IT HAS BEEN far from straightforward, but after a long wait, earlier today it was confirmed that by the UCI that Team Ireland has qualified a quota in each of the Men’s and Women’s Madison, and Men’s and Women’s Omnium events.
While the achievement of Lydia Gurley and Lydia Boylan was already assured, there had been some doubt as to the status of Mark Downey and Felix English and whether they had pipped Hong Kong to a spot at the Olympics in last week’s World Championships. There was confusion over ranking points and exactly how many points Hong Kong should be afforded for their failure to finish the race, before Ireland’s qualification was officially confirmed today.
It represents a significant improvement from the last Olympics, when Ireland had just one athlete, Shannon McCurley, competing in track cycling.
Speaking before this confusion and after the World Championships performance, English expressed his delight at the achievement.
“It was a surprise,” he tells The42. “We had a lot of things going against us. A lot of things had to go right for us in that race, even if our performance was good enough.
“We had to beat Hong Kong by five positions. So we were kind of relying on them having a bad race as well as us having a good race.
“It just all fell into place. We were delighted, but so lucky as well.”
Of the race itself, in which the Irish duo finished 11th, English adds: “We got to a point where we could do what we could do and that was it. We put in the best ride we could and then had to see what happens from there.
“From the first 50 laps, it was clear that we had an opportunity to do it. Hong Kong and Portugal, who we had to beat, started racing straight away. We saw they were panicking.
“Other teams were doing world records at the beginning of the week and it was just going to be physically the hardest race we’ve ever ridden.
We went in with the plan of basically just conserving all the energy we had. We expected the top four or five teams to be 100 times better than everybody essentially. So every time they went for a sprint, the race would just break in half. It’s the teams that can lose touch at the front of the race and then get back in the most amount of times. We were able to stay on that lead with the front teams, which we hadn’t done many times in the last two years through the cycle.
“So we probably put in the best performance we’ve done in a long time in that kind of competition. With 30 laps to go, more than three-quarters of the way through the race, we realised we needed three points for the initial position between us and Hong Kong, for us to get the qualification spot and we managed to do that with 30 laps to go. From there on in, it was just ride it in basically.”
While just because they qualified the spots, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will be Downey and English representing Ireland at the Olympics, though the latter says this scenario is “more than likely,” adding: “But you’ve got to go through protocol and stuff like that, before they actually announce the team in June or July.”
Although they have played a significant role in helping Team Ireland qualify its largest ever cycling squad for the Olympics, English admits the journey was not always an easy one.
“For 24 hours after the race, I was just in shock really. We haven’t had a smooth run at all. There were ups and downs the whole time. After the first year, we lost our coach. He stopped working with us. It wasn’t working at all. We had a really turbulent time. Three years ago we were winning World Cups and last year, we couldn’t even get in the top 10. The same this year — it feels like an upward struggle the whole time. So to finally actually cross the line and get the spot, to be offered a clean slate, to just do it again and do it properly, I couldn’t believe it.
“Myself and Mark just didn’t give up, even though at times we were close, because it’s been frustrating.
“Things haven’t been right, but myself and Mark are physically good enough to compete, even not at our best, which has been fortunate with Cycling Ireland, because we shouldn’t be in the position we’re in really.”
It was only four years ago that the duo competed in their first Madison. It had just been announced as an Olympic event, prompting the duo to focus their energies on it.
“Pretty quickly, we managed to get some success. We got silver in a World Cup and were placed top five in the world. Because of that, although it was nice to have the success, people around us kind of relaxed and assumed it would be alright, and we weren’t given much focus after that, which is maybe why we struggled a bit since.
“We’ve always had a really good understanding of each other. We race really well together. We can read each other’s body language really well after the race. That’s part of the reason we’ve had the success, even though we’ve been struggling physically sometimes.”
Following a frustrating period, English opted to make some changes away from the track. He chose to extricate himself from the team’s base in Alaró, Majorca, and moved to nearby Palma, separating him from the group to a degree.
Everyone was on top of each other the whole time. Coaching staff. Female team pursuit. Women’s Madison. Men’s Madison. Just everyone. You couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into someone or everyone seeing what you were doing. So for me, getting that space and distance from people and just being able to separate my normal day life from my job was huge.
“When it’s going well, it’s not so bad. But when things aren’t going so well, people are frustrated with each other and then it gets really overwhelming really fast.”
He adds: “Now [after qualifying] my mind has shifted more towards how we can prepare and be the best we can be. I know both myself and Mark have easily another 20 or 30% that we can add on to what we had at the worlds, just by preparing properly and having things properly organised.”
Competing in Tokyo would be reward for years of hard graft put in by English. The 27-year-old, whose career highlights include a gold medal at the Track World Cup last November, was born and raised in Brighton, but his parents are from Dublin and he has been representing Ireland since 2010.
“My dad rode for the Irish team when he was a junior,” he recalls. “He was always on bikes and then he got back into it again in his early 40s and I just followed suit.
“I used to play football, I’d swim and run, and I just happened to be better at cycling than anything else. Then I started to win national medals and it just kind of took off without me even putting much thought into it.”
Moreover, English hopes his achievements can have an impact on Irish cycling at a deeper level too.
“Hopefully, [qualifying for the Olympics will] be huge. The biggest thing, if Ireland can get a Velodrome — the ability to have young riders racing and training, you can see a number of riders racing and coming through from that. You just can’t do it without it.
We’ve got a track squad of four or five men and it’s just been the same for the same for the past four or five years. Other nations who have Velodromes have a constant stream of young talent coming through. And that’s how you build, so I think that’d be the biggest thing. From having one rider at the last Olympics to potentially having six at this Olympics will hopefully give them some things to think about.
“We did a World Cup in Glasgow in November and the CEO of Cycling Ireland was there with the Velodrome Architects, just sussing out that venue — that’s the most progress I’ve seen since I’ve been doing track. So that seems pretty positive.”
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