PHILIP DEIGNAN was just 14 when, in 1998, he saw the start of the Tour de France on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.
Deignan ventured to Dublin with a group of friends from Letterkenny.
While the rest of the group hustled around the pool tables of the capital’s main thoroughfare, Deignan opted to watch the grand show on the street.
“That was the day I decided I wanted to be come a cyclist,” Deignan, now a professional cyclist with Team Sky, later said.
[adrotate group=”38″]“The seed was planted that day in Dublin.”
Deignan was with the AG2R La Mondiale team in 2008 when he qualified to represent Ireland at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
He was 24 then and the chance came after a six-month battle with glandular fever a couple of years previously.
He’d had a torrid time of it with injuries, breaking a collar bone and a wrist, while a bad knee injury threatened to derail him even further.
[adrotate group=”81″]However, a good run at the Tour of Spain brought him into the reckoning for Beijing and when he finished three stages of the Vuelta inside the top 20 he was in the mix for sure.
“The Olympics is the pinnacle of any sports person’s career,” he said after qualification was sealed.
“I’ve worked really hard over the last five or six years and all the work has paid off now that I’m going to the Olympics.
[adrotate group=”76”]“I was absolutely ecstatic when our National Team Director Frankie Campbell contacted me to tell me that I’d been selected.”
Deignan finished in 81st place – 15 minutes and 53 seconds behind winner Samuel Sanchez – in a gruelling, punishing 150.2-mile road race that August around Beijing, including a section of the Great Wall of China.
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