It’s 1987, and Irish cycling is on top of the world. Stephen Roche has become only the second rider, after Eddy Merckx, to complete the Triple Crown, and Sean Kelly has secured a record-breaking sixth Paris-Nice title. Flash forward almost four decades, and while Ireland might lack the Grand Tour or Monument favourites of Roche or Kelly, it has a new cast rapidly driving the nation back up to the top tier of cycling, whether that be on the tarmac or the track.
Ben Healy ended a 38-year dry spell since the last time an Irishman donned cycling’s most iconic jersey when he finished third on stage 10 of this summer’s Tour de France to take hold of the maillot jaune. That “fairytale” moment came just four days after he also became the seventh Irishman to have won a stage of the Tour, and the first since Sam Bennett in 2020.
It capped off a stellar past 18 months for the 24-year-old. On the track, before her rainbow jersey, Gillespie made her Olympic debut in Paris, scored bronze in the 2024 Worlds’ Points Race, and became European champion also in the Elimination. On the road, she completed her first Tour de France Femmes – narrowly missing out to Lorena Wiebes in the stage 4 sprint, added a second pro win in September, and a further seven top-three finishes across the 2025 season.
How Gillespie made up for lost time
Gillespie’s rise to world champion is made even more impressive by the far-from-natural trajectory that the Wicklow-born rider took to get into professional cycling. After dabbling in countless…
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