'Pester power' brought the Rás

It took four years of asking, but in the end it was ‘pester power’ that went a long way to landing the prestigious start of the 2009 FBD Rás Cycle Race for Kilcullen.



“I had asked race organiser Dermot Dignam for a stage start or a stage finish for years,” Kilcullen Cycling Club Secretary Liam Walker says of the event which underpinned a day of festivities last Sunday week. “Finally, when I rang him last September, he apologised that all the stages were gone, that all he had left to allocate was the race start. So I said that’d do fine ...”

“Getting the Rás here took the same tactics as you use in racing, you have to be persistent,” confirmed the legendary Shay O’Hanlon, who won the overall Rás in 1962, 1965, 1966 and 1967 and holds the record for the most wins. “If you get tossed, you just have to get up and go again.”

Kilcullen representation in the event itself included Kieran Kelly, Brian Geraghty, Ciaran Steed, David Peelo and Colm Bracken, racing as the County Kildare Murphy Surveys Team.

The Kilcullen club also featured in a 10-minute segment on RTE’s ‘Nationwide', on the theme of amateur teams competing against professionals from countries such as China, Australia, Austria, Germany and England.

Brian Byrne.

(An extended version of this piece was published on the Kilcullen Page of last week's Kildare Nationalist.)