Kevin Kimmage reflects on winning the Rás for his famous cycling family
Kevin Kimmage at his home in The Naul
with his bike and jersey from the 1991 Rás
It was just right that a Kimmage name was on the winners list..."
By David Coughlan 11:52, 9 MAY 2021
UPDATED14:54, 9 MAY 2021
UPDATED14:54, 9 MAY 2021
Kevin Kimmage still has the bike.
The Giant Cadex has been collecting cobwebs in his shed for a while now, but it’s too special to ever part with.
Thirty years ago, Kimmage rode the bike to victory in the 1991 Rás, a win that put him firmly on the road to the Barcelona Olympics.
It was also hugely significant for his famous cycling family.
His father Christy had been national champion in 1962 and between Kevin and his three brothers — Paul, Raphael and Christopher — they had won nearly every race on the domestic scene.
“But the one race the family had never won was the Rás,” says Kimmage.
“It was nice I won it, but it really didn’t matter to me that it was me. It was just right that a Kimmage name was on the winners list.”
Kimmage is at home in The Naul in north county Dublin, where the weather is somewhere between sunshine and hail stones.
It’s his birthday, but he’s spending it marking exam papers.
“What’s another year,” he says, laughing.
Raced
He grew up listening to his father’s cycling stories and his mother Angela was always behind him as a young rider.
“We came along, the four of us raced and there was this thing that my dad had produced a cycling factory,” says the 54-year-old.
“All it really was about was being like him. We all just wanted to be like him.”
He watched and learned from his older brothers, Paul and Raphael, who were two of the sport’s brightest talents in the 1980s.
When his own time came, they were there to support him.
Paul trained with him on the roads for the 1991 Rás and he worked in a bike shop with Raphael, who helped with equipment.
“I actually broke a frame the day before the Rás started that year,” he says.
“Raphael got on to Giant and got me a new Cadex and the first time I rode it was down where the race started.”
Kimmage is telling the story of that memorable week in May 1991, when his voice begins to crack.
“I know my father… I don’t think he actually watched the last stage,” he says. “He went down to the seafront in Dún Laoghaire. He was too nervous to watch it.”
In recent years, both Christy and Raphael have passed away, and the memory of that Rás win brings his emotions to the surface.
“Raphael said something that was very important. Before the race, he said: ‘Whatever you do, you have to keep riding’,” says Kimmage.
“What he meant was, the thing about stage races… you obviously have to go out and win them. But, sometimes, the most important days are the days you’re not actually up the road.
“They are the days you have to avoid losing them.”
That day for Kimmage during the 1991 Rás was the 170kms stage five from Limerick to Clifden.
“I lost five minutes that day, but I could’ve lost the race. I could’ve lost 15 minutes,” he recalls.
“It was actually Raphael’s words that came back to me.”
Kimmage hung in there and won the stage the following day to Ballina, changing the course of his week and the race.
“That was the low point, but, looking back, it was the day that saved the race. Everything went right then the next day, and everything switched then,” he says.
After a battle with Gethin Butler and Declan Lonergan, he won the Rás by 28 seconds after the final circuit stage around Dún Laoghaire.
“The feeling, I’d say, it was relief more than anything else. Obviously, I was delighted, but relief. The fact that my family were there as well to see it was a massive part of it for me,” he says.
The win put him in line for a place on the Irish team at the Barcelona Olympics the following year.
“Strategically, it was a very important race to win,” he says.
“It had been pointed out to me that the most important Rás to win was the year before the Olympics, not the Olympic year itself, because that was too late.”
Kevin Kimmage with his winner's
yellow jersey from the 1991 Rás
As it happened 1992 was to be the last Olympics that amateurs rode in.
The monastic life of a professional never appealed to Kimmage, and everything in his cycling career was building towards Barcelona.
Long before eldest brother Paul became an award-winning journalist, Paul had competed at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles and has since written about how little it meant to him.
For Kevin it was very different.
“Paul always wanted to turn professional, so the Olympics to him was just a step on the way,” says Kimmage.
“But to me… It was him going to Los Angeles that really fired up my desire to ride in an Olympics.
“He brought back all these photographs and was talking about all these people that he met. I thought: ‘Jesus, yeah’.
“When you were an amateur, this was the absolute the zenith really.”
He rode in the team time trial on the opening day of the 1992 Games which meant missing the opening ceremony where swimmer Michelle Smith carried the Irish flag.
A week later he took part in the road race in intense heat alongside teammates Conor Henry and Paul Slane.
“Every lap you’d get a bottle and by the time you’d gone around a lap, the water had gone lukewarm,” he says.
Kimmage was still in contention going into the final laps, before being swallowed up late on and eventually finished in 32nd place, with Henry in 35th and Slane in 65th position.
Kevin Kimmage after winning the 1991 Rás
Naive
Gold went to Italian Fabio Casartelli, who later tragically died after a crash during the 1995 Tour de France.
“I was completely naive,” he says.
“We got to know the boxers and all of the athletes and I remember Michael Carruth saying how important it was for him that he’d competed in Seoul (1988),” he says.
“He got the Olympics experience out of the way. He came to do one thing and that was to win.
“I look back on the race and I was quite naive in how I approached it. I had ambitions to do well. But really I lacked experience.”
It was the last occasion he ever pulled on the national colours.
“We got no Government grants or anything like that. The only reason I was able to ride at that level was because Raphael was keeping me going with equipment from the shop,” he says.
“I was literally living off my family. I couldn’t justify doing that for another four years after the Olympics.”
He stayed on for the remainder of the 1992 Games after the road race, enjoying the “full Olympic experience” and supporting Wayne McCullough and Carruth on their way to silver and gold.
Although he didn’t quite make it to their final bouts.
“The night before the finals, there was a big party hosted by Time magazine on a cruise ship and somehow we were invited,” he says.
“We only got in that morning and McCullough and Carruth were sitting there having their breakfast.
“I went for a kip for a couple of hours before the finals. Next thing I woke up and the thing was over. I missed the whole thing.
“Ireland’s first gold medal in 30-odd years and I was asleep.”
Kimmage and the rest of the Irish team walked around the Olympic Stadium for the closing ceremony a day later.
“I remember this incredible feeling of anti-climax. ‘Is that it?’” he says.
“For the last three years you had been building up to this point, and you don’t see beyond it. You’re living for this for almost your whole sporting career and all of a sudden it’s over.
“And you say: ‘Jesus, what do I do now?’”
By this stage, his brother Paul had become one of the leading journalists in the country and pointed Kevin down the same road.
Kevin Kimmage rides his bike from
the 1991 Rás near his home in The Naul
Famous
It was while working for the Sunday Independent that he produced one of the most famous articles in GAA history, when an interview he did with Páidí Ó Sé took on a life of its own.
And it was never supposed to happen.
“I actually wanted to interview Darragh (Ó Sé),” he says.
“It was the year Kerry had been beaten by Armagh in the All-Ireland (2002). So, a few days after Christmas, I rang Páidí and says: ‘Any chance I could interview Darragh?’ And he says: ‘Interview me’.
“He said it in a way that he wasn’t suggesting an alternative.
“I think I left the house around three in the morning the next day. I met him at lunchtime and we did the interview in the house, and that’s where the famous line…”
Kimmage had first interviewed Ó Sé back in 1996 before his first Championship game as Kerry manager. The experience was unforgettable.
Ó Sé had put him up and regaled him with anecdotes all evening at his pub in Ventry.
“It was so colourful, I was thinking: ‘This is going to be fucking great’,” he recalls.
“Then, at two in the morning, everybody else is gone, he says: ‘Everything that’s been said before now is off the record’.
“I take out the tape recorder and it was like the shutters came down. He completely clammed up. He gave me almost nothing.”
Kimmage came down again in early in 1997 and got even less, but Ó Sé remembered the interview when Kerry won the All-Ireland later that year.
“I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but Páidí was extremely superstitious and he made the connection in his head that I was lucky,” says Kimmage.
In late 2002 Ó Sé was under pressure from certain sections in Kerry following the All-Ireland defeat to Armagh.
Enter Kimmage, his ‘lucky journalist’ a few days before the end of the year.
When the interview turned to the insatiable appetite for success in the county, Ó Sé said: “Being a Kerry manager is probably the hardest job in the world because Kerry people, I’d say, are the roughest type of fucking animals you could ever deal with. And you can print that.”
It appeared in the paper on a quiet Sunday in early January with just a handful of O’Byrne and McKenna Cup games on.
Sniff
The Examiner ran the quote again on the Monday and suddenly the story had taken legs.
“It completely broadsided me,” he says. “The first sniff I got of it was when my sports editor Adhamhnán O’Sullivan rang me on the Monday evening.
“Adhamhnán only rings you on a Monday if there’s something up… so he rang me and told me the shit was hitting the fan.
“What really threw petrol on the fire was someone from the Kerry County Board came out and disowned themselves from Páidí’s remark.”
There was further controversy over quotes interpreted by some in Kerry as a slight on team selector and trainer John O’Keeffe.
By this stage, Ó Sé and his panel were in South Africa on a team holiday and the saga only ended when the Kerry manager did a TV interview with Marty Morrissey on the waterfront in Cape Town.
“About nine months after the whole thing had ended, Páidí was gone now as Kerry manager and I got a phone call out of the blue from him,” says Kimmage.
“He says: ‘Listen, there’s absolutely no problem with anything you wrote. If you ever want to interview me again, no problem at all’.
“It really summed the man up. The generosity of the man. To take the time to ring me and say it to me. What a decent fella he was.
“But I don’t think he considered me a lucky journalist any more.”
Kimmage decided to move into teaching and completed a Masters at DCU in journalism in 2004.
Among his classmates were Ciaran Cassidy and Mark Horgan, producers of the recent Where Is George Gibney? podcast, along with Horgan’s fellow Second Captains colleague Ciarán Murphy.
Also there was Samantha Barry, now editor-in-chief at Glamour magazine and Petula Martyn and Fiachra Ó Cionnaith, now with RTÉ News.
“I was the oldest in the class. Everybody else there was doing it to get into journalism, I was doing it to get out of journalism,” he says.
Soon after he began teaching at Stillorgan College of Further Education and has been there ever since.
He lives just up the road from his brother Paul and they see each other several times a week.
“Are we close? About 300 metres,” he says, laughing.
The loss of Raphael in 2019 is something the whole family are still coming to terms with.
“It was a terrible shock. The void he has left in all our lives is incredible,” he says.
“He was an exceptionally talented cyclist, but what he really was… he had an incredible relationship with his family. With his wife and kids, he adored them and they adored him. He lived for them.
“The room lit up when Raphael was there. You couldn’t get a word in when Raphael was there.
“He was always in good form. He’d do anything for you.”
His mother Angela has had her two Covid jabs and is looking forward to the summer with the extended family.
Kimmage has a daughter, Maeve (20), and two sons, Oisín (23) and James (17) of his own.
He says the next generation are more likely to appear on the football field than on the bike and youngest son James is currently on the books at Shelbourne.
Although he did catch him wearing his skin suit from the Barcelona Olympics recently...
As for the bike? It still works well and Kimmage plans to ride it over the coming months after taking it for a spin on Thursday.
Whatever he does, he has to keep riding.
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