This feature is from the March 2017 edition of Procycling magazine
When 19-year-old Dan McLay turned up in Belgium as a Dave Rayner-funded rider, his new host, the 1989 British road champion Tim Harris, noted his shyness. “He was really quite quiet and not very outgoing, but slowly as he got to know us and other people in Belgium, he came out of his shell,” Harris recalled.
McLay may have been quiet around the house in those first few months of 2011, but his legs did the talking for him. He’d lived on the Continent barely a fortnight when he won the GP Stad Waregem (the U23 version of Dwars door Vlaanderen) from a field of 245. “He was perfect for Belgium,” says Harris. “Big, strong, he can sprint and ride in echelons.”
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That first year, McLay won six races. In the process, McLay and Harris became friends. The Omega Pharma-Lotto-Davo development team that had handed him a couple of bikes, a race programme, and instructions to get on with it invited him back for a second year. The Dave Rayner Fund, which supports young British and Irish riders striving to turn professional abroad, invested in the New Zealand-born, Leicester-bred rider again. The pattern repeated in the next two years, though the win rate had slowed. But in the fourth year – 2014 – the wins in big U23 races came: stages in the Tour de Normandie and the Tour de l’Avenir.
Four years riding for the Lotto development squad represented a fairly long apprenticeship, especially given that fellow Briton Adam Blythe before him, and James Shaw afterwards, signed contracts with Lotto’s WorldTour squad after less than two years. When the contract did materialise it was with the French Pro Continental squad, Bretagne-Séché Environnement; not the WorldTour start McLay may have secretly hoped for, perhaps, but as the 25-year-old notes with a smile, “It’s worked out alright.”
When he joined the Breton outfit, his old reticence came back, partly due to the language barrier. “I tried not to force English on them… I’d rather just try to fit in. I felt quite relaxed, though, and it feels like I’ve come out of my shell now.”
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