Darren Rafferty of Hagens Berman Axeon won the overall title at the Giro della Valle d’Aosta. The five-day stage race is considered to be one of the toughest weeks of racing for under-23 riders during the road season.
One day after his overall win, EF Education-EasyPost confirmed the 20-year-old Irishman, a multi-time national championship across four disciplines, would be joining them at the WorldTour level in 2024.
“I can’t really believe it is actually happening,” Rafferty said in press release. “It is hard to put into words, something that you have worked so hard towards for such a long time. Three years ago, I went to France instead of university with the dream of getting a job as a professional cyclist, and now it is going to happen from next year. It is incredible.”
EF-EasyPost CEO Jonathan Vaughters said Rafferty has been on their radar since last year, and they found he was quite talented physiologically but hadn't quite translated that into results. A second place in the Under-23 Giro Next Gen sealed the deal.
"We brought him into our laboratory to test everything from metabolism to Vo2 max to aerodynamic qualities early in the year, and at that point, which was pre-Baby Giro, the decision was pretty much made to take him onboard because he showed incredible metabolic values and incredible oxygen consumption and power values," Vaughters said.
"The only question we still had was that his results in junior and U23 races thus far had not actually been as incredible as his physiological values are. It turns out that the reason for that is that the races just weren’t hard enough. As soon as he went to the Baby Giro and went up the Stelvio, it became very apparent that actually his race results in that hard of a race absolutely match the lab results."
A national title in the under-23 preceded his most recent success in the Giro della Valle d'Aosta-Mont Blanc, where he claimed the race lead on the penultimate stage.
“I can’t really believe it. I’m super proud of the team. I just can't thank the team enough. It’s such a nice race, incredible, to get the jersey at the end,” he said.
Rafferty moved into the overall race lead with a second-place finish on the longest stage of the race, a 172.5km journey from Verrayes to Fénis on Saturday. On the mountaintop finale Sunday at Breuil-Cervinia, he managed to work his way into a front group on the long ascent and hang on to seventh place, finishing 3:06 behind stage 5 winner Joshua Golliker (Equipe Continentale Groupama-FDJ).
“I mean it really wasn’t what I was supposed to do, but once I caught [the front group] I kept on and it worked incredibly at the end. It was a super-hard day. I had a nice gap from yesterday, and it worked out. I knew I had about two-and-a-half minutes. I just sat into a rhythm I knew I could hold until the finish.”
In the last few kilometres he dropped off the pace, but he said he didn’t panic, just “hung in as long as I could and hoping they wouldn’t take too much time”.
“What can you say? I think we were the strongest team. They all performed exceptionally today. I couldn’t have won without them.”
Last year he won the overall at one-day Strade Bianche U23 on his first season at Hagens Berman Axeon. This year he has a runner-up finish from Giro Next Gen along with the Irish U23 time trial gold medal, and also finished second in the points classification this week in Italy.
He said his next big goal was the World Championships, which will be in Scotland next month, where he focuses on getting medals for Ireland in the time trial and road race. He last competed at Worlds as a junior in 2021, when he was fourth in the men’s junior time trial.
Hagens Berman Axeon will return to racing in the US in early September for the the Maryland Cycling Classic presented by UnitedHealthcare. The US-based squad will be among seven Continental squads in the one-day race, alongside five WorldTeams, four ProTeams and a United States men’s national cycling team.
