In an exclusive extract from his award-winning book ‘Inside the Peloton’, Nicolas Roche outlines his eventful Irish racing campaign in the summer of 2002.
After coming up short in the Irish national junior championships, he comes from France for the Junior Tour of Ireland where, as an exotic blow-in, he is given no quarter by the natives.
He finishes the year exhausted and frustrated, but addicted with it. Standing on the shoulders of giants, the kid knows he must follow his famous father’s footsteps.
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In August 2002, I was back in Ireland for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Junior Tour.
Having been ignored for the Irish national team the previous year, I turned down selection for the 2002 edition and instead formed a composite team with two French riders that I had been competing with all season.
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Anthony Esposito had been on the French national team twice that year and was going really well, and Jack Servetto had been on the same underage team as me in Antibes and was a good friend. My dad had just started running his cycling holidays and training camps in Mallorca at the time, and he gave us jerseys and shorts with his name on them; we became Team Stephen Roche.
I had won a big mountain time trial in France two weeks before the Junior Tour, so when I heard there was a hilly time trial in Waterford to start the race, I thought I had a good chance. I completed the 3km time trial in three minutes forty seconds and became the first leader of the Junior Tour of Ireland.
Before the stage start, it had been announced that one of the local shops was offering a digital camera to the first Irish rider on the stage. As I was waiting on the podium after being presented with my yellow jersey of race leader, the race announcer spoke: ‘And now the winner of a digital camera for the first Irish rider on the stage goes to . . . Theo Hardwicke of the Irish national team.’ I had forgotten all about the extra prize, but was incensed when they gave it to someone else.
I reminded the announcer that, as I had won the stage, I was obviously the first Irish rider on the stage and therefore should be getting the prize. But he just picked up the microphone and said, ‘The prize for first Irish rider . . . on an Irish team, goes to Theo Hardwicke of the Irish national team.’ It was to be the start of a week-long battle with the Irish team for me.
I was keen to bring the final yellow jersey back to France a week later but, with just a one-second lead, I knew it would be difficult for my three-man Team Stephen Roche squad to defend my yellow jersey for six days against national teams and a couple of good continental outfits.
I thought it would be to my advantage to lose the lead by a few seconds and thereby force another team to defend it, until nearer the end of the race, when I planned to attack and get it back.
My plans for the race changed when I found out after stage two that only three riders had ever led the Junior Tour from start to finish. If I had been willing to give up my yellow jersey momentarily the day before, I was determined to hold on to it until the end and become only the fourth rider ever to do so.
As the rain lashed down during the stage, I was getting increasingly frustrated by the Irish team, which was marking me closely and wouldn’t let me jump clear at all. I couldn’t understand it. Every time I moved, one of them was on my wheel.
I knew they wanted to have the winner on the national team, but surely they would have been better off letting one of the foreign teams chase me if I attacked and then hitting out after that team had tired itself out. It made me even more determined to get away from them.
With 50km to go on the 100km stage, I jumped hard and opened a gap. At the time, I thought I was a lot closer to the finish than I actually was. Behind me, there was panic, but I just rode as hard as I could into the wind and rain and slowly went clear. Despite the whole of the national team and several others forming a chase group behind me, I had opened up a gap of two minutes at one point, before I started to suffer.
The last 10km or so were really hard, with a lot of drags and a strong headwind. I began to falter near the end but hung on to win the stage alone, finishing thirty seconds clear of the chasers.
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Team Stephen Roche continued where we left off when Anthony Esposito out-sprinted nine others to win stage four the following day into Sean Kelly’s hometown of Carrick-on-Suir. Team Stephen Roche had now won three out of the first four stages. We now held every jersey in the race. I still led the overall, the points and the mountains classifications, while Anthony had moved into the lead in the first-year junior competition. We also led the team competition. We were cleaning up.
With just forty seconds’ lead overall and two stages remaining, I wanted a bigger cushion. I was feeling good and attacked after just 12km on the penultimate stage. I was hoping a small group would come across to me and that maybe, if we worked hard enough, we could stay clear to the finish and I would consolidate my advantage.
After a few hundred metres of riding hard, I turned round to see if I was making progress. The whole Irish national team was on the front of the peloton chasing me down. It didn’t surprise me, as they had been doing it all week.
Any time I flinched, one of them was behind me. As far as I was concerned, they were playing into the hands of the foreign teams, who didn’t have to do any work at all and would eventually get out of the armchair they had been sitting in all week, attack the living daylights out of us and bring the race home with them. Exasperated, I sat up and let them catch me. I also let them know what I thought of their tactics.
A few kilometres later, Páidí O’Brien of the national team attacked. The bunch was strung out in one long line, with everyone gritting their teeth to hold on to the wheel in front of them. Just then I heard a ping. I had broken a spoke. I was worried, as I would have to change my wheel at the fastest part of the race and I knew I would have a hard time getting back on to the peloton. I stopped and got a new wheel from the car, and my team mates came back for me, to help pace me back up. As we neared the back of the bunch, I saw a green jersey. It was Páidí.
There is an unwritten rule in cycling that you don’t attack the race leader if he is having mechanical difficulty. I was grateful to Páidí for his sporting behaviour and didn’t contest the next King of the Mountains sprint, allowing Páidí to move closer to my lead.
A seven-man group went clear inside the last 20km of the stage and as one of them, a Dutch rider, was only a minute and a half off my jersey and the Irish team wasn’t interested, our three-man Stephen Roche team had to chase. After some very hard riding, we managed to close the gap to forty-seven seconds on the line, and I was still in yellow with one day to go. Ironically, the winner of the stage was a British rider named Steven Roach.
The final stage covered three laps of a 20km circuit, with a King of the Mountains prime each time. That stage was the one and only time I have ever argued with Páidí O’Brien. As he had begun the day just one point behind me in the King of the Mountains competition and we had three climbs to contest that day, I knew we would be battling for the overall classification.
Páidí is a great sprinter, and I narrowly beat him to the top of the first hill, earning an extra point. Afterwards, though, he wasn’t happy that I was still sprinting for the mountain points even though I had almost certainly won the race outright. He felt that the yellow jersey was enough for me to be bringing back to France and, probably under a bit of pressure from the Irish camp, he wanted me to let him win the King of the Mountains competition.
I disagreed. ‘Why should I give it to you?’ I asked him. ‘Every time I moved this week, your team, the Irish national team, chased me down. How come you didn’t chase down the foreign riders when they attacked? If you want the jersey, you’re going to have to win it yourself. I’m not giving it to you.’
The stage was won by Geraint Thomas of Wales, with Mark Cavendish of the Isle of Man third. I rolled across the line in thirteenth place, with my arms in the air and my forty-one seconds advantage over Joost van Leijen of Holland intact. I was happy to have taken what I considered a very big victory.
Some more good performances in France saw me selected for both the time trial and the road race at the junior world road champion ships in Belgium in October 2002.
My dad had told me beforehand that, while the Worlds were always a bit of a lottery, I had nothing to lose by giving it a go in the last few laps if I got the chance, so that’s what I did.
To try and shake things up a bit and get rid of some of the weaker riders, I attacked my thirteen-man breakaway group with 16km to go. I was hoping two or three guys would come with me and we would ride flat out to the finish and stay away, but I was soon reeled in.
I still thought our group would survive to the line, especially when we were still dangling clear going through the finish for the bell. Half a lap later, I was very disappointed to be back in the bunch and even more pissed off to get caught up in a crash soon after and lose my place at the head of the field.
When I finally got back up, I was caught up behind yet another crash and had lost so much energy chasing that there was no way I was going to get up in the sprint. I crossed the line in the middle of the peloton in eighty eighth place; nine seconds behind winner Arnaud Gérard of France.
I was eighteen that year and had another year to do in school but I thrived on the adrenaline rush I felt during those world champion ships and wanted to feel it again. That race was my revelation. I wanted to be a professional cyclist.
© Nicolas Roche
