Ireland's Ben Healy confirmed for Tour de France
Healy's inclusion on the Tour comes after it was announced yesterday that Cork's Eddie Dunbar would be making his Tour de France debut this year. The 2025 race gets underway in Lille on Saturday.
Harry Sweeny, Neilson Powless, Vincenzo Albanese, Michael Valgren, Alex Baudin, Kasper Asgreen, and Marijn van den Berg will all join Healy on the EF Education-EasyPost team.
'I would love to win a stage at the Tour de France,' Healy said following the team announcement.
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'Last year was my first experience at the Tour and it was just massive. I am really proud of the way we raced last year. We were always part of the action.
'We've got a really balanced team that can go for it almost every day at the Tour. This spring gave me a lot of confidence. I got my best results in the Ardennes and at Strade and had the win in the Basque Country. Since the Dauphiné, I have been working hard up at altitude in Andorra. Now it's time to race.'
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Irish Examiner
2 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Vikki the supporting Wall as Meath restart the party
When the ball is thrown in at Croke Park tomorrow, it'll be exactly 10 years since Meath faced Cork in an All-Ireland qualifier in Thurles and lost by 40 points. Cork put 7-22 on the board on the afternoon of August 3, 2015, to Meath's solitary three points. Cork went on to win the All-Ireland but if you'd told any of their supporters at the end of that season that Meath would outscore them by two to zero in the Brendan Martin Cup count before 2025 rolled around, you'd have been laughed out of it. It was a 17-year-old, widely reported as Victoria Wall, that scored each of those three points for Meath in the 2015 encounter. These days, she goes by Vikki and the christian name alone sparks instant recognition. Her list of achievements across that decade is remarkable from All-Ireland wins at the senior and intermediate grades with Meath, Player of the Year and All-Star awards, to winning an AFLW Premiership with North Melbourne last December, when she scored two goals. She had a stint with the Irish rugby sevens team across 2023 and 2024 too. Throw in her role in leading Dunboyne to All-Ireland junior and intermediate titles at the expense of Cork teams Bantry (2015) and Kinsale (2017) - she scored goals in each final - as well as her four points in the 2021 Leinster club senior final win, and you have a quite phenomenal career. All by the age of 27. "I think it's been winning and losing over the years that's probably brought us all so close," said Wall. "In 2018, 2019, those two years for Meath were definitely pivotal in terms of creating a core group, a lot of them are still here. The losing and the craic we had, it hurt so much at times. "The stories that we still talk about probably are more centred around 2018, 2019, when we just had great fun. Those times and memories, as much as they hurt at the time, you don't realise how pivotal they are for a group of young players like that which came together." Meath operated in the intermediate ranks in those years of 2018 and 2019, losing All-Ireland finals in both seasons. They finally got over the line in 2020, beating Westmeath to return to the senior ranks. Then the fun really started with landmark senior successes in 2021 and 2022. But when the Eamonn Murray management team broke up after that, and results spiralled, many presumed the party was over. "No, that was never the perception inside the group," contested Wall, who missed virtually all of last year due to rugby commitments. "I could understand that from the outside perspective. We've lost to Kerry in quarter-finals in each of the last two years. "Going out at the quarter-final stage, you're in the top eight, okay, but top eight is a far, far cry from being in an All-Ireland final. "I think this year we were very conscious of the potential within the group but also knowing that you still had to get the scores and you still had to get the results on the day. "Knowing there's potential there and actually executing it are two very different things." Wall's presence for the entire season, allowing her to link up again with her sister, Sarah, and clubmate Emma Duggan, has been significant. "I probably didn't see it happening last November, December, to be back in with Meath this year," she revealed. "So, for me, I've just enjoyed this year so much. "Even when results weren't going our way, or when we wouldn't be happy with things, like driving to training every day and stuff, I was still just really grateful to be here and just really lapping it up and enjoying it with the girls. "I don't know whether I'm a bit more present than in other years or something but I suppose, for me, that probably feels a little bit different. So yeah, I'm really enjoying it." What might have kept her away from football in 2025, rugby? "No, I just wasn't too sure," she shrugged. "I suppose finishing up in Oz and it had been a long enough year and a half and stuff before that. But look, just delighted to be back in with the girls. It's been class." Megan Thynne, Meath's dynamo half-forward, and midfielder Marion Farrelly also lined out against Cork a decade ago and are expected to start tomorrow. Shauna Ennis could start again too, if she slips in as expected for the injured Katie Newe, while current sub goalkeeper Monica McGuirk was the number one in 2015. McGuirk also has iconic status within Meath ladies football, a three-time All-Star and two-time All-Ireland winner. She's being kept out of the team by Robyn Murray, an adventurous young 'keeper who, along with Kerrie Cole and Ciara Smyth represents a new wave of talent. "There's a great mix," said Wall. "Other individuals that have been here for the last few years, have grown as well. And there's a bit of flair in the younger players. Having them all at training and pushing each other, that's instrumental for our team." And yet Dublin are still favourites. The 2023 champions have beaten Meath three times already this year, though it took a late surge to take the Leinster title. "I don't think we did ourselves justice with our performance, as in our scoring accuracy and stuff like that," said Wall of the provincial decider. "I suppose everyone wants to right those wrongs, all the cliches, but I think there's a lot more to it than the Leinster final."
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
'The winning ensured we had that time with each other' - Juliet Murphy on life, legend and loss
The bible and a basket of breakfast pastries sit side by side. Tears and treats. The same as Eamonn Ryan used to mark homework for Juliet Murphy before sending her back up the road from Ballingeary, I had my own spot of homework to do ahead of Wednesday morning's class in the Montenotte Hotel. The bible, as Juliet calls it when she sees the book tucked under my arm, is Relentless. Relentless is the phenomenally well-told story of Cork ladies football, as penned by Mary White. Relentless got a second reading this week. We searched through the yellowed pages for anecdotes and old quotes that would hopefully enhance Wednesday's conversation. Faded tales that might relocate Juliet to 20 years ago and Cork's breakthrough All-Ireland. After all, that is why we are here. To reminisce on their relentlessness. To rake through the time of their lives and the mark left. Success and its shaping. The people they were and the people they became. Club cliques to one still tight circle. The moments and memories spawned by the medals. For all the pages folded at the edge and for all the paragraphs marked with a biro, we begin with a picture. I hand over the bible, direct her attention to the image at the top of the right-hand page, and ask what comes to mind. The moment, caught expertly by retired Examiner snapper Denis Minihane, is a joyous embrace in the Hogan Stand tunnel between Murphy, with the Brendan Martin Cup in her left hand, and Eamonn Ryan. Manager and captain. Master and pupil. Friend clasping friend. History-makers. LETTING IT ALL OUT: Cork manager Eamonn Ryan hugging team captain Juliet Murphy after defeating Galway for their breakthrough TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Senior Football Final triumph at Croke Park. Picture Denis Minihane. There's silence in this corner of the hotel lobby. The tears present themselves. A steady queue of tears present themselves. I apologise. My last intention was to upset her. 'I know, I know,' she replies. Eamonn is never far away from her thoughts. This particular picture, though, she'd not come across anytime recently. The emotion stirred creeps up on her the same way their Cork team did the summit of ladies football. 'I remember that hug. We were out of picture, or so I thought. I was struggling off the pitch at that time, so it was the relief that we did it, that gorgeous feeling of achieving something that we thought for so long was beyond us. And then to share that with somebody who was making us feel so good about ourselves. 'A group that weren't even cohesive, a group that weren't just not talking about achieving, but not even challenging, not competing, not enjoying their game at that level, to then move into the realm where you want to go training, you can't wait for it. 'I often think that team was capable of winning an All-Ireland, maybe two, but nobody could have got out of us what Eamonn did and no other coach could have impacted our lives as much as he did. That hug for me represents just gratitude to him.' Gratitude for everyone else in red. No gratitude spared for herself. Not for a number of years. For a number of years, there were two of her. There was the self-assured matchday athlete. There was the Juliet Murphy who stepped onto the field knowing the role she had to fulfil and knowing she had the requisite tools to execute. And then there was the everyday individual riddled with self-doubt. Two strangers. Two opposites living in co-existence. Before she came to prominence in red, Murphy was prominent enough on local hardwood floors to earn selection in green. An Irish basketball teammate of hers from down the road in West Cork, Paula O'Neill, died tragically in 2001 following a car accident. The deceased was just 21, so too was the friend mourning the loss of a 'gas woman and brilliant basketballer'. 'She died a few days later in hospital. Those few days, I can remember it all so vividly. It was just so tragic. It was a trauma,' Juliet recalls. 'I didn't really know anyone locally that knew Paula, I had no other friends that knew her because it was the basketball scene. I just struggled with it. I probably had struggled bits and pieces with my confidence before that.' That confidence became transient. Her inner self-critic shouted louder and for longer. Doubt became a fierce opponent and even fiercer motivator. Juliet convinced herself that to succeed she needed to do more than everyone else in every aspect of life. 'I trained extra hard. Looking back now, I over-trained. But then it drove me on as well. There is that fine line, isn't there, of having the confidence to say, I am ready, and saying, no, I need to do more. And I always felt that if I could run longer than whoever I was marking at midfield, I would be giving myself every advantage. 'With Cork and the opponents you were meeting, there was always that sense of 'would you be good enough, would you be fit enough, would you be strong enough?' The challenge became greater every year because we were there to be knocked off.' The paradox was her internal silence amid the matchday chaos. The chatter and the noise checked out and disappeared. She was in her happiest room. Even an in-possession mistake was given a free pass until long after the final whistle. Her on-field persona was no front. She wasn't acting. No mask was being worn. Inside the whitewash, instinct took over and game intelligence won through. A tower of composure in the centre of the field. LUCKY 13: Cork players, from left, Juliet Murphy, Elanie Harte, Briege Corkery, Bríd Stack and manager Eamonn Ryan celebrate with the Brendan Martin cup after the 2103 TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Football Senior Championship Final against Monaghan. Pic: Ray McManus / SPORTSFILE 'I knew exactly what my role was and I wasn't going to let anyone down,' reflects the eight-time All-Ireland winner and now 45-year-old mom to Moss (6) and Sophia (5). She also mined confidence from those around her. And given the sheer spread of quality she kept company with, who wouldn't mine confidence from having in your corner Briege Corkery's engine, Nollaig Cleary's left peg, Valerie Mulcahy's penchant to never stop scoring, or the defensive nous of Bríd Stack and Angela Walsh. And that is to literally name but a few. 'You saw your teammates doing brilliant stuff and you went again. I loved that. Not long before he passed away, I was chatting with Eamonn on the phone and I was talking about football being a complete mindfulness. I was like, 'Eamonn, you are just following this white thing all around the field'. Being the psychologist he was, he said sure that's completely it. But it was. Just so absorbed and so in the flow and feeling good about what I could do. It was brilliant. 'I needed football. I needed it to express myself. I needed it to feel good about myself. I knew I had ability. I knew this was something I was good at because I was damn well sure of the things I wasn't good at. I wanted more of this. I wanted more of the thing I had ability in. That made me feel good about myself, which I needed.' TIME TO REFLECT: Eight-time All-Ireland Senior medallist and three time winning captain Juliet Murphy of Cork during a special LGFA 50th Anniversary celebration event last year in Thurles, Tipperary. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile A sip of Americano, a pastry pulled from the basket, and we go again. She starts talking about luck. There's an eye-roll from this chair. From 2005 through 2016, Cork played 66 championship games. They won 61 of them. Of the five they lost, only the solitary - the infamous 2010 quarter-final against Tyrone - was knockout. And so luck has no business intruding on this conversation. She goes again. There was luck, she insists, in the collective coming together of such like-minded individuals. Individuals relentlessly driven to keep pushing their ceiling north. 'The timing and when you come along is so important. And I know you're smiling, thinking 'ah c'mon now Juliet, there is more than timing', but there's a lot of luck involved in the decisions people make to get involved with us, and for people to stay on and keep going with the team for as long as they did. 'We were all getting such enjoyment from it that we wanted to stay on the train for as long as we could.' Subtly steering the most successful team in modern Gaelic games history was the late Eamonn Ryan. He was, of course, so much more than their manager. It was Eamonn who convinced the three-time All-Ireland winning captain to return to college and become a primary school teacher. It was he who helped lift her Gaeilge to the required level. The grinds, more often than not, took place in his 'trí na cheile mancave' in Ballingeary, but only after his wife Pat had served Juliet a bowl of homemade soup and a plate of homemade brown bread. 'The odd time Eamonn might be cranky with you, you'd kind of think he is fed up with me today, I am not getting it as quickly as I should,' she says, smiling wistfully. 'But I think he'd nearly do that on purpose to make you cop on and do a little bit more. The psychologist was always at play. 'I've kept the notebooks he wrote from that time. Eamonn had gorgeous writing, so I love looking at them. I know that he helped loads of people in terms of education and career and life choices.' She remembers him floating blissfully in the sea on various team holidays. She remembers their chat in the corner of a Castletownbere pub the Tuesday after the 2006 triumph. 'It was maybe 15 minutes, maybe longer, before everyone else came across. We had a drink together and a chat about life. It was magic.' When he passed in 2021, Covid denied all those he impacted in life and in sport a proper goodbye. For his players, it was organised that they say goodbye in a familiar setting. PANDEMIC FAREWELL: Current and former Cork players part of the guard of honour for former Cork manager Eamonn Ryan at the UCC Farm. Picture: Eddie O'Hare On Eamonn's final journey from Ballingeary to Ballinaltig Cemetery in Watergrasshill, the hearse briefly detoured to take in UCC's training ground, The Farm. The Cork ladies lined either side of the road in. The hearse stopped and they clapped. They clapped for their friend and all he'd done for them. The tears come again. There's a napkin at the bottom of the pastry basket. She rips off a piece to wipe them away. 'It felt surreal for a long time because there wasn't closure. I watched his funeral on the couch at home, it's not really a proper goodbye, and not surrounded by each other either. But look, that's only one story of how many from those Covid times?' The memories are so many. The memories are warm. On their way up to a GPA event last Friday week to celebrate the 2005 history-makers, they reminisced on how Briege missed the train to Dublin the day before the 2006 All-Ireland and so took the next train up alone. On the way home from the same GPA event, they rekindled the singsongs they so cherished during their playing days. Not everyone in their carriage was delighted to hear the Cork ladies once again belting out the hits. 'My medals are in a drawer somewhere, I have never taken them out to look at them. What I have and what we all have is our memories. We are lucky we have so many of those because of the time we were together. 'The winning ensured we had that time with each other, and don't get me wrong, loved to win, hated losing, but you can only take the memories with you.'
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Bellew: Swap the All-Ireland final dates and stage four hurling quarter-finals
Paul Bellew knows how he and Kevin O'Donovan are viewed. On one hand, the Galway chairman and Cork chief executive are considered the guardians of the split season and the protectors of their dual code realms. On the other, they are regarded an obstinate pair standing in the way of pushing out the All-Ireland finals into August and letting the inter-county season breathe. Bellew isn't naïve enough to believe all is right at inter-county level: Galway tabled their own structure for the six-month game period, which envisages football and hurling games being played on alternate weekends thereby guaranteeing a minimum of two weeks between each game. Bellew has more ideas but within the same timeframe and the finals taking place in July. 'The penalties in the Munster final, the teams out within six days of their last game, not enough prominent hurling games, I think every one of those issues can be dealt with without extending the season whatsoever,' he opens. Galway GAA chairman Paul Bellew. Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady 'There's a view that if you extend the season, we'll solve all of these things. The fact is penalties were in before the split season was implemented. I think there's a real ability there to tweak the structures in the current calendar and that could solve so much. 'We, along with Cork, seem to be getting a lot of the flack at the moment in our opposition to any change to the split season. But there's a lot of counties other than Galway and Cork, I would say, and our position is very clear. We need a minimum of 14 to 16 weeks to run our club championships. 'Dual counties with a genuine emphasis on both codes at club and inter-county level have no advantage or incentive to do it (extend the inter-county season) bar it's our tradition. The one area we feel we should get fair play in is to have the right amount of time to play our club championships.' By swapping the All-Ireland finals and staging the hurling decider last, Bellew sees more counties being freed up earlier to start their football championships in summer but hurling also being given later summer prominence. As for the All-Ireland SHC, he makes the argument for the return of four All-Ireland quarter-finals, last seen in 2007, and possibly the fourth team in each province qualifying for the knock-out stages with the provincial finalists having home advantage. 'Is two quarter-finals enough within the current structure? I know we don't want to dilute the competitiveness of a Munster championship, etc., but hurling needs at least seven big days outside of the provincial championships. At the moment, you only have five. I think we really need to look at that. 'The proposal that we have sent to the CCCC (Central Competitions Control Committee), positioning hurling at the latter end of the calendar and the hurling final at the last day of the season, and work back from that, I think is getting some traction. Combined with the quarter-final element, a bit more competitive games would go a long way to helping out on the hurling promotion front.' Bellew was disappointed that this year's All-Ireland quarter-finals were not played on a Sunday – 'that was something I thought would be fixed this year. That it wasn't was disappointing.' He makes no bones about hurling outside the Munster SHC needing greater profile and endorses taking the Leinster final out of Croke Park. 'There's a gap in the attractiveness of Leinster versus Munster hurling as occasions. There was great work done by the Leinster Council this year in what they did on the football side, but I really do think that the Leinster final for a couple of years probably needs to move provincially or to a home-and-away arrangement if the counties agree to it. 'There was no comparison this year between the Connacht football final and the Leinster hurling final and the Munster hurling final. Castlebar and Limerick were just totally different occasions to the Leinster final. Now, we have a lot to answer for on that and the way we performed against Kilkenny but even if that was a rip-roaring game, you only had 30,000 people there.' Next year's Sam Maguire Cup will have eight fewer games as the group stages are replaced by an enhanced qualifier system, which Bellew fully supports. 'I think the fact that next year's structure is welcomed, because there's less games, and there are more competitive games. I know the format was very good this year but you had two lopsided groups that probably overshadowed the competitive level. 'Next year, you have the right amount of games to win an All-Ireland. Last year, when we got to an All-Ireland, we played 17 games, and it was hard going. Donegal played 18 games this year. Kerry played 17 games to win it. You should play no more than 15 games in the year.' The Leinster Council have also given more time to counties to complete their championships by truncating the timeframe of their club provincial competitions. Could Galway benefit from Connacht shortening their period? 'There's more to this than just fitting it into a calendar,' Bellew maintains. 'Our position on this is club players deserve certainty and a minimum number of matches. But most importantly, they also deserve to play it in summer conditions. We're starting our football championship this week and the hurling next week. Everyone will get two rounds in August and another couple of rounds in September. 'If we keep pushing out the season, what we're having is increased inter-county spend and we're having decreased income from a club perspective for county boards.' Bellew senses there is 'an appetite out there for replays in All-Ireland finals after 70 minutes' but points out as the likelihood of more second days will increase 'that's another reason not to extend the season'. He remains a supporter for 'winner on the day' in provincial finals. 'The penalty thing isn't something I've ever agreed with. I think all these games should be finished out under an additional score at some stage. The fact that they're not season-ending games, I think we could live with that.'
