Heralding the start of the Giro d'Italia here as a success, two of those involved in the project to host the race on the island of Ireland yesterday said that they were optimistic that a national tour will return soon to these shores.
Darach McQuaid played a big part in convincing race organisers RCS Sport that the Giro d'Italia Big Start proposal was viable, while former race winner Stephen Roche did a lot of promotional work with the main backer the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB). Both said that talks are progressing well as regards a Tour of Ireland.
"I'd love to be able to tell you here today that we have a backer secured," said McQuaid at a post-stage press conference held in the Aviva Stadium, "but we are not quite at that stage. However we had some people on the Giro in the last couple of days who were blown away by what they saw, including the huge reaction from the Irish fans.
Huge interest
"We are hotly pursuing these members of the boards of several companies and we would hope to be announcing something very soon."
Roche said that the turnout of crowds in Belfast, Armagh and Dublin underlined how popular the sport has become and showed what companies could hope to achieve in backing an Irish event.
“There may have been a lot of rain but there were thousands of people on the roadside, showing huge interest,” he said. “I saw a huge amount of passion, both from those fans and also from the NITB for the Grande Partenza in Belfast.
“I spoke to an elderly couple yesterday and they told me that they had been at the start of the last ten Grand Tours,” he continued, referring to the Giro, Tour de France and the Vuelta a España.
“They said that the Tour of Italy this year was the best they had ever seen. They said they had never seen any country embracing the race’s pink colour so much – people wore it, painted it everywhere and really embraced the event.”
According to McQuaid, there is a UCI deadline of next month to register the event for the 2015 calendar. He said he hoped to have something finalised in the next couple of weeks; if it was the case that there wasn’t sufficient time to finalise things for 2015, that he believed the event would definitely return in 2016.
However he made clear that reintroducing the race next year is his priority.
Irish rider Philip Deignan also spoke at the conference and said that within the peloton there was an appreciation for the crowds which had turned out.
“This event really lived up to expectations. It was incredible, it really lived up to what I hoped it was going to be. The other riders said they never saw as many people by the side of the road.”
Deignan said that he took up the sport himself after watching the start of the 1998 Tour de France in Dublin, and that he hoped that the children and teenagers who saw the Grande Partenza this weekend would do the same.
According to McQuaid, a further Tour of Ireland would ‘definitely’ be a cross-border event. He underlined the symbolic importance of what the Giro had done and said that the NITB would likely be involved in backing a reintroduced national tour.
“We also are looking for commercial backers too,” he said, “ and will continue working on this over the next few weeks. We are following several leads and think that the Giro start here in Ireland shows what sort of support there is for the sport.”
Deignan said he would liked to have put on more of a show in Ireland, but had to bear in mind the length of the race and his goal to take a stage win in the mountains.
"I think there was definitely a temptation in the last two days to go up the road in an early break," he said. "It would have been nice. But the race is three weeks long and I have to think about that. I hope people outside the sport can understand that I can't turn into Mark Cavendish and do the sprints here."
