STEPHEN ROCHE - The "Driver" Within
Photo: Cycling Legends Collection
The new wave of English-speaking pros entering the European peloton in the early 1980s caused ripples. They were winning, but they were different. To the eyes of the Peugeot team manager, Maurice De Muer, the young Stephen Roche didn’t even look like a pro bike racer.
They met at the 1981 Peugeot training camp in the South of France. Roche travelled with Robert Millar, who’d been with Peugeot the previous year. When they arrived De Muer asked Millar if his driver was staying for dinner. The ‘driver’ was Stephen Roche.
Millar explained the mix-up and De Muer looked Roche up and down, and told him; “You might have been able to win amateur races carrying that much weight, but you won’t as a pro.”
Roche’s baby face had misled De Muer, which he quickly proved by winning the Tour of Corsica and Paris-Nice. That was incredible. Peugeot was stuffed with established talent, but its newest recruit took the first two big wins of the year. And with that Roche went on holiday.
He knew himself, and winning those 2 races as a 21-year-old new pro was big. Roche needed time to recover and process what he’d done. De Muer was not impressed. When they next met, the evening before Paris-Roubaix, he told Roche he was a tourist. Roche did badly, and afterwards De Muer said; “That’s what you get by going on holiday halfway through the season.”
Their relationship changed at Roche’s next race. The night before La Flèche Wallonne, De Muer held a team meeting and asked Roche; “What will you be doing tomorrow.” Roche replied; “I’m a tourist, so I’ll be taking my camera.” The room fell silent.
Nobody spoke to De Muer like that, and he told Roche, but Roche would not back down. “I understand what you are saying, but next time you want to talk to me like that do it in your room, not in front of everybody,” De Muer told him. The others were shocked.
Later that evening De Muer knocked on Roche’s door, entered and said; “Everyone in that room has wanted to talk to me like that at one time or another, but you are the only one who has ever had the balls to do it.”
“It cleared the air,” Roche says. “We knew where we stood after that.”
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