Paul Kimmage has said after taking drugs himself, his responsibility when becoming a journalist was to expose and try stamp out the conditions that brought riders to that point. His documentary 'Rough Rider' goes out on RTE One tomorrow, Monday July 28th, at 9.35pm. The Dublin International Track Grand Prix is on Setanta Ireland on the same night from 8.30pm to 9.30pm; perfect timing.
Ahead of the broadcast on RTE One of his documentary 'Rough Rider', Paul Kimmage has said nobody should be fooled into thinking that doping in cycling had disappeared with the banning of Lance Armstrong.
"You'd have to be very naive to think that because Lance Armstrong retired, the problem is solved. The problem didn't start with him and it doesn't end with him. It's still there, it still needs to be addressed.
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"There are some very encouraging signs; I am encouraged by a lot of what I see. I'm also seriously discouraged by a lot of what I see. So, for me, the fight goes on."
While his love for cycling had been tainted, he still loved the sport and riding his bike, he said.
"It's something good and that good is worth fighting for."
Speaking during an interview with Miriam O'Callaghan on RTE, Kimmage rated finishing the Tour de France as "without question" the highlight of his sporting career.
He added when the documentary due to be aired tomorrow, Monday, at 9.35pm on RTE One had been completed and he viewed it, he was shocked to see the joy he had felt when he finished the race compared to how his feelings for the sport would evolve in the years that followed.
"There's a clip of me when I finished the Tour; and the sheer joy on my face... I remember looking it at for the first time and being shocked by it and thinking 'what happened', you know?"
Left to right; Paul Kimmage (RMO), Stephen Roche (Carrera) and Martin Earley (Fagor), with what looks like a youthful Miguel Indurain just about visible on the far right. Kimmage says Kelly and Roche now still have a duty to raise the doping issue.
Kimmage added that taking amphetamines three times on the criterium circuit after the 1987 Tour in France, in his second season as a pro and after pulling out of the race with just three stages remaining, was not something he regretted because of the insight it would give him into the drugs problem.
"I went into a small hotel room and I was offered the choice," he said of his first time.
"I'd spent a year and a half as a professional at that stage and I succumbed. At the Tour a couple of weeks earlier I had been offered testosterone and cortisone and said no. But this time for whatever reason, pressure, I don't know; I succumbed to it.
"I took the amphetamine and would have run through the wall the effects were so strong. I felt like superman. I drove home that night, around a four hour drive and still wired. And of course the guilt is starting to kick in.
"It was a massive line to cross and I crossed it twice very quickly after that again. I did it three times in the space of a month."
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Kimmage's journalistic career is so storied it's easy to forget how good a rider he was; instantly the best amateur in Ireland when he turned senior, an Olympian and 6th in the amateur World Championships despite finishing on a slow puncture.
Feeling he was being drawn quickly into the culture, he decided against taking drugs again and says he rode the rest of his career as a clean athlete.
"I don't regret that choice," he said of taking banned substances.
"I experienced the power of the drugs. I understood the pressure and temptation. What it did was gave me a determination to address it; that young cyclists would never be put in a position - and of course there was a choice - but they felt that pressure."
Having continued cycling until 1989, the Tour de France that year was to be Kimmage's last pro race. He took a job at The Sunday Tribune newspaper, for whom he was already writing a diary from the pro peloton, and decided to write his seminal book 'Rough Ride'.
The "blow back" from its publication in 1990 was huge, he said.
"It was bringing news to sports lovers that they didn't really want to hear. It was a reaction to that and a rejection of it. And I was easy to reject."
He said people did not appreciate his whistle blowing then - a time when journalists covering the sport had roundly ignored the drugs issue thus enabling it to grow without being exposed, and in a period that was still the height of the Kelly-Roche era in Ireland. And he doubted if people all these years later wanted to hear the message.
"I don't know what it says about us as people that there is this reaction to people who stand up for truth."
However, many people had thanked him for his 1990 book and he was proud he had done it despite the difficulty at the time.
He rejected the suggestion put to him by Miriam O'Callaghan that Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche may have felt betrayed by his book, saying it was the cancer of doping he was targeting and he had a responsibility as a journalist to write about that.
"I was trying to make the sport purer and better for everybody. And they have a responsibility to address it as well. Whether they like to hear that or not, they have a responsibility to do that.
"The reason the sport is in the mess that it's in is because we don't have journalists actually doing their job. And if they did, my life as a professional cyclist would have been a lot easier."
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