The Man in the Mud: Sean Kelly on his way to victory in the 1984 Paris-Roubaix - he would win the race again two years later. His new book 'Hunger' has just hit the shelves.
By Gerard Cromwell
“No wonder the Belgians adopted Sean Kelly,” says 1984 Tour de France King of the Mountains Robert Millar of Ireland’s former world number one cyclist.
“He was one of those mythical Flandrians you see in black and white, covered in mud, growling, being hard. He just happened to be born in Ireland instead of Belgium.”
The cover of Sean Kelly’s new autobiography, ‘Hunger’, published by Peloton Publishing and released yesterday, would seem to agree with Millar’s perception of the Irishman; the nail-hard Carrick sprinter wrapped in a rain-soaked KAS top, his face caked in mud, after another epic ride.
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Recognised as one of the top ten professional cyclists of all time, ‘Hunger’ tells the story of Sean Kelly’s meteoric rise from farmer’s son to world number one and his evolution as a bike rider from that of a raw but fast finishing sprinter to polished classics winner and eventual Grand Tour contender.
Kelly was on the Irish Olympic squad for Montreal in 1976 before that door was closed to him for good and another into a bigger world opened up for him.
Having won two stages and the King of the Mountains title at the 1975 Tour of Ireland, won by current UCI president Pat McQuaid, Kelly was persuaded to join McQuaid and his brother Kieron on a racing trip to South Africa for the three week Rapport Tour.
With a six month break before the start of the 1976 Irish season, the plan was to try and elongate the season and get a head start in Olympic year.
At the time, the apartheid regime in South Africa meant that cycling there was no longer recognised by the sport’s world governing body the UCI, or the International Olympic Committee but it didn’t stop the Rapport Tour from attracting riders from all over the globe.
“We got the invitation to go down to South Africa and compete in the Rapport Tour before Montreal,” Kelly recalls.
“We were riding with two Scottish guys as a GB team under false names, all of that is pretty well known now, but we never thought we’d get caught. There was no risk in doing it.”
In fact, Kelly and his cohorts may never have been caught if it hadn’t been for Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor and her second honeymoon with Richard Burton.
“Liz Taylor was on honeymoon down there, in one of the towns the race passed through,” explains the former world number one.
“One of the English journalists from the Daily Mail following her thought it would be a good idea to have her photographed with this ‘Great Britain’ team but our manager told him he wouldn’t let his riders be interviewed by journalists because it would disrupt our racing.”
The journalist in question wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer however, and his suspicion was aroused when the GB riders eventually did appear for photos, after much haranguing, looking slightly overweight and with strong South African accents.
“He knew something was up and hung around the next day to get photos of us at the start of the stage,” says Kelly.
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“He sent them back to England, where we were identified as Irish riders, and we got suspended.”
At first a seven month suspension was reduced to six months on appeal and Kelly and the two McQuaids had barely missed the start of the 1976 domestic season but then things took a turn for the worst.
“First of all, we got suspended from competing for a number of months, which wasn’t too bad,” says Kelly.
“We served that, but then, when we started back racing, we got hit with a lifetime ban from competing at the Olympics. At the time it was a big, big disappointment to me.”
“To be on the Irish Olympic panel with a very good chance of making the team for Montreal, it was a very big blow at the time. I had an offer to go to France to a club in Metz shortly after, so I immediately took up that offer when I knew I wasn’t going to be going to the Olympics. ”
It was in Metz that Kelly sowed the seeds for his remarkable professional career, winning 18 of the 25 races he started in France.
That winter, renowned French professional team manager Jean de Gribaldy flew to Dublin, hired a taxi to Carrick-On-Suir and went looking for Kelly. He found him driving a tractor on a back road and offered him a professional contract. The rest is history.
“When I was a few years into the professional scene, I kind of said ‘What does it matter?” If I had gone to the Olympics and maybe got a good result, finished in the top 10 or 20, I might have stayed amateur for another four years and tried to ride them again. Then I could have missed the opportunity to go professional.”
Turning professional in 1977, Kelly won a stage in his first Tour de France just a year later. The Irishman went to on to become synonymous with the green jersey in the three week Tour, winning the points classification no less than four times in his 18 year career.
Victories in the monuments of the sport such as Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Lombardy earned him the nickname King Kelly and the Carrick-On-Suir native remains the only Irishman to have won the Vuelta Espana having taken the title in 1988.
His run of seven victories at early season stage race Paris-Nice is yet to be bettered.
Off the bike Kelly pretty much kept himself to himself.
He who was once deemed so shy that he nodded in response to a question on radio but the now multi-lingual Carrick man has transformed himself in recent years into one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the sport and is currently working for British Eurosport at the Tour de France.
“As a kid I liked proper working class heroes,” says reigning Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins in reference to Kelly in the new book’s foreword.
“That’s what Sean was. He still is.”
Written in collaboration with Lionel Birnie, ‘Hunger’ hit the shelves in books stores yesterday and is priced at €18.99.
