Ireland secures 4 road race, TT slots for Paris Olympic Games

We may be a long way out from the Paris Olympic Games next summer but the destination of the slots in the men’s and women’s road races and TTs has already been decided. Ireland has qualified four places and Paris will be the first Games that Irish women have ever qualified for the road events.

With the men’s road race field having reduced this year, and the number of berths in the women’s road race having increased, the overall allocation favoured those nations with significant numbers of women racing at the top level.

However, while Ireland may not be in quite that league, Irish women’s cycling took a huge step forward this year and did so just in the nick of time; Megan Armitage (Arkéa Pro Cycling Team) and Mia Griffin (Israel Premier Tech Roland) riding especially well.

Indeed, Griffin’s 3rd place at the the Tour of Guangxi (1.WWT) yesterday, on the last day of the qualification process, secured a whopping 260 UCI points. That lifted Ireland from 47th in the rankings last week – just two places outside the automatic qualification zone – to 33rd this week, on 779 points.

That means the Irish women have qualified one place for the road race, though none of the TT. It looked like we might have qualified one slot by virtue of the World Road Race Championship placing of Lara Gillespie (UAE Development Team), though Griffin’s 3rd place in China yesterday meant we did not have to count on the Worlds placing possibly securing us one place in the Paris road race.

In the men’s category, Ireland has qualified two places for the road race and one for the TT. We secured those slots by virtue of finishing 17th in the UCI Nations Rankings when the qualification window for the road events closed yesterday.

Ireland scored a total of 4,015 points, with more than half of those – 2,163 – coming from Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost). Eddie Dunbar (Team Jayco AlUla) was next, scoring 798 points, then Rory Townsend (Bolton Equities Black Spoke), who collected 400 points, while Sam Bennett (Bora-hansgrohe) claimed 290.

Darren Rafferty (Hagens Berman Axeon) took 188 points, Archie Ryan (Jumbo Visma Development) scored 101, while Ryan Mullen (Bora-hansgrohe) and Dillon Corkery (CC Etupes) completed the Irish points tally with 50 and 25 points respectively.

There are 90 riders in both the men’s and women’s road races at the Paris Games and the maximum number of riders any nation could qualify was four. For the TTs, 35 riders will take to the start line in each of the Olympic title races, with a maximum of two TT riders to qualify from each nation.