Garda Caroline Ryan has been selected by Cycling Ireland as a Tandem Pilot on the Irish Paralympic Cycling Team.
Pearse Street based Garda Caroline Ryan was recently selected by Cycling Ireland as a Tandem Pilot on the Irish Paralympic Cycling Team. Tandems compete in the Blind and Visually Impaired Category with a sighted Pilot up front controlling the steering, gears etc and the Visually Impaired rider (Stoker) on the back.
Caroline’s first call to action came when she was selected to pilot visually impaired athlete Catherine Walsh for the Paralympic Track World Cup in Manchester, England on 22nd May 2009 and the Paralympic Grand Prix of Wales on Sunday 24th May 2009. The Paralympic Track World Cup was the first international event since the Paralympic Games in Beijing and the top nations in world rankings were all in attendance.
Just 0.074 of a second is all that separated the Irish Female Tandem Pairing of Catherine Walsh and her pilot Caroline Ryan from the gold medal in the 3km Pursuit at the World Cup. The girls were drawn to ride off for the gold medal against the current World and Paralympic Champion British cyclist Aileen McGlynn and her pilot Vicky Begg in what turned out to be the closest fought race of the event.
The British girls started out strongly and gained a lot of ground in the first lap but slowly and surely the Irish girls pegged back the time until nothing seemed to separated them going into the last lap and it needed the electronic timing to show the crowd who had actually taken the title, which gave it to the British Bike by a whisker. The winning time was 3:44.355 and Catherine and Caroline’s time was 3:44.429.
This was a new Irish record and knocked a full 6 seconds off the old record set by Catherine at the Paralympic Games in Beijing last year. A truly great performance from Catherine and Caroline which is all the more awesome considering Caroline has only recently transferred from international rowing to cycling and was flown in from Dublin early in the morning to replace Joanne Hickey who picked up an injury during warm up for the 1KM Time trial on Friday.
The Irish Team then transferred to Newport Velodrome in Wales to compete at the International Paralympic Grand Prix of Wales. This is an 'Omnium' competition where participants accumulate points from 3 different events 200m Sprint, 1km Time Trial and 3km Pursuit. Catherine and Caroline won their Omnium outright winning each of their 3 events and in the process set their second Irish Record of the week, this time in the 1Km Time trial which they won in a time of 1:12.980 almost a full second better that the time recorded by Catherine in Beijing. A further win in the 3Km Pursuit set them up nicely to regain the title won by Catherine and Joanne Hickey in 2008.
Expressing delight at the performances of Catherine and Caroline at the World Cup and Grand Prix of Wales, Irish Team Manager Denis Toomey said “We recognised Caroline had great potential from her initial tests during the Talent Transfer and Identification Programme she took part in at the end of 2008. This was borne out at recent track camps in Aigle in Switzerland and Alkmaar the Netherlands and her performances this week at top International level. She has certainly done her case for selection for the World Championships later in the year no harm and if she continues as she started will hopefully be piloting a tandem at the start line at the London 2012 Paralympic Games.”
Photographs of Catherine Walsh and Caroline Ryan at the event are available on request to the Garda Press Office.
Garda Press Office,
1150hrs, 29 May 2009.
