Pelotons of the Premier

Times may have changed, but the wheels have never stopped spinning for the members of North Tipp Wheelers, writes Thomas Conway

At some point or another, it’s probably accurate to say that every young, sports-mad Irish kid dreams of one day donning the green jersey and representing their country on the highest stage.

Sam Bennett’s success in this year’s Tour de France marked the realisation of that very childhood dream in the most unique and creative of ways. Following plenty of agony and heartache, he finally achieved the accolade coveted by all sprinters – completing the feat in a magical crescendo of a final stage victory on the Champs-Élysées.

Perhaps the greatest irony of it all is that Bennett doesn’t generally fare well on the highest stage – his career is based on exploding down straights on flat terrain, not climbing vertiginous mountain peaks. As for his hometown, Carrick-on-Suir has certainly earned its status as a bastion of Irish cycling. The specific county-affiliation of the town might be a contested topic, but if we take the Tipperary perspective, and move northwards, has the impact of Carrick’s cycling status reverberated across the county? The members of North Tipp Wheelers will tell you definitively that it has. Nenagh’s most established cycling club is currently thriving, but there have been plenty of Category 4 climbs along the road, and maintaining its existence wasn’t always easy.

Wheels in motion

For Peter Moynan, owner of Moynan’s Cycles on Cecil Walk in Nenagh, an interest in cycling might seem like an obligatory requirement of working in the family business, but his passion for the sport is genuine and extends back beyond the golden era of Stephen Roche and Seán Kelly during the 1980s. It was Peter and his father, along with a few friends, who first set the wheels in motion when it came to the creation of a cycling club in Nenagh, launching the original version of North Tipp Wheelers during the late seventies.

“I think it was 1978 and Upperchurch-Drombane had a club at that time, so originally we would have linked up with them for a year or two, but then we had a gang of lads here who were enthusiastic so we set up our own club,” he recalls.

“It would have been myself and two other lads my age – a MacAbar lad from the Silvermines, and Bill O’Gorman from Tyone. The three of us would have been the starting participants of the club, and I suppose our parents would have been on that starting committee for those couple of years, to get the thing going. And we would have just trained to race back then, there weren’t really any sportifs or tours (competitive races), so we just trained on our own – with a bit of help from the Drombane lads at the very start.”

Ireland has evolved significantly since the late 1970s, but the country resembled an entirely different political and social environment back in 1915, the year in which Peter’s grandfather first established the family business on Castle Street. As any economist will tell you, specialisation is often the key to commercial success, and in recent decades Moynan’s has built its reputation on bikes and cycling equipment. Initially however, Peter’s grandfather employed a different business model. His ‘cycle and motorworks’ store on Castle Street was quite a diverse operation, catering for all number of mechanical requirements, as his grandson describes.

“The shop was opened in 1915, by my grandfather,” Peter said.

“I actually have a page from The Guardian hanging up here in the shop – it has an ad on the front of it announcing the opening of a ‘cycle and motorworks’ store at Castle Street, Nenagh. So, I suppose my grandfather would have put ads in The Guardian like that. Now it was mainly cars they worked on back then, but bikes were always a part of it too, the cycling was always there. They sold petrol and parrafin as well, repaired cars, they did all sorts. Anything mechanical – they were sharpening clippers and blades, they even sold record players.”

Cyclical pattern

Following its inception in 1978, North Tipperary Wheelers has followed a similar trajectory to many clubs across the country, fading in and out of existence in what could be described as a cyclical pattern. It was 1987 when Jan White arrived on the scene, having been convinced to take on the role of club secretary by her son Daniel – an enthusiastic rider who was determined to ensure the club remained active.

“Of course it was the usual thing, they couldn’t get anybody to go onto the committee, so our son came home one day nearly in tears, asking would one of us go onto the committee – otherwise the club wouldn’t survive. So I said I’d go down and see what I could do – and I’ve been there ever since,” she said.

Although numbers have fluctuated over the years, an influx of people from a local gym helped to consolidate the membership towards the end of the 1990s. Since then, North Tipp Wheelers has more or less been on an upward trajectory, and although the club has evolved from a competition-focused structure to something more diverse, that reflects the growing appetite for cycling amongst a wider variety of people.

“At the moment we seem to be hovering most years at around 70, 75 members,” she said.

“The focus has kind of changed a bit though. There was a lot more racing at one point, but now we have a lot more leisure cyclists. We cater for everything – we tell everybody that we’re not a racing club, we’re a cycling club. So, we do club races, open races, leisure cycling, mountain biking for anybody that wants it – we do whatever!”

Having now served as secretary of the Wheelers for more than three decades, her journey in the sport has seen her venture along many different roads, most of them flanked by positive experiences and happy memories. It’s a journey which has also been tainted by sadness and personal loss, as her son Daniel was tragically killed in a car accident in May 1999, aged 23. He had been an accomplished underage cyclist, and a much-loved figure both within and outside the cycling community. While she acknowledges that such a devastating loss creates a permanent grief, there will forever be a permanent association between the North Tipp Wheelers and her son, one which is full of fond memories and happy experiences.

Featherweight frames

By the time Peter and co. established North Tipp Wheelers in the late 1970s, some of the club’s present-day members had already forged an accomplished career on the saddle, such as Borrisokane resident John Caulfield. Set to turn 80 years-old in the coming weeks, John’s plans to celebrate his birthday with an eighty kilometre cycle have been slightly scuppered by both the Covid-19 pandemic and a recent injury he sustained to his back. It won’t stop him however – the celebration will merely be delayed.

Born in Wexford in 1940, it was during the mid-1950s that John unearthed his passion for cycling, by which time he had migrated up to Thomastown in Co. Kilkenny. Local parish sports days served as a barometer of the athletic potential in an area, and they could be hotly competitive affairs – often the starting point for athletes of many different disciplines and ambitions.

“You see at that time every parish would have a local sports day. And obviously there weren’t many cars around so you would cycle to a sports meeting wherever, you might cycle from Thomastown over to say, Mullinavat. You might have eight or ten fellows going and there’d be three or four cycle races, then they’d have running races, they’d have a ‘tug of war’, and all sorts of stuff,” John recalls.

Cycling has evolved dramatically in the decades since, as no-nonsense one-gear racers have been replaced by featherweight frames with multiple gears and wheels so slim they’re invisible from front and back. Still, the fundamentals of the sport remain the same as they were during the six editions of Rás Tailteann in which John competed from 1959 to 1966. Road-racing wasn’t the only game in town either. If the thought of whizzing around an oval-shaped circuit at high speed makes you feel nauseous, you’ll appreciate the effort involved in one of John’s odysseys inside the Eamon Ceannt Stadium – Ireland’s first designated track cycling venue, opened in the late 1950s. Along with two friends and fellow cyclists, Ben McKenna and Brian Connaughton – both former winners of Rás Tailteann in 1959 and 1969 respectively – John undertook a charity cycle in aid of the Irish Wheelchair Association, as he recalls:

“During the early 70s the three of us did a charity cycle on the track in Crumlin, we did a 24-hour cycle for the Irish Wheelchair Association. So, we got them to leave the lights around the track on all night, and then we had two caravans lined up – one for sleeping and one for eating. So, each of us cycled around the track for eight hours, we did an hour on and then two hours off. We did 490-something miles, and we raised enough money to buy the Irish Wheelchair Association a mini-bus.”

It seems like a world away from the lustrous wooden tracks of today’s Olympic velodrome. The advanced facilities required for elite-level track cycling probably cause the sport to suffer, although there are proposals to construct a velodrome on the National Sports Campus in Abbotstown over the coming years. Given that Nenagh was famously home to Ireland’s only indoor athletics track from 1988 to 2002, perhaps Sport Ireland might consider locating the country’s first indoor velodrome in the town. Regardless of whether that prospect ever transpires, John will continue to clock up the kilometres on the open roads, Jan will balance cycling with secretarial duties, Peter will keep on mending any chain which unravels, and the wheels won’t stop spinning in the North Tipp Wheelers.