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:
“O Paddy dear, an’ did ye hear the news that’s goin’ round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground!
No more Saint Patrick’s Day we’ll keep, his colour can’t be seen,
For there’s a cruel law agin the wearin’ o’ the Green!”
—Unknown. The Wearing of the Green (l. 37–40)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“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)