The horrifying day my little boy looked up at me and asked: ‘Am I going to die?’: Stephen Roche about the family trauma that proved as gruelling as any of his races
For 13 years, he earned his bread travelling at up to 60mph on inch-wide tyres, wearing nothing more protective than shorts and T-shirt, often with less than the width of a bicycle between him and his equally foolhardy rivals. It was a recipe for pain – and Stephen Roche endured his share.
There was the shattered knee in 1986 that meant he rode in agony for the rest of his career; the kicking, spitting and punching he took from an angry Italian mob when he dared to beat their favourite in the 1987 Giro d’Italia; the emergency oxygen he received when he literally pushed himself to unconsciousness to win the Tour de France that year… But Stephen Roche was 47 and long retired before he discovered the real meaning of pain.
Pain is having your seven-year-old son look up from his bed in the cancer hospital and ask you straight out: ‘Daddy, am I going to die?’
Five years on, Roche can barely stand to recall that moment. Then, as now, he tensed himself to keep the tears in check and whispered to little Florian: ‘Don’t be stupid. Keep going. You’ll be okay once you get over this.’
It was only after he had kissed his son goodbye and left the hospital that Stephen couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.
‘He was really in a bad way, being down – so painful and so disfigured – and he was asking was he going to die. He was very frightened. How can you respond to it?
'It was very painful and horrible. Then you’re actually breaking down when you’re out of there,’ recalls Stephen, 52, who returned to his native Dublin this week to promote his autobiography, Born To Ride.
Florian – the youngest of four children Stephen has with ex-wife Lydia – first became sick on a family trip to watch his elder brother Nicolas compete in the 2007 Tour of Ireland.
They thought ‘stomach bug’ but then he began to suffer severe headaches. He was sent to hospital for tests. It was leukaemia.
A specialist told Stephen there was a chance Florian would die within hours. His body was ‘completely malfunctioning’.
‘The specialist tried to lighten the situation by saying, “The good thing is we have cured 80% of kids that get this disease.”
‘So you say, “That sounds great.” But then you analyse: there’s still 20% who don’t get cured. That’s two in ten,’ he recalls.
Florian was transferred to the hospital he had been born in – the Nice L’Archet Hospital, one of the best paediatric leukaemia centres in France – and taken to surgery.
Even though Stephen had gone through a ‘bitter divorce’ with his Lydia in 2003, they put their differences aside.
‘The first couple of weeks you’re sitting there and doing what you’re told. Myself and Lydia were spending every second night in the room and trying to make him as comfortable as possible. We tried to make his journey as peaceful as we could.’
But it was terrifying. Other parents whom Stephen met in the leukaemia ward lost their children.
‘We knew two kids who were in there with Florian who died. You get friendly with the people who are on the same journey and you become part of their life and they become part of you’re life.
And all of a sudden they’re gone. You don’t ask the question, “Why them?” When you see people lose people, you see them sitting there and you’re afraid to ask the question, “What’s happened?”
Did he worry Florian would die?
‘Of course. Tomorrow it could be your child. It’s impossible to imagine how fearful you can be. Now, Florian realises it a bit more how close you get or what could have been,’ he says.
‘I was confused. You have to be confident in the medicine and doctors but you’re basically a passenger for the next couple of years.
You see kids coming on so well and for some unknown reason things go wrong.
Whereas you see our kid coming on well and then you see him go backwards and then he goes forward and then he goes backward and then he goes forward. You can do nothing. Everything you can do you do it.
‘First of all, when he’s doing his treatment and you see his reacting straight away, you say, “Good, he’s reacting.”
‘You’re 18 days in and the doctor calls you in and says, “We’re very sorry but all of a sudden he’s regressing. His body is fighting hard but rather than going down, the cells are coming up again.” I’d ask, “What does that mean?”
They’d say, “Well, it means that the treatment isn’t working.”
The specialists told Stephen that Florian’s only chance was to take part in an experimental treatment in a Belgian hospital.
‘They told us, “It’s not yet been on the shelves for kids but we know it works so with your approval – and with the approval of Brussels, the National Centre for Research – we can try it.” I asked, “What other options do we have?” and was told, “This is the only option.” So I said, “Do it.”
‘All of a sudden Florian started getting better. They reckoned he needed a transplant and they looked for a donor and they start with the family.
Our son Alexis, who was only two years older, was compatible. He was only nine years old so you don’t want him feeling that everything depends on him. It may work, it may not. It was an incredible experience.’
Miraculously, Florian was given a clean bill of health and was released from hospital in March 2008. It took two years, though, before he returned to school.
The long fight back to health did, however, allow Stephen to rebuild bridges with Lydia, to whom he had been married for 20 years before their divorce.
The couple met when Stephen moved to France to establish himself as a professional cyclist and he spotted her from afar at one of his races. Was it love at first sight?
‘She was a pretty good-looking girl. It was a physical attraction initially at first sight and then, of course, we got talking and it ended up in a relationship.’
Initially, Lydia found Stephen so difficult to understand that she assumed he was insulting her.
‘With my accent, I was saying I had 15 laps left, “quinze tours”, but with my Irish accent she heard “casse-toi”, which means “F*** off”. We have a good laugh about it still.’ To make matters worse, Stephen turned up late for their first date.
‘I went to the wrong side of the river. I finally got there and all the restaurants were closed. I made up for it.’
They got married two years later but Stephen sheepishly admits that it was not a romantic proposal.
‘I was always away racing. It basically got to a situation where you make things easier getting married. She was young.
'It was easier getting married and better for everybody. It was basically, “We’re living in this attic. We need to get out and do something. We can’t do something when we’re boyfriend-girlfriend. It’d be better if we get married. We’re going to get married anyway because we’re together.” That was it.’
Stephen believes cracks first started in their marriage because of his determination to become world No.1. It was an ambition that paid off when he became only the second cyclist – the other being Eddy Merckx – to win the so-called Triple Crown of cycling, the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the World Championship in 1987.
That was the year he incurred the hatred of the Italian tifosi.
‘That was very scary. The Italian public got very aggressive. People were standing around for hours waiting so when I got there, they were half drunk and they had rice and wine in their mouths and they’d spit it at me. It was terrible. They had “Roche Go Home” banners.
The crowd jumped over the barriers and they were hitting me.
‘Lydia was there. She never came to see me because she felt I’d be under pressure.
'When I turned around and saw her, I was happy but disappointed because I would have preferred her seeing me on the podium rather than her having to fight her way in to where all the Italian fans were hitting me and shouting bad things.
‘I would’ve loved her to see me getting acclaimed by the public, rather than her coming to see me like that.’
The victory was further overshadowed by a story in an Italian newspaper in 2000 that quoted Dr Francesco Conconi, who claimed he had used a performance enhancing drug, Erythropoietin, on cyclists from Roche’s Carrera team in 1993.
In June 2004, an Italian investigation into the Carrera team claimed that aliases such as ‘Rocchi and Rocca’ used in files clearly pointed to Roche.
Stephen calls the allegations ‘ridiculous’.
‘Why wouldn’t I be angry? I wasn’t positive. I never failed a test. I was tested all the time. There’s no evidence in there at all. It’s guilt by association,’ he fumes because doctors involved with the team were investigated over the allegations. Nobody associated with the team was ever prosecuted.
‘How can you write such damaging things with no proof? There were four or five code names in there and they’re associating them with Roche but there’s no evidence. They’re assuming once again.
‘If this thing was so big and so important and I was supposed to be involved in it, you would imagine that I would’ve been maybe contacted by the magistrate.
‘These findings were in ’92 or ’93, I think it was, so nothing at all to do with ’87. Why not go back and say, “Why is Stephen Roche still the youngest rider to win Paris-Nice? Is it not because he was naturally talented maybe?” Why not give talent a bit of credit in all this?’
Retirement in 1993 exacerbated the strain on Stephen’s marriage. He invested some of his savings in a hotel in the south of France; it was not doing well. The twin pressures of worrying about income and trying to run a hotel took their toll.
‘It was partly to do with the hotel and also the fact that we were drifting apart because I was always looking for something else,’ he says.
‘We had a lot of arguments because of the hotel because we both wanted to run different sides of it and we weren’t always going on the same line. It caused a lot of arguments.
‘Looking back, maybe the best thing I could’ve done was let her look after the hotel and I do my business. I might have been able to earn a little less and have a better life.’
It was a traumatic divorce. He says: ‘It was very bitter. When you’re in the heat of things… when you have time to reflect on it and be mature, you see things a lot differently.
'Even though we had both decided it was the best thing to get divorced, it’s one thing shouting at each other and getting divorced but then you sit down and work out the separate lives, separate things – and sharing the same kids makes it very complicated.
‘Looking back at it now, I can say, “Did I give up too easy?” It was only when the kid got sick that you realise the value of the family and you say, “That poor kid – wouldn’t it have been nice if you’d given him a normal upbringing? Family holidays, family weekends and everything else. Whereas, here he is now dealing with this problem and also then having to deal with separated parents.”
‘So, all I try to do now is to make his life as easy and comfortable as I can. I moved back down there. He lives a few kilometres from me. Myself and Lydia get on very well now. There’s no restrictions on seeing him. We try to do it as intelligently as we can.’
Soon after the separation, Stephen ‘fell in love’ with a retired French athlete named Sophie, who was working as a radio broadcaster.
In his candid memoir, he admits to making a grave error by not standing up to his new lover when she made derogatory remarks to his ex-wife. Tension grew between the two women.
‘You say to yourself, “My girlfriend doesn’t want me having a relationship with my ex-wife, which is normal, but there’s kids involved.” Then you say to yourself, “Isn’t it also normal that my ex-wife doesn’t want to see me going off on a Saturday morning taking the kids with my girlfriend beside me?”
‘Unfortunately, I learnt the hard way from having a bad couple of years with Lydia because of that.
‘I also should have said to Lydia, “That’s your life, I’ve got my life.” And I should’ve said to my girlfriend, “This is my life and that’s her life. I’m with you now and my kids are jointly with Lydia. My kids must not suffer in this situation. If Lydia is suffering the kids are suffering. My past cannot just be wiped out.”’
The relationship didn’t last. Three years ago Stephen fell in love again – with another Sophie, to whom he was introduced by a friend who was running his hotel.
But no sooner had Florian got the ‘all clear’ from his battle with leukaemia than trauma struck again when his new partner was diagnosed with breast cancer.
‘The tumour was seven centimetres and they got it down to nothing and they cut her open and they took it out. It was eight months of chemo and four months’ radiation and then the operation,’ he says.
‘Then the rebuilding after the operation – the mental side of it, the physical side of it. She was given the all clear last February. Lucky enough.’
The day his memoir was launched last week in London was also particularly painful for Stephen because it coincided with the burial of his mentor, 62-year-old Claude Escalon.
They had been close friends ever since Claude had picked Stephen up at the Paris airport 32 years ago when the young Dubliner first went there to pursue his dream.
‘I had actually been at his wedding at 12.45pm on the Wednesday and he died at 4am on the Thursday morning. I was glad I was there. He was gone, he was almost finished. He could hardly even say “Yes”.’
Working on the book was hard – it dredged up painful memories. He says: ‘I’m not one for looking back to the past – I don’t have any medals and photographs hanging up on my sitting room wall.’
Born to Ride is published by Yellow Jersey Press
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