Interview from Brian Canty and Sticky Bottle. Thanks lads!! Former UCD CC rider, Anthony Walsh has put his bad luck of 2012 behind him in signing a new one-year deal with the American team Astellas Oncology. Initially the team was a small outfit, but with a significant cash injection and some of the top riders from the States and Canada coming on board, plans are at an advanced stage to have the team ride some of the biggest races on the US calendar next year. Walsh, a 29-year-old barrister from Clontarf, Dublin, is part of those plans having impressed in several races in Canada. “The races we’ll be doing are all pretty much Rás level races, most of them are UCI races too,” he told stickybottle. “They’ll have the big US teams going to most of them, the likes of Philip Deignan’s Unitedhealthcare team, Jelly Belly, Kenda and those boys.” He said the new deal had followed recent periods of competing in Canada. “I raced there a couple of times last season because my girlfriend’s Canadian. I had a bad crash racing in France with the Apoge Super U team. I broke my scapula, collar bone and a couple of ribs and coming back from that I was training hard, I had good form. I wanted to ride the Rás but it was just too soon.” “I came out here (Canada) instead and I won a big enough race called the Ontario Cup in Niagara. That kind of put me on the map and then I had a second crash and broke my scaphoid (bone in the wrist) out at the Stephen Roche crit just before the nationals.” “So I came back out here again and got another good result (5th) in Windsor in a big race there called Tour de Vi Italia. After that I got talking to a guy and he was asking me what my plans were for next season. He said there was meant to be a team with a big budget coming along and would I be interested. I said we’d stay in contact because I wasn’t sure what I was doing at the time so it stemmed from there.” Though he subsequently had offers from teams in the UK as well as the option of going back to France; with his girlfriend from Toronto and some of his family living there he was sold on the idea of relocating across the Atlantic. “I had a couple of stressful weeks trying to decide would I take that route of going to the UK. I got a feeling from speaking to the manager here though. It’s the same with anything, you get a feeling within a couple of minutes if they want you or not and this team made me feel really comfortable. They’re even hiring a buddy of mine to be soigneur to help me fit in.” “But don’t get me wrong, France was brilliant, I really loved it out there and I couldn’t recommend the team highly enough for any Irish lads. They really treated us like family. After the first time I crashed in February, the guys in the team had me staying in their houses with their families and wouldn’t even hear of me going back to the apartment on my own.” “They really pulled out all the stops for me and it was a tough decision not to go back because they’ve a super star line-up and have signed some great riders; some of the best riders from around the area.” “But the language is a big issue over there. My French got better from being there but I think you’d need three or four years. I was doing French classes over there and I was trying to learn as much as I could but it’s very difficult to get the intricacies.” “What you’d learn in the classroom and how the lads talk is very, very different. So without another English speaker for next year, it would have been very difficult and that was a factor in my decision to come to Canada.” He will live in Canada in 2013 and will travel to the US for races. His new team is based in Chicago. For the next number of months Walsh will alternate between Spain and Ireland where he’s hopeful of a big winter of training before the team convenes early next year for some training blocks in Carolina and Florida. One thing Walsh did stipulate with his new contract was that he would be released to ride the An Post Rás in May; that’s assuming the team don’t get an invite and he rides with them. It’s a race that has always held a special appeal for him. “I was gutted to have missed out this year but it just came too soon after my crash”, he said. “But I’ll be targeting GC in that next year. I did a good ride there before, 23rd overall in 2011. And maybe I can target the top 10 if I’m really on form.”