“We put our own money into Nissan Classic to pay the bills”

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October 7th, 2015

By Brian Canty

One of the two men responsible for bringing the Nissan International Classic to Ireland in the mid-1980s has said the event changed the face of Irish cycling forever.

Pat McQuaid, along with fellow race director Alan Rushton, succeeded in bringing 18 teams to Ireland for the stage race event which saw many of the world’s top riders take part.

Among those on the start line for that first stage from Trinity College, Dublin, to Wexford were Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche as well as former World champion Hennie Kuiper and one of Kelly’s big rivals in the classics and the sprints, Dutchman Adri van der Poel.

One man who was gutted to miss out was Paul Kimmage.

He really could have done something riding for the national team having just finished sixth in the World Road Race Championships that year in Italy.

However, a crash at the GP d’Isbergues a week prior to the event forced him out with a fractured wrist and vertebrae.

McQuaid recalls that first day as if it were yesterday, and the feeling of pride at pulling the event together on a shoestring budget is not lost on him on the 30th anniversary of the race.

“A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then but it still feels like it was yesterday when we were rolling out of Dublin,” he said.

“It was a major achievement to get the race and bring it here; having 12 of the best teams in the world – and six amateur teams on Irish roads.

“It had never happened before and I’ve very strong memories of it.”

From a sporting standpoint the race was a roaring success, but it wasn’t all so rosy.

“From a financial point of view it didn’t work,” said McQuaid of the first edition in 1985.

“We’d never done that before and we ended up having to put our own money in to meet all the bills.

“But it was huge success from a sporting perspective and it was so good that we got the sponsor to sign on for the following years and we recouped what we’d lost then.

“Kelly was the star of the show,” continued McQuaid.

“He set the race on fire and the way he approached it; so motivated and so determined was a credit to him.

“Roche the same. They’d just finished third and fourth in the Tour that year but took the race very seriously.”

Indeed, Kelly made the break on day one and won the sprint to take the first yellow jersey.

The bunch, meanwhile, were a staggering 10 minutes back and in there was Roche.

The latter’s race was over before it started from a general classification point of view because his teammate Paul Sherwen made the break.

The following day saw the riders tackled a 20-kilometre time-trial in from Carrick on Suir to Clonmel and McQuaid said he’s rarely seen anything like the show of support Kelly received.

“It was phenomenal, I’ve lots of different memories of the race but Carrick on that evening is something I’ll never forget.

“The whole town was taken over. There were cars were parked all day in the street and they never moved. It was completely unreal.

“The TT, of course, was superb because Kelly absolutely blitzed it,” he recalled of a performance that has assumed inconic status down the years.

“People wanted that, they came out and supported him and Roche but there was only one winner that night.

“The two of them had huge followings but they were two different types of people.

“You had Kelly’s people from the rural countryside and you had Roche’s people from the city.”

McQuaid said the race really captured the imagination of the public and perhaps most crucially, the media really latched onto it also.

“The race changed the face of Irish cycling forever. There was nothing like it before or has there been anything like it since.

“A tour of that duration in Ireland with the best cyclists in the world; it gave the people a huge appetite for the sport.

“Kelly had already been competing for seven or eight years on the Continent and Roche too; they’d both won big races but this brought it home. They were front and centre.

“Kelly had won several editions of Paris Nice but the coverage was minimal and that, to my mind, was the fault of the media.

“But when the LeMonds and the Phil Andersons came and their names were written on the road it showed the Irish sporting public had taken the race to their hearts.”

The years that followed saw the race only grow and McQuaid remembers a time when they were rolling out of Kilkenny and the entire cavalcade was completely swamped by fans.

“I think it might have been 1987,” he said.

“The crowds were just absolutely huge. The peloton was all over the place and the place was so crowded with fans they couldn’t even form a bunch to start!

“Some (riders) went out the road they were supposed to go out, plenty more went out other roads to the official start.

“There was all sorts of carry on between the commissaires and the team cars trying to get organised. It was chaos.

“The crowds were estimated to be around half a million. I can’t ever remember anything like it in this country.”