The Irish National Cycling Championships are annual cycling races to decide the Irish cycling champion for several disciplines, across several categories of rider.
The men's road championship is usually held on a Sunday at end of June; the women's race is held the previous day. The winning élite rider wears the national champion's jersey for all road races in the following 12 months. The men's under-23 champion is awarded to the first under-23 in the élite race. The junior road races are held on the same day as the élite and the time-trial championship is earlier in the week. The national criteriums are later in the summer. The 2012 races are: Thurs 21 June - Time Trials (senior, U23/espoir, women); Sat 23 June - women's, veterans road races; Sun 24 June - senior, U23/espoir, women road races.
Famous quotes containing the words irish, national and/or cycling:
“Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)