Rough Ride (2 page)

What a turn around! Three years previously, in an interview with the
Irish Independent
on the day after he had won the Tour, he told the journalist Tom O'Riordan: 'You can get a false opinion from the excitement which surrounds victory in the Tour de France but I can tell you that many cyclists who were extremely good amateurs found the going very tough after they turned professional. Paul Kimmage and Martin Earley are two very fine cyclists, but it's very hard to make a breakthrough. I would advise young Irish cyclists to have a talk with Paul. It's not all glory and there is a lot more to it than people realise.'

But a month after
Rough Ride
was published, in a ghosted column in the
Irish Times
('KIMMAGE'S DRUG EXPOSURE IS UNFAIR
'), he had obviously changed his mind. In a classic knee-jerk reaction piece that was both inaccurate and a mass of contradiction he said,

I've read Paul Kimmage's book
Rough Ride
and I don't feel concerned about anything he wrote in it. I think Paul has taken one or two of his bad experiences in cycling and has generalised from that. For example, on the drugs issue, he has generalised from one post-Tour criterium at Château Chinon – but in all his career on the continent, Paul only rode a total of two or three such criteriums.

I believe the impression he has given is unfair because it has left Sean Kelly and myself, as the top Irish riders, carrying the can as far as allegations of drug use are concerned. I can show you a list containing hundreds of drugs, including products in everyday use like codeine and caffeine, which would show up positive at a race control.

I don't think it's anyone's business other than mine whether I've taken amphetamines or anything else. If I denied it, no one would believe me and if I said, 'Yes, I do', everyone's going to say I'm a drug user. In my first year in France I won Paris-Nice, the Tour of Corsica and several other big races and no one who knows me and is in his right mind is going to say I went overnight from being a Dublin fitter to using drugs. I didn't even know such things existed at the time.

You have to realise that top riders like me face drug controls far more often than
domestiques
like Paul Kimmage. There's a 99 per cent chance of me getting tested, and only an outside chance of a rider like Paul getting done. I know that if I took something to get me through one day, I would run the risk of it showing up in tests the following day or the day after. I'm not crazy enough to risk that. I can say that throughout my professional career I have never once tested positive in a drug control.

As far as hormones are concerned, any doctor involved in cycling will tell you that they have been rooted out for a long time now, because they were easily traceable for up to three months. Two years ago, Delgado was tested positive after taking a product used for wiping out the traces of hormones – well, those hormones could be traced now.

All sportsmen know that where there is money, fame and fortune there will also be drugs. Cycling was the first sport to seriously introduce drug controls back in the sixties. When you have 2,500 controls per year, as you do now, and there are one or two positive traces, everyone starts moaning. If you had only a hundred controls and no positive findings, would that mean very much in comparison? If you had the same large number of drug tests in other sports, it's likely that you would have the same number of positives.

I learned things from Paul's book that I never knew. He said he's seen riders taking stuff during races. It may happen, but I've been in professional cycling for ten years and I can put my hand in the fire and say I've never seen it. Paul talks about everyone being 'charged up' on the last stage of the Tour de France along the Champs Elysées. That's completely false. The riders know that the day after the Tour ends they'll have to ride in criteriums in Holland, and they are controlled automatically for drugs, unlike in France.

You can't generalise about drug-taking. There are individuals, as in any sport, who use them. Everyone knows these guys. Sometimes leading riders feel other top riders might take drugs, but as long as they continue to test negative in controls, it's not right to accuse them of it.

The only thing that upset me in Paul's book was when he wrote that I paid to win a criterium in Dublin after my 1987 Tour win. But he didn't tell the whole story. I did pay £1000 to win that race, but only in the sense that I put the money in a pool to be shared out among a seven-man combine – Sean Kelly, Martin Earley, myself and four others – to help us beat the forty-five riders who had come over from Britain to beat Kelly and me. Everyone in the combine helped everyone else and we shared the money.

That column in the
Irish Times
signalled the end of my friendship with Stephen Roche. I returned to the Tour in July, but it was a miserable experience. I hated every minute of it. The word was out that I had ratted on my pals. Thierry Claveyrolat and Jean-Claude Colotti, two of my closest friends at my old team RMO, turned their backs on me. When I pleaded with them to forget what they had heard and to reserve judgement at least until they had read what I'd written, they weren't interested.
Pute
(prostitute) was the expression used.

And that's pretty much how it continued for the rest of the year. For months, whenever conversation turned to the book, my blood pressure would soar and I would foam at the mouth in its defence. And though I like to fool myself that I am more dispassionate about it now, I know nothing has changed. When I began writing for a living my friend David Walsh gave me some good advice: 'Never run from the truth.'
Rough Ride
may not be the best sports book ever written but it's honest.

These last eight years as a sportswriter have changed a lot about the way I view the drugs question and there are a couple of things I wrote in Chapter 23 ('Spitting in the Soup') that I totally disagree with now. (In particular I would retract the diplomatic immunity I offered to the sports champions with regard to the 'law of silence'.) Although it pains me to admit it,
Rough Ride
changed nothing. It was the story of a 'bitter little man'. A 'loser's whinge'. The sport just carried on. Had it been scripted by a champion, that wouldn't have happened. The UCI would have been forced to make changes and some of the lives which were lost in the early 1990s, might have been saved. However, apart from the Epilogue and a slight change to Chapter 1, I have resisted the temptation to tamper with the original. The prose style is still very rough. The fawning references to Stephen Roche remain. When it was published in 1990,
Rough Ride
was a bike rider's story, not a sportswriter's. It still is.

Paul Kimmage, January 1998

Toulouse, July 13, 1989

Stage 12: Toulouse to Montpellier (242 kilometres)

I knew it would be hard this morning. In a race that lasts three weeks there are good days and bad days and survival is all about morale. With weak legs and a good head you can go a long way. With good legs and a weak head you go nowhere. This morning, I rode out of Toulouse on the twelfth stage of the Tour de France with a weak head.

If the start had been a little easier it might have made all the difference. Maybe today I would still be a
coureur cycliste professionel.
But we raced out of Toulouse like there was no tomorrow and I was struggling from the start. The Danish rider Jesper Worre attacked and I cursed him because cursing him was easier than following him. I quickly realised that my legs were not responding to the demands I was making on them. I was dropped. To be left behind at such an early stage was demoralising, but I fought back and managed to regain contact with the peloton.

I made my way forward through the bunch, but as I did they accelerated away and I started slipping back again. The bunch strung out into a long line and I realised with despair that I could not match the pace and would soon be dropped again. I pulled over, not wanting to obstruct the riders behind me. And then I heard someone laughing. The Belgian Dirk de Wolf was laughing. I had had a run in with him two days earlier. Was he laughing at me? He couldn't be. Yes, yes he was. He was laughing at me. The bastard was laughing at me. On a good day I would probably have gone over and spat in his face. But this was a bad day and I was feeling sorry for myself. Suddenly my spirit snapped. It had always been my greatest asset. Others had reached the top with talent or class mixed with spirit. I only ever had spirit. Fighting spirit. Never say die, spit in your eye. It was spirit that had brought me from a dreaming childhood in Dublin to the Tour de France. It had cracked before, many times, but I had always managed to repair it. Today was different.

I started thinking, 'I don't need this shit. I can go home and be a journalist and live happily ever after. I don't need this Belgian laughing at me. Fuck him. Fuck the whole lot of them.' And then I stopped pedalling. My mind was confused. I hadn't planned it like this. I was supposed to finish the Tour and be presented with a medal (everyone who finishes the Tour gets a medal). I was going to continue racing until the end of the season and end my career in O'Connell Street in Dublin in the Nissan Classic. I wouldn't win a stage or anything like that, that would be dreaming. I stopped dreaming when I turned professional, which was probably part of my downfall. But as an acknowledgement of my modest career, the organisers would present me with a bouquet of flowers and my home would cheer as I waved them goodbye. Slipping happily into oblivion, I would return to the city the next day as an ordinary man to look for a job, any job. This was how it was supposed to end. This was what I had planned. But as the official cars passed me as I freewheeled down the road, fifty-five kilometres out of Toulouse on the twelfth stage of the Tour de France, Dublin was not on my mind. It was the laughing, that horrible moronic laughing. No, I didn't need that shit. The bike stopped and I got off. I was surrounded by photographers who were probably fed up with taking pictures of Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon – a sobbing
domestique
as he abandoned the Tour always made a good shot for the evening paper. The best was yet to come and they knew it.

On abandoning the Tour the rider is not allowed simply to slip discreetly into a team car. No, he must wait for the Voiture Balai, the broom wagon, to arrive. I saw it coming and knew what would happen. I spread my legs, placed my arms on the door and stood to the sound of clicking cameras as the commissar removed the two numbers pinned to my jersey. This was the official court-martialling, the stripping of the stripes. When he had finished, I jumped into the back of the bus and buried my head in my hands and cried, 'It wasn't supposed to end like this.'

The rider who abandons the Tour is like a wounded animal. He feels shame and emptiness. He needs privacy to lick his wounds, to heal the mental sores. I just had to get out of Montpellier tonight. I could not face the company of my teammates or put up with the frowns of my
directeur sportif
(team manager) for five minutes longer than was necessary. My friend Gerard Torres drove my wife Ann down from Grenoble to take me home and I was so grateful to him for relieving me of my torture. My head was filled with so many emotions and questions, all tangled and jamming the switchboard of my brain. On the journey home, Gerard tried to raise my spirits with talk of the future, of the World Championships at Chambéry in August, of the Nissan Classic in October: 'Do you remember how well you rode last year in Dublin?' But I just nodded and tried not to offend his enthusiasm.

There won't be any World Championship or any Nissan Classic. I know I'm not going to race again. My spirit has snapped and it's an unmendable break. My thoughts are not of the future, they are a prisoner of the past.

Beasy McArdle, the portly staff nurse at the Rotunda maternity hospital in Dublin, loved babies. She used to walk up and down the wards of screaming new-born, pluck them from their cradles and hug and kiss them as if they were her own. Embracing them with tenderness, she caressed them with her soft west of Ireland accent: 'Oh I could love you.'

On the evening of 7 May 1962 another brand-new baby joined the assembly line and took its place beside its mother. Beasy took a long, hard look at the child. She noticed his large head and decided it was the head of a leader – a Pope: 'I'm sure he will be the first Irish Pope,' she said.

My mother smiled. It had been a difficult pregnancy, full of complications, but she was over the worst and was glad her child was healthy. I tipped the scales at nine pounds two ounces, a hefty lad with a huge head. My mother remembers the head – it nearly killed her. She already had a name for me, Paul. She thought about what Beasy had said: 'Pope Paul' had a nice ring to it. She would mention it to Christy when he came in later.

My father worked on a more conventional assembly line. He welded car bodies at the Volkswagen plant on the Naas road in Dublin. It was monotonous, tiring work and he looked forward each night to clocking off and escaping into the countryside for two hours' training on his bicycle.

My Da was born in Dublin, the youngest of the seven children of James and Mary Kimmage. It's an unusual name, from a suburb of Dublin on the south side, but we can't trace our family tree back very far. We don't know where we come from. Da had three brothers and three sisters and it was his elder brothers Jimmy and Kevin who introduced him to cycling. He liked it and joined the Dublin Wheelers' touring section in 1954.

One day they went to see a race, the Circuit of Bray. Seamus Elliot, the best Irish rider in the country, broke clear of the field with two English riders, Harry Reynolds and Dick Bowes. He soon disposed of them both, to the delight of the huge crowd lining the seafront. My Da was touched by the atmosphere, the colour, by Shay Elliot. He wanted to race. The bug had bitten him.

His first year of competition was in 1956. The new sport was tough, but he had a talent for it and it wasn't long before he was winning. In 1957 he returned to the Circuit of Bray – and won, the first of four wins in that once prestigious classic. In 1958 he was selected to represent Ireland at the World Championships in Rheims, France. On a searing hot day the field was whittled down to forty riders with just two laps left. Da was there, he wanted to finish, to be one of the top forty in the world.

A friend of his, John Flanagan, was taking care of him from the pits area. With two laps to go he handed Christy a feeding bottle with brandy in it. In sheeting rain or arctic cold, a nip of brandy would perhaps have been beneficial, but not on a day when the temperature was in the nineties. Da, dying with the thirst, took a swallow from the bottle. It nearly killed him – he abandoned.

Rheims was the end of a very successful season for him. Back in Ireland another season was just beginning. The 'be social' season. The Wheelers advertised their regular Sunday outings in the shop window of the Rutland bike shop in North Frederick Street. On the third weekend of September a notice read:

Meal 'alfresco' at Roundwood. Tea at Butler's 6 o'clock.

Butler's tearooms, at the Scalp in County Wicklow, was the traditional rendezvous for all Dublin's cycling clubs when they went south of the Liffey. The hungry pedallers would devour tea, home-made scones and cakes and then settle down to an evening of songs, dancing and plenty of fun. It usually ended about midnight, when the last thrill of the day was a mad descent into the city in the dark.

On that Sunday in September, my Da spent the day touring the Wicklow hills and then headed to Butler's for tea. There, a pleasant young
touriste
caught his eye. Her name was Angela. He liked her.

Angela Davis was the youngest daughter of Francis and Mary Davis of Kilfenora Road, Kimmage. They lived in a two-bedroomed corporation terraced house – not very big for a family with fourteen children. Granda worked nights in dispatch at the
Irish Times.
In the modern era his family would undoubtedly have been smaller, but as he says in his typical Dublin accent, 'In dem days der was no television.' My Ma, the twelfth arrival, left school at fourteen and started work as a trainee tailor at Weartex, near her home. She saved hard, bought her first bicycle on hire purchase and joined the Dublin Wheelers with her sister Pauline. It was on a run with the Wheelers that she met Christy at Butler's. They talked, danced and although Ma claims it was 'love at first sight', the relationship did not take off immediately. The first real date was months later – a visit to the Theatre Royal for a film and a show.

The following year, 1958, my father enjoyed the best form of his career. He won anything worth winning. In June Billy Morton organised a prestigious track meeting to celebrate the opening of a new cycling and running track at Santry stadium in Dublin. Shay Elliot, now a professional (Ireland's first), was flown in from France along with French star Albert Bouvet and the Italian
campionissimo,
Fausto Coppi. In front of a huge crowd, Elliot beat the continental pros and my father won the amateur event.

A day later he flew to the Isle of Man for the Viking Trophy race on a small plane with Coppi, Bouvet and Elliot. The flight gave him a nice opportunity to talk to Elliot about the possibility of racing in France. Shay suggested he try his luck in Paris with a club called ACBB. He had contacts there and would arrange it if my Da was interested. He was interested. Elliot won the pro race on the island, but my Da was denied victory on the line to finish a narrow second in the Viking race. Twenty-three years later my brother Raphael won that same race and brought the Viking Trophy back to our house. My Da wouldn't admit it, but I know it meant a lot to him.

When he came back to Dublin, Da organised himself for Paris. He gathered his savings and remembers a friend, John Connon, giving him £25 (a lot of money in those days) and a bike bag. Paris was huge, mind-boggling compared with Dublin. When he arrived he got hopelessly lost in the underground, the Metro. He was hampered in the crowds by his bike and bag, but eventually found his way to his lodgings, a flat in Montparnasse. The club provided him with a new Helyett bike, but in the two weeks he stayed he never raced. Living out of a suitcase, unable to speak a word of the language, he felt desperately alone. The life of a professional cyclist was not for him. He didn't want it. He returned to Dublin and to this day does not regret his decision.

Twenty-five years later Raphael and I arrived in the same city with the same objective, at the same club. Before we left Dublin we had never fully understood why he only stuck it out for two weeks. We soon did.

When he returned home, he was selected to ride in another world championship, but the week before a bad crash at an evening race in Baldoyle sent him to hospital instead. He didn't race again for two years. The crash and the disappointment of Paris had turned him off the sport, but there was also another reason – marriage. Ma always claims he wasn't so much homesick as lovesick in Paris because as soon as he came home he popped the question and started saving for a house.

The wedding was in August 1961 and they honeymooned in Edinburgh before returning to Dublin to begin married life in a run-down Georgian house in Eccles Street. It was divided into eight rooms on two floors and was home to eight families. There was just one toilet in the building and one cold-water tap provided all eight families with their only running water. My parents' flat was on the ground floor and had a window looking out on the street. It was old and run-down, but it was home and they didn't complain – housing in Dublin was hard to come by in the early 1960s.

The flat was my first home in the world. When I was seven months old, Santa Claus brought me a three-wheeled bicycle and it wasn't long before I was racing around the room on it. Ma laughs about that little bike. She remembers that when she was toilet-training me I would charge around the flat with nothing on. One day I got it wrong and deposited a huge stool on the brightly painted seat of the bike; she can still see it today.

She has other, not so pleasant, memories of the street. Late at night Da and she would be awakened by the sound of a fist banging on the windowpane and a man's voice calling out, 'Joan!' This happened regularly. The voices changed, but the demand was always the same: 'Joan!' They made inquiries and found out that 'Joan' had been the previous occupant of the flat. She was a prostitute. The most frightening incident happened three months after they moved in. It was a typical Dublin evening, raining cats and dogs. My mother was pregnant with me and suffering from a kidney infection. At three in the morning, they were woken by a fierce banging on the door. Granda Kimmage was very ill at the time and my father feared it was one of his family with some bad news. He jumped up to answer the door, but it wasn't his brother or sister. There was a tall, uniformed Garda standing in the hall. He was soaked to the skin and reeked of alcohol. He demanded to see 'Joan'. My father explained that Joan had moved out months ago, but the policeman insisted on entering the flat. He walked into the room, looked at my sick mother, apologised and left.

Da started to race again at the start of 1962. My arrival half-way through the year did not upset his form for, two months after my birth, he became the Irish champion at Markethill in County Armagh. He had come second in 1958 and 1959, so the elusive tide victory brought him great pleasure. I was taken regularly to watch my Da racing and I'm told my first words were not so much 'Da Da' as 'Come on Da Da'. My brother Raphael was born two years after me in 1964. Da called him after the famous French professional Raphael Geminiani, much to the disgust of Granny Kimmage, who said Raphael was no name to give a child. Kevin, the third son, was born three years later and Eccles Street started to get crowded. We moved to a new complex of flats in Ballymun five miles north of the Liffey.

The flat was bright and clean, had toilets and running water and a unique central heating system – the floors heated. But my parents didn't like it. On the day we moved in the lifts broke down and Da had to carry a washing machine up eight flights of stairs on his back. Soon after he caught Raphael hanging over the balcony and got a terrible fright. Raphael was given the standard punishment: his bum was reddened. I suppose it's what I remember most about my youth – my father's war cry when we misbehaved or were 'bold', as we say in Ireland. It was always: 'I'll redden your arse for you.' He rarely did, the threat was enough to put the fear of God into us.

We stayed in Ballymun for a year and then moved to a new three-bedroomed semi-detached house in Coolock, two miles to the east. My fourth brother, Christopher, eleven years my junior, was brought up here. The family was complete and Kilmore Avenue remains the family home today. My Da stopped racing in 1972: he was thirty-four years old, and raising sons was very time-consuming. He tried to get me interested in every kind of sport, but I was only ever interested in doing one thing. When I was ten years old he bought me a racing bike.