Making history at the Tour de France after a nasty crash and a confidence rebuild

The 42

7 hours ago

A WOMAN HAS just crossed the line of the final stage of the Women's Tour de France when the camera closes in on her distressed face.
Delirious with fatigue, she crouches over the handlebars of her bike while a race official props her up. She leans down, pressing her helmet into her left hand before moving across to the other side in a desperate search for relief. Every breath is a fight for air. Her whole body is heaving.
After nine days, and roughly 1,000km of cycling, she's finally at the end of the toughest tour of her professional career.
Another minute and she wouldn't have made the time cut. The record would have shown that Fiona Mangan from Limerick didn't finish the Tour de Femmes, a sign-off she would not have deserved. She has already made history by being one of the first three Irish women to compete at this prestigious cycling event. And on Stage 7, she became the first Irish rider to win an intermediate sprint.
This is the ninth and final stage. Cycling with the last group on the road, it's been a grind to get through the 3,000m of climbing to cross the line at Châtel Les Portes du Soleil. A big push to get inside the cut line.
'It was such a suffer-fest out there,' she says to the interviewer as she slowly starts to recalibrate. 'I'm not a climber so I'm really suffering . . . I've achieved things I've never done before . . . definitely the hardest thing that I've done.'
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The pain didn't arrive immediately after Mangan was thrown over the handlebars during a race in Belgium. She leapt back up and tried to haul down a car for assistance.
She can't quite remember, but she thinks her saddle was loose. There was about 30km left in the Omloop Nieuwsblad in March, when she veered off the road, out through the bushes, and over the handlebars after her front wheel became lodged in a drain.
That's when she noticed her saddle was broken and that's also when her shoulder and right hand started sending signals. A hospital in Belgium saw nothing of concern in her injuries, but a second opinion in Spain offered a clearer picture of the damage. A broken collarbone and a broken metacarpal in her right hand.
'I got a plate in my collarbone and a screw in my hand,' Mangan, 29, recalls. 'They said , 'You have to get surgery done on your metacarpal, because if you don't, it's going to heal like in a strange way.'
'You won't have like proper functioning of your hand for writing and stuff.'
Crashes are unspectacular events in cycling. They happen frequently and procedures are in place to respond quickly. Mangan has had a few spills in her time.
'At least 20, if not more,' she says when asked for a rough estimate.
Most of her falls have resulted in minor injuries like cuts, bruises and scrapes. In January, she was unseated during a race in Majorca and was left with just a cut on her face.
'There's so many crashes in cycling that that was a good crash,' she adds.
But the Belgium incident was more serious and the impact on her confidence was quite significant. The Omloop Nieuwsblad is what is known as a spring classic on the cycling calendar, and is raced over cobble roads. Riders need to be strong for these races as the course is mostly flat with a lot of corners to navigate.
This was a race that Mangan felt she was suited to and was building her training towards it. But mishaps can still happen in a sport like cycling. Saddles can loosen. Equipment can fail. Riding that line between safety and danger carries a cost.
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'It took me like a few months before I could fully descend properly and corner properly. It took me a few months to get back confidence.
'You have to manage your risk because you're going 60, sometimes 80km per hour on descents.
'So in training, I try to be as careful as I can and really mindful and not pushing it. And and then when you're in race mode, you're in race mode. And I guess, you're always taking risks. It's a sport that's dangerous in so many ways. But I think the more you do the sport, the more you know when to take the risk, and when not.
Fiona Mangan pictured at the Tour de France. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
'But then, the reason I love cycling sometimes is because there's there's such a thrill to it, too. A bit like probably Formula One or jockeys, there are parts that are thrilling. And when you're in a flow, you don't even feel the fear. You just you just go with the flow.'
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Cycling was in Mangan's family through her father who had an interest in triathlons. Growing up, Fiona would often join him for a cycle but didn't like the length of time they spent on the bike. She didn't want to wear a helmet either.
Her attitude to road safety came up at a friend's wedding recently. They went to school together and when they were in transition year, the pair started cycling to school.
'As soon as she was gone around the corner of her house,' Mangan says taking up the story, 'She'd take off her helmet. My parents would leave for work earlier so they wouldn't even see me sometimes leave the house without a helmet. One day our neighbour caught us and I think we got in trouble.'
Gaelic football was Mangan's main sport at that point. She played basketball too, and some soccer but playing for her local GAA club Mungret was her main priority. County football came up for her at the underage grades up to about minor.
Cycling came back into her orbit during her college years. While studying Biomedical Engineering in NUIG, she went to Georgia Tech in Atlanta as part of an exchange programme. A local triathlon club was organising events and Mangan decided to head along with a friend.
'For some reason, I really got hooked to cycling out there.
'It gave me an opportunity to visit all like the roads around and to visit and I had no car. So like I really got into cycling, like I would cycle to the school, to the gym, like just to the shop. I was just cycling all the time to get anywhere.
'I did a few triathlons out there and I really enjoyed it. And then came home and Dad said he had an old road bike. That's when I started using doing triathlons in Ireland.'
Her Dad was also quick to remind her of a time when cycling didn't meet her standard.
'He definitely did. Although I think he was delighted when he was doing a bit of triathlon. He would take me along with him. It was nice for the two of us to have a day out at the weekend, so I think he was happy.
'He wasn't happy, though, when I started beating him.'
Cycling tightened its grip on Mangan during the Covid-19 pandemic. She moved back home with her parents in Limerick and found the bike to be a useful instrument for getting around the 2km and 5km social distancing restrictions.
She joined a local cycling group called Greenmount and found an instant acceptance among the other cyclists. A new obsession was born as she took part in her first competitive race in the 2020 National Championships, which were held in Limerick.
'They [Greenmount] really took me under their wing and showed me how to race. They gave me a lot of confidence. They were always challenging me to do a harder race or do more training and things like that. I loved that. I really loved the community that they had built around cycling.'
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Mangan didn't think she would rebuild her form in time to earn a selection for the Tour de France. She signed a professional contract with the Winspace Orange Seal team in France last October, but the crash that followed in March had knocked her. She was the national Time Trial and Road Race champion in 2024, but was unable to defend her double success this summer.
And then, in July, she revived her season with her first international victory as a pro. Mangan won the sprint finish to claim the third stage of the Volta a Portugal Feminina Cofidis. It was a big win for her confidence, and a landmark win for her team.
'99 percent of the time you're losing. When you do win, it's just such a nice feeling. You you kind of can't believe it. There's 150 girls in the race and when you actually do cross the line first, you're like, 'What'?
'It was really nice for the team, too. I was their first podium win with the Winspace sponsor.'
Mangan found out that she was on the Tour de France team about three weeks out from the first stage. She had plenty of support as her mother is from France and her parents loaded up the car to follow her campaign. Her cousins in Brittany supported her too.
Mangan made history in 2023 by becoming the first Irish woman to complete one of cycling's Grand Tours at the La Vuelta Femenina. And now, she was opening the record books again. Along with Mia Griffin (Roland Le Dévoluy) and Lara Gillespie (UAE Team ADQ), the three riders broke new ground by becoming the first women to represent Ireland at the Tour de Femmes.
It was a successful debut as Gillespie took third place at Stage 4 to secure a podium finish. And then Mangan delivered another milestone moment with that intermediate sprint finish on Stage 7. She was in a breakaway group when she heard there was a sprint coming up. Winning sprints during a stage entitles the rider to points and Mangan was allocated 25 of them for her effort.
'My director was on the radio and he said, 'Look, there's a sprint coming up. You might as well take it.'
'When you're in a breakaway, it's a lot easier to win those kind of points, because instead of competing with a peloton of 200 girls, you're only competing with the breakaway of, in our case, it was 17.
'It just a nice kind of experience to have as well, to kind of practice maybe in a few years time. The green jersey is something I might want to aim for.'
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It's unusual to take a full week off from cycling, but that was exactly what Mangan needed after the Tour de France. After nine straight days of racing, a beach in Spain sounds like just the ticket.
'It's like you're really hungover. Your brain is really foggy.'
She's peddling again now, working towards a stage race in Ardèche in France next month. The European Championships are after that. She has also started some track pursuit training in the Velodrome. A shot at qualifying for the LA Olympics could be on her bingo card.
Ben Healy in the yellow jersey during this year's Tour de France. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
These are prosperous times for Irish cycling. Ben Healy set the tone with his yellow jersey exploits at the men's Tour de France before the trio at the Tour de Femmes boosted cycling's profile in Ireland once again. Eddie Dunbar, Darren Rafferty, Gillespie and Griffin, Mangan mentions them all when she thinks about the sport's recent growth spurt.
And the Limerick woman wants more of this. More risk-management. More riding the line. More pain. More joy. And hopefully, more success.