House takes over after Evans has spell in yellow

CIARAN POWER (Dan Morrissey) claimed his second stage victory and the race leadership changed hands twice in a matter of hours as the 1996 winner, Tommy Evans (Dublin IRC Usher Insulations) took custody of the yellow jersey in the morning team time trial only to pass it on to Kristian House (Recycling.co.uk), the form man going into the race, when the FBD Insurance Rás arrived in Westport last evening.

With two stages remaining House holds a precarious lead as he is on the same time as American, Danny Pate (TIAA-CREF), who had relinquished the overall lead to Tommy Evans in somewhat unusual early morning time trial in An Ceathru Rua.

There were two sections in the team time trial ­ one for international teams and one for county teams ­ and the winners of each got zero penalties while second placed teams got 15 second penalties with each other getting an extra five seconds down the sheet.

When the calculations were completed Tommy Evans, a member of the IRC Usher Insulations team that won the county section, had an overall lead of eight seconds over House despite the fact that Recycling.co.uk had put in a storming ride to win the international section.

David O’Loughlin (Ireland Grant Thornton), who went into the team time trial just one second behind Pate on GC, ended up fifth overall — 29 seconds behind Evans — and there was more woe for him when his strongest team mate, Conor Murphy, was eliminated after finishing several minutes outside the time limit.

It set the scene for an interesting 51 mile trip to Westport.

David O’Loughlin was isolated when the leading group split and eventually it was Ciaran Power, Jehudi Schoonacker (M. Donnelly/Sean Kelly) and Ryan Connor who escaped with 20k remaining to fight out the finish.

With a kilometre to go Ryan Connor attacked and Power reacted. When he brought him back the Belgian got the jump on Power but he remained calm, held his position for the sprint and was never going to lose this one.