Mark Rohan Unbeatable in World Cup

Irish eyes were certainly smiling in Segovia Spain this afternoon when Mark Rohan topped off his gold medal win in yesterday’s time trial by winning the H1 Road Race at the UCI Paracycling Road World Cup. Mark had also completed the gold medal double in Sydney last month in round one of the World Cup competition. With just one more event left in the 2011 series which takes place in Canada in July, Mark cannot now be caught so today’s win guarantees him the overall trophy.

Irish Manager Denis Toomey expressing delight at Mark’s performances over the series said it would be great if we could now send Mark to compete in Canada so he could collect his trophy personally at the end of thatrace. However Canada was not on our programme and our budget is fully committed to the end of the year. This is an historic achievement and a boost for the country at an otherwise time of constant bad news, it would be fabulous if somehow we could raise the funds necessary to send Mark to Canada to fly the Irish Flag. If anyone could assist Denis can be contacted at denis@cyclingireland.ie or on 087-2533630.

The Irish Female Tandem pairing of Catherine Walsh and Francine Meehan followed up their gold medal performance in yesterday’s Time Trial by taking 7th place in this morning’s Road Race. The girls were lucky to have narrowly missed involvement in a bad crash during their race that saw one of the British riders hospitalised so we were more than pleased with the 7th place finish.

James Brown and pilot Con Collis finished a fine 15th in the Men’s Tandem Road Race followed behind in 16th place by Andrew Fitzgerald and pilot Damien Shaw. John Goldrick and pilot Anthony Walsh finished the Road Race in 22nd place.

Tomorrow’s final day of the event sees current C2 World Cup leader Colin Lynch compete in the Men’s C2 Road Race, Enda Smyth competes in the Men’s C3 race and TrixSchwedler competes in the Women’s C5 race.

Day 1 Report

The Irish Paracycling Squad go the second round of the 2011 Road World Cup off to the best possible start with 2 gold medals and one silver medal at today’s Time Trial in Segovia Spain.

First success went to the Irish Female Tandem duo of Catherine Walsh and Fran Meehan who took the gold medal when recording a time of 28:13.76 for the 21km circuit to beat the Spanish tandem by 20 seconds with the Dutch Tandem taking the bronze medal 50 seconds behind the Irish girls.

Colin Lynch competing in the C2 category was trying to emulate his Time Trial win in the Sydney World Cup last month but missed out on the gold by just 0.4 of a second to the Spanish rider leaving Colin in second place which was still a fabulous result.
Current leader in the Handcycle H1 category Athlone man Mark Rohan was always going to be favourite going into today’s Time Trial and he certainly justified the tag by winning his Time Trial by over 33 seconds from the Israeli rider with Bronze going to the Belgium rider. This brought the medal tally to 3 for the day and a great start to the competition.

The rest of the Irish Squad all put in very fine performances with James Brown and Con Collis proving best of the 3 male tandems finishing in 17th place at 1:22.95 behind the Spanish winner. They were followed closely by Andrew Fitzgerald and Damien Shaw in 20th place 1:39.04 off the gold and John Goldrick and Anthony Walsh in 25th place @ 2:42.77 off gold.

Enda Smyth riding in the C3 category finished in 18th position in his race 2:46.19 behind the Gold which was won by Great Britain.
Trix Schwedler riding in the women’s C5 category finish 5th in her race, 6:53:53 off the gold won by Australia.

Five Irish bikes will be in action in the first of the road races tomorrow’s, the 3 men’s tandems, the female tandem and Mark Rohan in the H1 Handcycle category. Colin, Enda and Trix compete in their road races on Sunday.
Here’s hoping for more podium finishes over the next two days.

Denis Toomey
Irish Paracycling Manager.