THE EMERALDS IN VILLACH

Barry Ryan, author of The Ascent: Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and the Rise of Irish Cycling’s Golden Generation, recalls the relationships within the Irish team that led to Roche’s 1987 Worlds win and another near miss for Kelly

Writer: Barry Ryan
PROCYCLING 234 - October, 2017

When Sean Kelly first began to earn selection for the Irish national team as an amateur in the mid-1970s, he regularly found himself competing for jerseys with his teammates. Not rainbow ones, mind, but the notoriously ill-fitting garments provided by the Irish Cycling Federation at the time. Alan McCormack, regularly Kelly’s equal in the sprint as a junior, was rather slighter of build than the robust farmer’s son from Carrick-on-Suir, but he was never guaranteed the snuggest jersey on offer. 

“They’d be laid out on a bed and Sean would grab my jersey, saying he liked a nice tight fit,” says McCormack. “Jesus, the medium would be like a dress on me, so I used to have to fight him to keep my small jersey. They were pure cotton and they’d sag in the rain.” Come the 1987 World Championships in Villach, Austria, after a decade climbing inexorably to the summit of professional cycling, Kelly had long since countered his federation’s sartorial shortcomings by having his own green jerseys made. The internal competition with his Irish teammates, meanwhile, had taken on rather grander dimensions. 

Kelly arrived in Austria that September desperately searching for a rainbow at the end of a summer of stinging disappointment. A saddle sore had forced him out of the Vuelta a Espana while he led the race and then a seemingly banal fall ended his Tour de France challenge in the opening week. To compound matters, 1987 had snowballed into the year of Stephen Roche. 

Having already claimed the Giro d’Italia in June, Roche rode into Paris on the final Sunday of July in yellow, the first Irishman to win the Tour. From a dreary television studio in Brussels, Kelly sat watching with his arm in a sling, trying to place order on a riot of emotions. “When you see Roche winning it, I suppose you say to yourself, ‘Sh*t, if he can win it, I should be able to win it,’” Kelly says. “There’s a lot of things that go through your head at that time, especially at the end, on the final day.” 

Kelly and Roche’s rivalry was a largely unspoken one. When Roche, a garrulous city boy three years Kelly’s junior, arrived in the professional peloton in 1981 and announced himself by winning Paris-Nice, the older man was careful to pay due deference to the neophyte’s fine debut season and potential. At year’s end, however, Kelly expressed himself more frankly in his preferred, wordless manner by lapping Roche at his Carrick Wheelers club’s pre-Christmas handicap event. The following season, Kelly won Paris-Nice for himself, definitively shaking off his tag as ‘only’ a sprinter, and began to target the general classification at the Tour. Or, as Roche puts it: “This Dublin guy came along and started winning stage races so he said, ‘Gee, I’d better get my finger out here, otherwise Roche will be taking all the limelight.’” 

Through the 1980s, Kelly and Roche would push one another to greater heights through a mutually beneficial competition that was more spirited than either man dared to admit at the time, though largely bereft of enmity. After all, they effectively operated as a cartel when it came to negotiating fees with organiser Pat McQuaid for appearing on home roads at the nascent Nissan Classic. Once the flag dropped, hostilities resumed. “I suppose I wanted to beat Roche,” Kelly says of his 1985 Nissan victory, and then grins. “If I tell you anything else, I’d be telling you a bloody lie.” 

In the spring of 1987, however, Kelly and Roche’s on-the-bike competitiveness grew so feisty that it briefly threatened to derail their relationship off it. Roche, under pressure to produce a big win to justify his contract at Carrera, led Paris-Nice into its final day, but Kelly made no concessions to their friendship when Roche punctured on the Col de Vence, ordering his Kas team to up the pace. To Roche’s intense annoyance, Kelly claimed a sixth successive title that afternoon. The tension took time to dissipate. “You could feel it when we spoke to each other,” Kelly says. “It was still there for quite a few weeks.” 

By September, however, with Kelly and Roche first and second in the world rankings, the animosity had abated. Roche, seemingly sated by his Grand Tour double, arrived in Austria insisting that he would ride in the service of Kelly, who was, along with defending champion Moreno Argentin of Italy, the favourite for Worlds victory. Roche’s duties as deluxe domestique even extended to serving as a decoy on the afternoon before the race. As he held court for a retinue of journalists in the hotel lobby, recounting all over again the story of his Giro-Tour double, Kelly enjoyed a nap. 

***

ALAN MCCORMACK had initially followed a similar trail to Kelly in the late 1970s, turning professional with the Old Lord’s-Splendor team and completing the 1978 Vuelta a Espana, but their paths diverged thereafter. McCormack returned to Ireland within six months and dropped back to the amateur ranks for two years before trying his luck on the professional scene in the United States. It was a propitious decision. Almost unbeknown to the Irish cycling community in that pre-internet era, McCormack established himself as a superstar across the Atlantic, even receiving America’s ultimate sporting accolade of having his image appear on a Wheaties cereal box. 

For all that cachet in the United States, McCormack still yearned for some recognition back home. What better way to prove that he was an Irish professional bike rider than by competing at the Worlds for the Irish team? He rode in Montello in 1985, when Motta bikes paid his way to Italy and lined out when the Worlds came to his own patch in Colorado Springs in 1986. In 1987, he travelled to Villach at his own expense to compete in the green jersey alongside Ireland’s four European professionals, Kelly, Roche, Martin Earley and Paul Kimmage, all of whom had started that year’s Tour. McCormack had shared a room in Montello with Kelly, Roche and Earley, who welcomed the returning emigrant by munching through the stash of M&Ms he had brought from across the water. This time around, however, while Irish cycling’s Fab Four stayed at the expense of their professional teams in the friendly confines of the Hotel Piber on the outskirts of Villach, the Fifth Beatle was housed with the Irish amateur team in rather less biddable lodgings in the centre of town. “It was hell to get there, I had all these different connecting flights and delays,” McCormack says. “By the time I got to Austria, I was just fried. I barely even made it to the start line.” 

McCormack’s teammates might scarcely have noticed if he hadn’t. “I’d actually forgotten he was in it because he wasn’t part of the group, not at all,” Kimmage says. “I don’t know if we even said hello to him, which is just. mad – and wrong.”

Kimmage, Kelly, Roche and Earley, meanwhile, arrived in Austria having already formed something of an ad hoc national team during a series of criteriums in Dublin, Wexford and Cork in the build-up to the Worlds. The field in Dublin was made up largely of British-based professionals, who rebuffed Kelly’s suggestion that Roche, the local hero, be ‘allowed’ to win, as per the conventions of a post-Tour criterium on the Continent. The trio of city-centre exhibition races instead played out as full-blooded, competitive affairs. After Roche won in Dublin and Kelly triumphed in Wexford, the visitors were desperate to salvage something in Cork,but Kelly claimed a hair-raising sprint on Saint Patrick’s Quay, where Mark Walsham complained that Roche had deliberately caused a crash on the final corner. Roche denied the charge and then grinningly turned to a troupe of local reporters: “Anyway, the score is Ireland three, England nil.” 

The Irish quartet knocked a kick out of that line as they said their goodbyes in Cork and went their separate ways before teaming up again in Austria 10 days later. “That was a fucking great week,” Kimmage says. “There was a great bond there.”

At the Italian hotel on the night before the World Championships, riders vying for team leadership typically pledged a bonus to be shared among their companions in the event of victory. No such arrangements were discussed at the Hotel Piber, nor was any real thought given to tactics. The Irish team had no manager, and their roughly-sketched plan was to ride in support of Kelly. He was best-equipped to triumph on the flattish Villach circuit and Roche had been troubled by knee pain since his fall in Cork. 

Besides, they knew there was no point in devising a more detailed scheme when the 12-man squads from Italy, Belgium and France would inevitably dictate the terms of engagement. “You can’t talk tactics with five guys,” Earley says. “I think the idea was just to hang on as long as possible and try to help Kelly.” 

Rain was general all over the Gailtal Alps on September 6, 1987, and for six hours, the World Championships road race was an exercise in drudgery. McCormack lasted 19 laps before he wheeled to a halt and watched the finale from the Irish tent near the finish line. With two laps left, he was joined by Earley, who had put in a mammoth turn to peg back a dangerous break featuring Argentin and then climbed off, his work for the day done. 

Kimmage was also prominent in a supporting role in what, in hindsight, was the finest outing of his short career as a professional cyclist. “A group went away and nobody was chasing it,” Kelly says. “We told Kimmage and Earley to ride. Credit where credit is due, they rode really well for Ireland. They closed that break down, or almost closed it down.” 

Kelly and Roche were among the 13 riders who remained in contention in the final lap, where the Irish team’s numerical inferiority was no longer a pressing issue. Only the Dutch, with three riders, outnumbered them. Meanwhile, Argentin no longer had any blue jerseys alongside him. With no team able to control the group, there was just one viable tactical approach amid the inevitable flurry of late attacks, and Kelly and Roche took it in turns to mark the moves. “I went at least two or three times with attacks,” Kelly says. “I’d get a little bit ahead and then I’d be closed down, and then Roche would go with the next one. Roche went with one. They looked at each other behind, and that was the one.”

Roche, it seemed, could not put a pedal stroke askew in this blessed year. Three kilometres from the finish, the rain now subsided, he ghosted off the front in the imminently beatable company of Teun van Vliet, Rolf Golz, Rolf S.rensen and Guido Winterberg. Kelly, by contrast, could not catch a break in this most accursed season. Argentin sat locked on his wheel in the chasing group and the rainbow faded. So it goes.

Mindful of his own weakness in a sprint, Roche looked repeatedly over his shoulder in the final kilometre, scanning the road for a sight of Kelly, but there was a similar deadlock in the group behind. Nobody wanted to drag Kelly and Argentin to a sprint finish, and the two favourites were certainly not going to help one another.

It was up to Roche, who had frittered away Liège-Bastogne-Liège victory from a similar position in April. The lesson was harsh, but lasting. With 400 metres togo, as the road began to kick up towards the line, he anticipated the sprint, squeezing between Sorensen and the left-hand barrier. He would not be caught. 

The Kelly group was closing in, but only to contest the medals. The rainbow jersey was Roche’s so long as he could keep his gear turning over. Five metres from the line, he threw his arms into the air. World champion. Instinctively, Kelly flung his arms skywards at the same time. Rather than continue his attempt to battle for a medal, he freewheeled across the line in fifth place, punching the air three times as he did so. 

“That’s genuine. Absolutely genuine,” Kimmage says. “You can’t fake that.” 

“No matter what anybody might say, no matter what doubt anybody would have about our relationship, that says it all,” Roche says. “Because if Sean was unhappy for me, or jealous, he wouldn’t have done that. That was spontaneous. That was from the heart: ‘I’m happy for this guy.’” 

The image would later come to define Kelly and Roche’s legacies in their home country. Roche sealed his Triple Crown that day, true, but Kelly’s sacrifice, real or imagined, would only copper-fasten his standing as Ireland’s most popular cyclist. By the mid-1990s, Roche had heard tell so often of his team-mate’s heroic selflessness in Villach that he felt moved to offer a revision. 

“It angers me when I hear that. I mean when you see the work I did that day, I did everything for Sean that day and still had the strength to win,” Roche told the Irish Independent at Kelly’s retirement race, of all places, in Carrick-on-Suir in 1994. Then again, Roche was always better at tactics than tact. And yet, for all that the 1987 Worlds enshrined his near beatific status, it was a bittersweet occasion for Kelly. As Roche was ushered towards the podium that afternoon, Kelly was left to heave his heart into his mouth for the gaggle of Irish reporters who had flocked to Villach expecting him to be crowned world champion. He had been Ireland’s standard bearer for a decade, but in the space of one summer, he watched Roche carry off cycling’s three biggest prizes. Had the cards fallen differently, the rainbow jersey might have been Kelly’s. 

“It could have been the other way. It could have been that I was in the move that stuck,” Kelly says now, before quickly laying the thought aside, stoic to the last. “But that’s the way it goes.” 

The Ascent: Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and the Rise of Irish Cycling’s Golden Generation by Barry Ryan and published by Gill Books is out on September 29