Dolan signs pro deal with Danish Team Rytger outfit

CYCLING COLUMN

Lauren Dolan has become the third young South Devon cyclist to sign for a European team for the 2019 road racing season.

The 18-year-old all-rounder from Bickington, near Newton Abbot, will ride for Denmark’s Team Rytger women’s squad next year.

Dolan bypassed a planned attempt on last weekend’s National Hill Climb Championships in Yorkshire to travel to Copenhagen for a photo-shoot and to meet her new team sponsors.

Rytger are an Under-23 development team with an international racing programme just below UCI Women’s WorldTour level, and Dolan’s signing there is the next step towards a possible senior professional career.

It follows similar moves for Matt Langworthy, from Combeinteignhead, and Torquay’s Harrison Wood - Langworthy, 22, will ride for Belgium’s Pro Race Team next year and Wood, 18, for VC Aix-en-Provence in France.

All three are products of Kingsteignton’s Mid-Devon CC, which has a long tradition of producing riders who have gone on to join the pro ranks.

Dolan, whose father Mark was a leading amateur rider in his youth, has progressed

to become a Great Britain squad rider, winning medals at top international track championships before hitting the headlines with a gutsy display at the 2017 World Championships in Norway.

Lauren Dolan will ride for Team Rytger

Despite a serious crash during the Junior Time Trial, she finished the event with lacerations to her leg which required several hours of surgery - and pictures of her injuries went round the world.

She has returned to competition this autumn after a break from the sport, producing a series of impressive victories in regional hill-climb events.

Mid-Devon CC’s World Masters cyclo-cross champion Robin Delve looks to have hit top form at just the right time, after winning the second round of the NationalTrophy Series at Irvine, Scotland.

Delve, from Longdown near Exeter, was held up by a fallen rider in a section of sand

early in the Men‘s Over-60 race, but he trains regularly on Exmouth Beach to handle such conditions and he recovered to win.

He now leads the National series overall, and his season is right on track for a defence of his world title in Mol, Belgium, at the end of November.

Cathy Kilburn finished third in the Veteran Ladies‘ race at the latest round of the SW Cyclo-Cross Series at Coxleigh Barton near Barnstaple.

The news that next year‘s UK National Hill Climb Championships are returning to

Haytor will bring one of the sport‘s most spectacular events back to South Devon.

The famous hill, from the start just below the Edgmoor Hotel to the Rocks, has attracted thousands of fans when it has hosted Tour of Britain stage finishes in recent years, and more big crowds are certain to support the HC champs on October 27, 2019.

Hill climbing is a specialist discipline and its race programme happens at the end of every summer season - this year‘s national championships were held near Sheffield on Sunday.

Ruling body Cycle Time Trials move the event around the country each year, and they also try to vary the tests.

This year‘s championships was up the .7 of a mile ‘wall‘ of Pea Royd Lane at Stocksbridge, with an average gradient of 12%, while Haytor is three miles long at average 6%.