Ben Healy has claimed a bronze medal for Ireland in the road race UCI Road World Championships in Kigali, Rwanda.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 267.7km race took no prisoners, with a combination of steep cobbled climbs and oppressive heat making for tough conditions throughout. Healy took to chasing leaders Isaac Del Toro of Mexico, and reigning world champion Tadej Poga\u010dar of Slovenia with a small group. Del Toro found himself dropped and quickly overtaken by the chase group, while Poga\u010dar held a steady one-minute lead from about the midway point of the race, and ultimately retained his title.<\/p>\n
Healy\u2019s group continued to shrink, and the Irish rider was left with just Mattias Skjelmose of Denmark and Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel of Belgium \u2013 who successfully defended his Time-Trial World Championship earlier in the week. An attack from Evenepoel with 20km to go left Healy battling for bronze with Skjelmose. The Irish rider made a jump with just over 5km to go, and the Dane could not hold his wheel.<\/p>\n
Healy\u2019s efforts were supported by four teammates in Eddie Dunbar, Darren Rafferty, Rory Townsend and Ryan Mullen.<\/p>\n
Healy\u2019s bronze medal makes him just the fourth Irish rider to take a medal in the elite men\u2019s road race at a World Championships, joining Stephen Roche, Shay Elliott and Sean Kelly.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah it’s pretty special,” said Healy, “I’ve done a lot of hard work and to stand on a podium with Remco and Tadej is pretty incredible. This season is getting crazier and crazier, from a stage win and yellow jersey at the tour and now a podium at worlds it\u2019s just hard to compare. Tadej is one of the greatest the sport has ever seen, Remco isn\u2019t far behind him, so to be on the podium with them was just insane.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
On his custom speed-suit, Healy said: \u201cSpin11 have put a lot of work into this suit. It\u2019s a pretty specific course with some slow speed climbs and pretty hot weather as well, so it\u2019s perfect for today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Healy has claimed a bronze medal for Ireland in the road race UCI Road World Championships in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4741,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-48993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-cycling","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}