NUI Galway lecturer in civil engineering Dr Eoghan Clifford stormed to his second World Title at the UCI Para-cycling Road World Championships in South Carolina on 1 September. Clifford was victorious in the Men’s C3 Road Race, which involved racing seven 10.2 km laps. The Championships ran from Friday 28 August until Monday 1 September and Clifford opened the Irish campaign by winning gold in the Men’s C3 Time Trial on 29 August. The engineer pushed ahead with three laps to go, winning by a margin of almost two minutes. “I can’t believe it. I had planned to not show in the first few laps, but it was very explosive, and I was struggling pretty bad, so hung in towards the back,” said Clifford after the race. “I felt that as they tired and lost the explosiveness, I stayed the same. At the start/finish area with three laps to go, I got about 20-30 metres in the technical section and put my head down to see what would happen. I'm the kind of rider that if I can get a gap I can hold it and they'd have to commit to a chase to catch me; I didn’t want it to come to a sprint. When I got up to two minutes ahead, I knew I had it.” Clifford added a special note of thanks to his fellow teammates: “I'd like to thank the rest of the Irish team and management here. They made it really easy for me; the other squad members have so much experience and were really helpful.” Para-cycling has been officially administered by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) since an agreement to transfer governance of the discipline from the International Paralympic Committee was signed in February 2007. This discipline is divided into road and track races for a total of seven events. The competitions comprise four groups of handicaps (blind and visually impaired riders, people with cerebral palsy, locomotor disabilities and handcycling) and a total of 14 functional categories for men and women in all the age categories defined by the UCI. Riders are placed in the appropriate category in the light of their functional capacity.