How to almost win a bike race

It may not be eight days, nor a UCI race, but Ireland’s Rás Tailteann is going strong – and boy it was an experience. I spent the week ‘on loan’ with Foyle CC. Racing on teams of five, there were three members of the Foyle club as well as me and Commonwealth Games medallist Finn Crockett.

It’s a bike race that is nonsensical. There is zero control, today’s GC can be tomorrow’s in reverse. Trying to guess where the breakaway will form is a waste of time; you may as well just throw a dart at a map. With five-man teams, it’s almost impossible to control.

I got in a big breakaway on day one with all the GC favourites, and every single person in that breakaway pulled an even turn. Even that is strange. We reached the main climb of the day and after following a few soft attacks, I launched on the steepest part. Bringing one other rider with me, we set off to catch the lone leader.

We caught him. I attacked with 5km to go, they chased. I attacked with 3km, they chased. I attacked with 1km to go, and they caught me with 250m to go. I finished third in a three-up sprint, which is embarrassing but to be expected considering my attempts at attacking. That pretty much set up the GC for the rest of the week. The next four days we threw the kitchen sink at the yellow jersey, but nothing worked.

That was until the final day. A breakaway with a few favourites got up the road, including the Irish national team. It seemed the second that the Irish GC favourite got up the road, the whole race started riding against us Brits. There are multiple races within the race. Out front, you have a high-level battle taking place for GC. In the middle you have people racing for sub-categories, and then you have the riders at the back who are just trying to finish. There is such a big difference between the back and front – it’s a great race though. I came close – one more hard day and I think it’s a race that I could’ve won.

I’ll be back.

Joe Laverick rides for Ribble Collective