from my house, it is mostly forest. But when lockdown was most severe, I wasn’t riding at all because you want to be responsible,’ he explained.
‘The last thing you wanted to do was have a silly crash and end up in hospital having fractured something, putting unnecessary strain on the staff when they were already over-stretched. But I am fortunate in that I have a home gym so I was able to do some gym work and once sport opened up again, I was able to get out riding.’
Callaghan reckons it was his childhood in Rathfarnham that saw him become obsessed with the sport.
‘The trails were on my doorstep, hills on my doorstep so it was such an easy thing to do, just ride out my front door.’ He was infused with a love of racing from an early age. His father and his uncles all raced motorbikes.
‘So, I grew up around them and was always into them. But when I was 15, I started mountain biking and it just took off from there.’
Within a few years, he was on the international circuit although he admits it took some time to find his feet. It wasn’t helped by the first couple of seasons being selffunded. He was working when he could with all the cash going into his career. And he spent the first couple of years, driving to events in a van, which he also slept in.
‘I am lucky enough now that I am professional and riding with a big team and have a brand like Red Bull behind me. But it wasn’t always that way, there were years where I had to work as much as I could to fund the travelling because if you are not at those races, you are not going to break through and make the top of the sport.
‘Those early years were definitely difficult. But it feels worth it now, I have been riding bikes since I was four years old, it has been my dream to ride them professionally and ride my bike all day and every day. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.
‘The scene is growing massively in Ireland,’ he insists.
‘When you consider that when I was starting out, it was very much a niche sport and a bit of an unknown. But now with the amount of trails we have in Dublin, Wicklow and all around Ireland, it is a common thing to see a mountain bike on the back of a car. And it can be seen in how busy the trails are. It is growing every year.’