The chains that bind
September 24, 2017
The French professional road racing cyclist Noël Converset spent just one season in the professional peloton. In 1977, he rode alongside fellow neophyte Sean Kelly for the Flandria team, managed by the so-called ‘Viscount’, Jean de Gribaldy. But where Kelly flourished, Converset struggled; and at year’s end, his contract was not renewed. Cycling trundled on without him, and he resumed civilian life, working for his family’s clockmaking business in Héricourt, near Besançon.
If the name rings a faint bell, it’s because Converset had a small but memorable part in the Sean Kelly origin story. In December 1976, de Gribaldy landed at Dublin Airport in a small private plane, and commandeered a taxi to ferry him to Carrick-on-Suir. He was accompanied by a pilot, who doubled as an interpreter, and Converset, who had raced as an amateur with Kelly in Metz that summer and was now charged with persuading the young Irishman to sign on the dotted line. If Converset succeeded, then he too would be offered a contract.
After some haggling, Kelly agreed to join Flandria, and de Gribaldy honoured his promise to Converset. At 28 years of age, Converset belatedly joined the paid ranks, but it would prove a short-lived and largely wretched experience. Few illusions survive intact when a child’s dream doubles as a man’s job.
Many old professionals remain umbilically tied to the peloton as managers, sponsorship reps or simple hangers on, but the disenchanted types like Converset tend to cut all links with The Show. It made him a difficult interviewee to track down for a writer researching a book on Kelly and Irish cycling’s gilded age, but a phone number was eventually unearthed.
Paul Kimmage finishes a stage in the 1987 Tour de France
Pic: INPHO
On a Tuesday evening in December, nearly 40 years to the day from his expedition to Carrick-on-Suir, Converset hardly expected a call from Ireland, and his surprise was palpable. After an uneasy pause, he confirmed hesitantly to the stranger on the line that he was the “ancien cycliste professionnel” Noël Converset, but long silences punctuated most of his responses thereafter.
For 20 minutes, he answered guardedly to most questions about that day in Ireland and life at Flandria, but two comments stood out. Where other de Gribaldy alumni had spoken glowingly of the Viscount, Converset complained that he had been ripped off: “He was a bandit, de Gribaldy. He didn’t pay me at all.” There was little sense of pride at having helped Kelly on his way to stardom. “I never got much thanks for it,” Converset said forlornly. He never saw any of his Flandria teammates again.
Of all the interviews that I carried out for The Ascent: Kelly, Roche and Irish Cycling’s Golden Generation, none made an impression quite like that awkward conversation with Converset. It was hard to shake off the sense that I had encroached upon feelings of rejection that he had left untouched for four decades. Asking him to immerse himself in that heartbreak once again and put it into words felt like an intrusion.
It was a reminder, too, that professional cycling was – and is – a brutal business, and it put Kelly’s achievement into fresh perspective. De Gribaldy routinely hired four or five new professionals each season, and ruthlessly cast aside the weakest at year’s end. Talent alone did not suffice, and more gifted athletes than Converset fell by the wayside.
A man needed to be almost preternaturally inured to hardship to endure such a cruel winnowing process. By rights, Kelly, far from home and with little grasp of the language, ought to have struggled more than anyone. Yet he did not simply survive in that harsh environment, he thrived. Kelly won four races in that first season, then claimed a stage of the Tour de France the following year. He was on his way.
All told, Kelly’s journey from a lonely farmhouse in Co Waterford to world number one took little more than six years. Whatever way you break it down, it is one of the extraordinary Irish lives. And that was only part of the story.
There was never an Irish sporting phenomenon quite like the cycling boom of the 1980s. Before the Ireland football team had ever qualified for a major tournament, before the Irish rugby team’s appeal moved at all beyond a small caste of private schools, Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche reached a level of nationwide popularity that no other international sportspeople had attained in Ireland before them.
For two riders of the calibre of Kelly and Roche to emerge independently of one another in a relative cycling backwater, within the space of four years, seems a most astonishing accident of history, as though Tupelo had produced a second Elvis Presley shortly after the first.
The 1987 Nissan Classic was probably the apotheosis. The crowds were so big at one stage start that, amid the tumult, half of the peloton rode off in the wrong direction. That summer, Roche had carried off the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and World Championships. Kelly was, well, Kelly. Martin Earley and Paul Kimmage, Ireland’s other Continental professionals of the time, came home to find themselves unlikely celebrities. “I think I’m a freeman of Tralee,” Kimmage said, shaking his head. “The Nissan in 87 was the height of it.”
Thirty years on from that golden summer seemed an appropriate time to revisit one of the most remarkable chapters in Irish sporting history, not least because so many of the major players from the era have remained in the spotlight to varying degrees ever since.
Martin Earley in action during the 1991 Tour de France
At the time of Lance Armstrong’s downfall in 2012, for instance, his most dogged pursuer was David Walsh, who had been the evangelist for Kelly and Roche in the Irish press in the 1980s; Nissan Classic organiser Pat McQuaid was president of the UCI; and Kimmage was his staunchest critic. Kelly was cycling’s most popular television pundit. Roche’s son Nicolas and nephew Dan Martin were Ireland’s best cyclists. Only the modest Earley, quietly and contentedly working as a physical therapist near Stoke, seemed to have exited the stage.
When I first sat down to research The Ascent, I naively thought that I might establish a neat explanation for Irish cycling’s sudden blossoming. I figured that the gradual détente in the 1970s between Ireland’s feuding cycling federations, which were split loosely along Civil War lines, must have contributed to the emergence of Kelly and Roche, but I was quickly disabused of that notion when I interviewed them. As young men, they were in such a hurry that they simply overtook the course of history.
I considered other avenues. I wondered if the cycling emigrants might serve as metaphors for the mass exodus of young Irish in the 1980s, until Roche confessed to me that he was completely unaware of Charles Haughey’s “living way beyond our means” address to the nation, which was broadcast just a couple of weeks before he left for France in early 1980.
Ultimately, it was the complex relationships between Irish cycling’s grandees of the era that steered much of the narrative.
Roche and Kelly managed to combine friendship with a rivalry that was more spirited than either man dared to let on at the time. Kelly can smile now as he recalls how deeply he was motivated to beat Roche in those Nissan Classics, but both men always understood that their competition was a mutually beneficial one. In driving one another to greater heights on the continent, they boosted one another’s profile back home.
Kimmage, meanwhile, was once nursed to the finish of an amateur race by Pat McQuaid, and then coached by him at the Los Angeles Olympics, but 30 years later they found themselves in a Swiss courtroom on opposite sides of a defamation suit. David Walsh was the ghostwriter for two Roche autobiographies in the 1980s, but in 2000 he would appear alongside Roche on The Late Late Show to press him on allegations of doping.
A thorough appraisal of the careers of Kelly and Roche cannot be made, of course, without examining the accusations of doping levelled against them, though it is debatable what damage, if any, has been done to their legacies. This is, after all, a sport where Eddy Merckx is generally regarded as the greatest of all time despite three positive tests during his career, not least because it is impossible to propose a demonstrably clean alternative.
When the accusations landed in 1999 and 2000, an old comrade was among the first to report Kelly and Roche’s denials of wrongdoing: Kimmage, in his new career as a journalist. As a teenager, he had gone on hostelling trips with Roche in the Wicklow Mountains. As a pro bike rider, he had been Roche’s loyal domestique. As middle-aged men, they no longer speak.
The story of Irish cycling in the 1980s was not really about events, but about people. It was about young men, and their dreams and ambitions. It was about their disappointments and their regrets. It was about their camaraderie and their rivalries. It was about decisions made and roads not taken. It was about growing older and, often, growing apart.
The Ascent will be published by Gill Books on September 29, priced €24.99
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