Every athlete, just like every person, has their own story to tell. Challenges overcome, experiences lived. Each chapter in a life shapes the next. Few in the WorldTour peloton have multiple stories as unexpected and as fascinating as Dillon Corkery.
The condensed facts are this: Corkery is a 27-year-old neo-pro from Ireland riding for Picnic PostNL who now he has finally reached the top-tier of cycling has designs on becoming an established leadout man. The rider he most idolises and wants to emulate is Michael Mørkøv. “Watching the way he could read a race and deliver a guy to the line was cool. He was class. And he was valued, and that to me is important.”
That’s only part of his story, though. The fuller version is even more interesting. If events had transpired differently, Corkery could have been an Olympic gymnast, a pool player, or be working on a building site, in a petrol station or in a pub. The latter is where his unique story really begins.
Corkery (bib number 63, far right) started his season at the AlUla Tour in Saudi Arabia. Image: AlUla Tour/Charly Lopez
“As soon as I could reach the taps – so around age six or seven – I’d be standing on kegs pulling pints,” Corkery tells me at Picnic’s winter training camp in Calp, Spain. Born in the small village of Banteer in southern Ireland, Corkery’s parents owned a rural country pub in Dromahane, 10km from where they lived. Every day the whole family decamped to the pub which was the centre of the community: pool tournaments sometimes had prize pots of €34,000, while other pub games awarded the winner thousands. Every night there was an event to draw a crowd.
Corkery was a centrepiece figure in the pub when he was just a kid. “I grew up in the pub and loved it,” he says. “I’d be pulling pints and people would say: ‘This can’t be legal, there’s no way’. But if it is if you’re blood [relatives to the owners] so me and three younger sisters could do it but my cousins couldn’t. We often had police come in and drink in the pub and they’d be questioning me. I’d be like, ‘It is legal! I can legally pull a pint for you at the age of 10!’ I loved everyone telling me that it was mad to see a young fella working behind a bar at that age.”
At the same age he was serving pints of Guinness – the key, he says, to a good pour is “practice” – he was also throwing himself around apparatus mats, having joined a gymnastics gym that his father’s cousin had opened up. “Alongside the pub that’s where I spent a lot of my time growing up,” he says.
Competition soon followed. “I was in a duo, and my partner was much older than me. We had a dance routine that we created, and we pieced together some tumbles and flips. I was tiny when I was younger – I didn’t have a growth spurt until I was 17 – so I was the kind of guy you could just throw around a room and hope he’d land on his feet. We were good; like, really, really good. We won the national championships five years in a row and we just missed out on qualification for the Olympics team when I was 12.”
This is where I step in. The Olympic Games? When he was 12? Surely he means the Youth Olympics. “No, the actual Olympics,” he answers. “We were really that good! The Olympic Federation of Ireland had set up a qualification process between different regions to put together a development program. We went through so many steps to qualify but then got beat in the final by a trio of girls from the same area who were better than us.”
That rejection was the first step towards Corkery switching sports. “I was 12, just beginning secondary school, and it was very hard for me to continue because I was afraid of being mocked and maybe bullied because, I guess, a lot of people would see gymnastics as a girls sport. If I had the mental capacity that I have now, I probably would have stayed at it because there was definitely a lot of room for me to develop and become quite a good gymnast. And you look at the male gymnasts today and they’re machines – they’re animals!”
Injuries also played their part. ”I spent a lot of time on the trampoline and with all that bouncing on the floor I did a little bit of damage to my pelvis and hips, and the physio said I should do some cycling to keep things aligned as it’s low impact on the body.” Yet he can’t have expected bike racing to take over his – and his family’s – life.
Corkery will line up for Picnic at the ongoing Belgian Classics. Image: Patrick Brunt
The moment Corkery began cycle racing he started winning. “My first or second race was the national championships and I won the road race, criterium and TT,” he says. “Each race I got better and I kept on winning. I think I only lost one race all season when I was 12. You might as well have just put my name on the trophy before the race started because I wasn’t losing. It was ridiculous, really.”
What most drove Corkery to the sport was the environment. ”I’d been in gym halls with crowds, but in the crit races there were massive crowds. Jeez, it was mad. It was so cool.” Quite often, his immediate and extended family made up a good proportion of the numbers. “My family is huge and my grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, everyone got involved. They’d all come to every race. It was a massive family thing and my grandfather said to me recently: ‘If you never do anything else in the sport again, what you’ve done for us as a family has been massive. You’ve brought us together week in, week out.’
“And that’s what it was all about. It was never about winning races – though they loved the excitement of me passing the line first – but everyone knew they could get together on a Sunday, have breakfast before a race while I was warming up, and then they’d have different points around the circuit where they’d watch me and hand out bottles. My family came out to GAA [gaelic football] matches and gymnastic events but cycling was different. It brought more excitement.”
Corkery’s dominance, however, faded through his teenage years, mostly because of his diminutive stature. “The field became more even and it was tough to go from winning without fail every week to then getting a hammering.”
Cycling remained present even as he struggled to reach his previous heights, and Corkery explored multiple options on the job front once he left school aged 16. The pub was one, of course, and labouring was another. “We were dry walling, working on guttering, down pipes, that kind of stuff. I enjoyed it. It was a great craic. I also worked in a local shop. It was great because I was 16, doing all of these things, and I had a bit of money in my pocket. All of my family are hard workers and it was the done thing for me to be working inside the pub until 3am on a Saturday night and then racing on a Sunday morning. It was just the way it was.
It was in his first year as an U23 rider that Corkery began to shine on the bike again. “I came back from a knee injury absolutely flying, won my first two races of the season, and then won every couple of weeks after that, beating ex-pros who had come home. That’s when people started telling me I should take a chance on going abroad. But I was enjoying the craic too much at home, was making a few pounds too, and going to France to a DN2 [amateur level] team wasn’t very appealing. In Ireland I was something. I was special because I was winning races and I enjoyed having a bullseye on my back and trying to crack guys. If I went to France I was going to have to restart everything again.”
A chat with ex-pro Paídi O’Brien the following season, however, persuaded him to give European racing a shot. “He said it’s now or never. That I’ve won everything there is to win in Ireland, and that I should give it a shot.” So Corkery did, signing for Team Elite Restauration 89 in 2020. “I was living with a Scottish and Welsh lad and we spent our days playing Fortnite and riding bikes. The craic was unreal. It was a genuine holiday.”
Covid threw a proverbial spanner in the works, sending Corkery temporarily back home where his dad got him powerwashing to earn his keep, but as soon as he could he was back out in France. A strong 2021 season alerted one of France’s best amateur teams, CC Étupes, to his services, and his progress accelerated even further. “I was nearly 23 so didn’t have a lot of time, but in my first year there I was consistently in the top-10 and won a few races. I was one of the highest point scorers in the country, and probably one of the only foreigners in the top-20. I was sure, convinced, I was going to go pro.”
But no. Not even Continental teams were tempted by him. “Age was definitely a factor, but I couldn’t understand why teams would sign someone who won a race in January but never again all season, while I was always in the top-10.” Corkery was certain his cycling journey was over. “I was finished, done. I went back home to Ireland with the intention of maybe taking the pub over. I went on holiday with my girlfriend, turned my phone off, and when I got back my phone was on fire. Melvin [Rullière], who is now a DS at Picnic, rang me and said, ‘Of all the riders I’ve had, you’d be the biggest ‘what if’ if you don’t just do one more year’. I was like nope, not doing it.” With some additional persuasion from his grandfather, Corkery would eventually be won over, and he committed to one final season with Étupes.
2023, by Corkery’s admission, wasn’t as good as the previous campaign, but what was different is that in the autumn he was offered a contract by French third division team St Michel-Mavic Auber 93. “A spot opened up for a specific type of rider and I happened to be there at the right moment at the right time. It’s funny how it goes in cycling.”
St Michel didn’t regret taking a punt on Corkery who by 2024 was now 25. He formed part of the team’s sprint train in the first year, and then the following season got his own opportunities. “They saw what I was capable of doing.” At GP Denain, essentially a mini Paris-Roubaix, he finished sixth in a field full of WorldTour riders and won by British sensation Matthew Brennan of Visma-Lease a Bike. “I never doubted myself but I also never thought I’d maybe be in a position to win that race. That was when everything changed for me.”
A fortnight later at the Pays de la Loire Tour he proved it was no fluke. “I crashed and really hurt myself two days prior and wasn’t supposed to go to the race but I begged the team to let me go because I was flying,” he remembers. “My to-be agent Gary McQuaid sent me a message that morning, saying, ‘Listen, I don’t like to put pressure on my riders and I don't do it, but you’re not young and if there’s a moment where you’ve got to do it, it’s today. Back it up and you get a contract’.” The pep talk worked: Corkery finished third in the opening stage’s bunch sprint, behind winner and close friend Sam Bennett. “Sam said to me I just need to get my foot in the door and then people will see what I'm capable of doing.”
Forming part of Picnic's sprint train is Corkery's task. Image: Charly Lopez/AlUla Tour
Picnic PostNL were convinced and they signed Corkery on a two-year deal, which began as a stagiaire in August. But the aforementioned crash pre-Pays de la Loire affected the rest of his campaign, and he struggled in his first few outings with the Dutch team. 2026, however, is a new chapter, the year when his WorldTour career finally gets going, at the relatively ripe old age of 27.
“I’m definitely young at heart and a bit childish at the best of times which definitely helps,” he chuckles. “My numbers and everything else have already improved since I’ve been here – my sprint numbers are up, as are my 20-minute numbers, and they’re all quite high compared to where they’ve been in the past. What I really like about this team is that there’s a good pathway for all riders to develop, and you learn how to be a WorldTour rider.”
This week, as the Belgian cobbled Classics reach their crescendo, Corkery will form part of Picnic’s roster. “I’d like to be able to do something in the Classics, to help guys like John [Degenkolb, teammate] and others. I feel like I’m capable of doing well as I am crafty in a bunch and good at surfing wheels, and in the Classics if you can do that you’ve got a good chance of helping a guy out or doing something yourself.”
If professional cycling doesn’t work out, and Corkery doesn’t go on to become Ireland’s version of Mørkøv, he won’t be short of things to do. “Even if I go back home now I’m down a field cutting timber or doing something stupid!” But he’s confident that, for at least the next few years, landlording, bricklaying and whatever else is on hold. He’s finally a professional cyclist and he’s determined to keep that his profession for as long as possible.
“I think because I lost so much development time during Covid and didn’t really start training properly until I was 21, I’ve only got room to improve. I look at guys like John who is still riding a top-10 at Roubaix at 34 and it gives me great incentive and a boost that at 31, 32 I could still be developing. I don’t see myself slowing down.”
Cover image: Patrick Brunt.
