Rough Ride

by Paul Kimmage

  'What about the lads?' he asked. 'What about Stephen [Roche] and Sean [Kelly]?'

  'What about them,' I replied. 'This is my story. It has nothing to do with them.'

  But that wasn't enough and he came after me again and for the first time I realised I wasn't about to be cuddled. Ireland's favourite broadcaster wasn't pleased. He had a look on his face that I would see many times over the next few weeks. A look that said, 'How dare you cast a shadow on our fairytale?' A look that said, 'How dare you poison our dreams?' He expected me to stand now before the good people of Ireland and reassure them only losers like myself got tangled in the drugs web and that the sport's heroes were clean. Byrne wasn't interested in the story of my betrayal. My dreams didn't count. He wanted me to distil 200 pages and five months of toil into simple clean or dirty. Black or white? Yes or no? Heroes or villains? But the book wasn't about heroes or villains and I wasn't prepared to compromise; not for Byrne, not for anyone. Kelly and Roche would understand.

  The interview finished amicably enough and I thought no more about it until a week later at a book signing in Dublin when I was handed a copy of the Evening Press. One story dominated the front page on 26 May: 'ROCHE MAY SUE OVER LATE LATE':

  Ireland's Tour de France hero is taking legal advice after watching a video of last week's Late Late Show where his friend and former cycling colleague, Paul Kimmage, spoke about drug-taking in the sport. Roche, Kelly and Martin Earley will this weekend meet to discuss the matter, when they come together for a cycling event in Canada, according to Roche's Irish manager.

  Kimmage, now a journalist, has told how he himself once took drugs, amphetamines – 'to fight the battle with the same arms as everyone else'. Interviewed by Gay Byrne, he revealed a serious problem of drug abuse in the sport and told how he had seen other riders injecting stimulants to improve race performances.

  Now, it is understood, Stephen Roche is 'taking advice about legal action'. His manager Peter Crinnion, said that 'questions had been left in the air' on the Late Late Show and that 'some of the inferences were fairly serious'. However Kimmage, contacted by the Evening Press, insisted that he had 'made it clear' that he was not linking the three top Irish riders to drug-taking. 'This is my story, no one else's,' he said, referring to his soon-to-be published book Rough Ride.

  And Kimmage today won the backing of Sports Minister Frank Fahey. Mr Fahey praised the Ballymun man's honesty in admitting to drug-taking and said that he hoped it would help focus attention on the problem, and that that in itself was a step forward in combating the drug menace in international sport.

  Criticism however came from friends and family of the top Irish riders and from a top cycling official. Sean Kelly's father-in-law, Dan Grant, criticised Kimmage for failing to state categorically if his three colleagues had been involved in drug-taking. 'He should have said yes or no,' said an angry Dan Grant.

  A senior cycling official said that Kimmage had done Irish cycling no favours. 'He glossed over the fact that top riders like the three mentioned just wouldn't take any drugs because they are tested so often. Kelly was tested nearly every day in the last Tour de France – he just wouldn't risk it.'

  The official admitted that drug-taking did go on, but claimed it was confined to a small group of second-rank professionals. He added that the image of cycling in this country would be tarnished by the affair, because the public could draw the wrong inferences from stories of drugs. 'The big guys just don't risk it and the amateurs wouldn't be bothered. It is just the second-string pros who are struggling to scrape a living who go in for it,' he said.

  Frank Quinn, manager of Sean Kelly and Martin Earley said that while he didn't know if legal action was necessary, things were left unsaid on the Late Late Show.

  'The situation wasn't clarified,' he said. 'Paul Kimmage's story is depressing in a lot of places – he was professional for four years without winning a race.'

  When I had finished reading, I was too stunned to be angry: not because the idiot who had written it had totally misrepresented the reason I had used amphetamines, not because the cowardly 'top' official had been allowed to spout his lies from behind a mask. I understood why Kelly's father-in-law was upset and why his manager had attempted to dismiss my story as that of a loser. What I didn't understand was the attitude of Stephen Roche. We were friends. We had always been friends. I had admired him since the age of twelve and had reflected that admiration in the book. I think my position with regard to Roche, Kelly and Martin Earley is clear enough, but let me restate it anyway. Nothing I wrote in this book should be read as an allegation against any of these riders. The reason I will not get into discussions about individuals is that, in what I am saying, it is not individuals who matter – what X or Y may have done – but the sport as a whole and the dangers it faces. Why should Stephen not understand this? Why hadn't he read it before racing off to his solicitor? What was he thinking of? Who was advising him?

  Life was pretty tough over the next few weeks. Try as I did to leave the controversy behind me, there was no escape. It dominated my every day. It was a difficult period too for my family, but they never wavered in their support and there was no turning back. In July, my return to the Tour de France for the first time as a journalist loomed. I was dreading it.

  A few weeks before the race, during the Criterium de Dauphine in June, Stephen Roche invited a journalist from L'Equipe into his bedroom one night, produced a copy of Rough Ride and began quoting selected excerpts. Had he opened the book on page one, I would have been delighted but Roche wasn't interested in the real story of the book. He couldn't seem to accept that the book was not about him. When I heard about this performance, I was more enraged than at any other time in my life. Because the book wasn't being published in France, I had relied on Roche to vouch for its integrity to my former team-mates. Instead, it looked as though he was putting the boot in. I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it.

  What a turn around! Three years previously, in an interview with the Irish Independent on the day after he had won the Tour, he told the journalist Tom O'Riordan: 'You can get a false opinion from the excitement which surrounds victory in the Tour de France but I can tell you that many cyclists who were extremely good amateurs found the going very tough after they turned professional. Paul Kimmage and Martin Earley are two very fine cyclists, but it's very hard to make a breakthrough. I would advise young Irish cyclists to have a talk with Paul. It's not all glory and there is a lot more to it than people realise.'

  But a month after Rough Ride was published, in a ghosted column in the Irish Times ('KIMMAGE'S DRUG EXPOSURE IS UNFAIR'), he had obviously changed his mind. In a classic knee-jerk reaction piece that was both inaccurate and a mass of contradiction he said,

  I've read Paul Kimmage's book Rough Ride and I don't feel concerned about anything he wrote in it. I think Paul has taken one or two of his bad experiences in cycling and has generalised from that. For example, on the drugs issue, he has generalised from one post-Tour criterium at Château Chinon – but in all his career on the continent, Paul only rode a total of two or three such criteriums.

  I believe the impression he has given is unfair because it has left Sean Kelly and myself, as the top Irish riders, carrying the can as far as allegations of drug use are concerned. I can show you a list containing hundreds of drugs, including products in everyday use like codeine and caffeine, which would show up positive at a race control.

  I don't think it's anyone's business other than mine whether I've taken amphetamines or anything else. If I denied it, no one would believe me and if I said, 'Yes, I do', everyone's going to say I'm a drug user. In my first year in France I won Paris-Nice, the Tour of Corsica and several other big races and no one who knows me and is in his right mind is going to say I went overnight from being a Dublin fitter to using drugs. I didn't even know such things existed at the time.

  You have to realise that top riders like me face drug controls far more often than domestiques like Pa
ul Kimmage. There's a 99 per cent chance of me getting tested, and only an outside chance of a rider like Paul getting done. I know that if I took something to get me through one day, I would run the risk of it showing up in tests the following day or the day after. I'm not crazy enough to risk that. I can say that throughout my professional career I have never once tested positive in a drug control.

  As far as hormones are concerned, any doctor involved in cycling will tell you that they have been rooted out for a long time now, because they were easily traceable for up to three months. Two years ago, Delgado was tested positive after taking a product used for wiping out the traces of hormones – well, those hormones could be traced now.

  All sportsmen know that where there is money, fame and fortune there will also be drugs. Cycling was the first sport to seriously introduce drug controls back in the sixties. When you have 2,500 controls per year, as you do now, and there are one or two positive traces, everyone starts moaning. If you had only a hundred controls and no positive findings, would that mean very much in comparison? If you had the same large number of drug tests in other sports, it's likely that you would have the same number of positives.

  I learned things from Paul's book that I never knew. He said he's seen riders taking stuff during races. It may happen, but I've been in professional cycling for ten years and I can put my hand in the fire and say I've never seen it. Paul talks about everyone being 'charged up' on the last stage of the Tour de France along the Champs Elysées. That's completely false. The riders know that the day after the Tour ends they'll have to ride in criteriums in Holland, and they are controlled automatically for drugs, unlike in France.

  You can't generalise about drug-taking. There are individuals, as in any sport, who use them. Everyone knows these guys. Sometimes leading riders feel other top riders might take drugs, but as long as they continue to test negative in controls, it's not right to accuse them of it.

  The only thing that upset me in Paul's book was when he wrote that I paid to win a criterium in Dublin after my 1987 Tour win. But he didn't tell the whole story. I did pay £1000 to win that race, but only in the sense that I put the money in a pool to be shared out among a seven-man combine – Sean Kelly, Martin Earley, myself and four others – to help us beat the forty-five riders who had come over from Britain to beat Kelly and me. Everyone in the combine helped everyone else and we shared the money.

  That column in the Irish Times signalled the end of my friendship with Stephen Roche. I returned to the Tour in July, but it was a miserable experience. I hated every minute of it. The word was out that I had ratted on my pals. Thierry Claveyrolat and Jean-Claude Colotti, two of my closest friends at my old team RMO, turned their backs on me. When I pleaded with them to forget what they had heard and to reserve judgement at least until they had read what I'd written, they weren't interested. Pute (prostitute) was the expression used.

  And that's pretty much how it continued for the rest of the year. For months, whenever conversation turned to the book, my blood pressure would soar and I would foam at the mouth in its defence. And though I like to fool myself that I am more dispassionate about it now, I know nothing has changed. When I began writing for a living my friend David Walsh gave me some good advice: 'Never run from the truth.' Rough Ride may not be the best sports book ever written but it's honest.

  These last eight years as a sportswriter have changed a lot about the way I view the drugs question and there are a couple of things I wrote in Chapter 23 ('Spitting in the Soup') that I totally disagree with now. (In particular I would retract the diplomatic immunity I offered to the sports champions with regard to the 'law of silence'.) Although it pains me to admit it, Rough Ride changed nothing. It was the story of a 'bitter little man'. A 'loser's whinge'. The sport just carried on. Had it been scripted by a champion, that wouldn't have happened. The UCI would have been forced to make changes and some of the lives which were lost in the early 1990s, might have been saved. However, apart from the Epilogue and a slight change to Chapter 1, I have resisted the temptation to tamper with the original. The prose style is still very rough. The fawning references to Stephen Roche remain. When it was published in 1990, Rough Ride was a bike rider's story, not a sportswriter's. It still is.

  Paul Kimmage, January 1998

  1

  IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO

  END LIKE THIS

  Toulouse, July 13, 1989

  Stage 12: Toulouse to Montpellier (242 kilometres)

  I knew it would be hard this morning. In a race that lasts three weeks there are good days and bad days and survival is all about morale. With weak legs and a good head you can go a long way. With good legs and a weak head you go nowhere. This morning, I rode out of Toulouse on the twelfth stage of the Tour de France with a weak head.

  If the start had been a little easier it might have made all the difference. Maybe today I would still be a coureur cycliste professionel. But we raced out of Toulouse like there was no tomorrow and I was struggling from the start. The Danish rider Jesper Worre attacked and I cursed him because cursing him was easier than following him. I quickly realised that my legs were not responding to the demands I was making on them. I was dropped. To be left behind at such an early stage was demoralising, but I fought back and managed to regain contact with the peloton.

  I made my way forward through the bunch, but as I did they accelerated away and I started slipping back again. The bunch strung out into a long line and I realised with despair that I could not match the pace and would soon be dropped again. I pulled over, not wanting to obstruct the riders behind me. And then I heard someone laughing. The Belgian Dirk de Wolf was laughing. I had had a run in with him two days earlier. Was he laughing at me? He couldn't be. Yes, yes he was. He was laughing at me. The bastard was laughing at me. On a good day I would probably have gone over and spat in his face. But this was a bad day and I was feeling sorry for myself. Suddenly my spirit snapped. It had always been my greatest asset. Others had reached the top with talent or class mixed with spirit. I only ever had spirit. Fighting spirit. Never say die, spit in your eye. It was spirit that had brought me from a dreaming childhood in Dublin to the Tour de France. It had cracked before, many times, but I had always managed to repair it. Today was different.

  I started thinking, 'I don't need this shit. I can go home and be a journalist and live happily ever after. I don't need this Belgian laughing at me. Fuck him. Fuck the whole lot of them.' And then I stopped pedalling. My mind was confused. I hadn't planned it like this. I was supposed to finish the Tour and be presented with a medal (everyone who finishes the Tour gets a medal). I was going to continue racing until the end of the season and end my career in O'Connell Street in Dublin in the Nissan Classic. I wouldn't win a stage or anything like that, that would be dreaming. I stopped dreaming when I turned professional, which was probably part of my downfall. But as an acknowledgement of my modest career, the organisers would present me with a bouquet of flowers and my home would cheer as I waved them goodbye. Slipping happily into oblivion, I would return to the city the next day as an ordinary man to look for a job, any job. This was how it was supposed to end. This was what I had planned. But as the official cars passed me as I freewheeled down the road, fifty-five kilometres out of Toulouse on the twelfth stage of the Tour de France, Dublin was not on my mind. It was the laughing, that horrible moronic laughing. No, I didn't need that shit. The bike stopped and I got off. I was surrounded by photographers who were probably fed up with taking pictures of Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon – a sobbing domestique as he abandoned the Tour always made a good shot for the evening paper. The best was yet to come and they knew it.

  On abandoning the Tour the rider is not allowed simply to slip discreetly into a team car. No, he must wait for the Voiture Balai, the broom wagon, to arrive. I saw it coming and knew what would happen. I spread my legs, placed my arms on the door and stood to the sound of clicking cameras as the commissar removed the two numbers pinned to my jersey. This wa
s the official court-martialling, the stripping of the stripes. When he had finished, I jumped into the back of the bus and buried my head in my hands and cried, 'It wasn't supposed to end like this.'

  The rider who abandons the Tour is like a wounded animal. He feels shame and emptiness. He needs privacy to lick his wounds, to heal the mental sores. I just had to get out of Montpellier tonight. I could not face the company of my teammates or put up with the frowns of my directeur sportif (team manager) for five minutes longer than was necessary. My friend Gerard Torres drove my wife Ann down from Grenoble to take me home and I was so grateful to him for relieving me of my torture. My head was filled with so many emotions and questions, all tangled and jamming the switchboard of my brain. On the journey home, Gerard tried to raise my spirits with talk of the future, of the World Championships at Chambéry in August, of the Nissan Classic in October: 'Do you remember how well you rode last year in Dublin?' But I just nodded and tried not to offend his enthusiasm.