Dubliner Sé O'Hanlon - wearing the winner's wreath - was victorious four times; 1962, 1965, 1966 and 1967. He also took 24 stages.
Tom Daly's latest edition of his book, "The Rás - The Story of Ireland’s Unique Bike Race", includes some fascinating stories of an often troubled and divided sport in dark but interesting times. It's failing is perhaps the lack of any update, especially to take account of the move into the new professional era, since the first edition was published a decade, ago writes Feargal McKay.
Outside of Ireland, the Rás is not exactly a race that sets the pulses racing in the same way as the Classics and Grand Tours. But the richness of its history, as told by Tom Daly in The Rás: The Story of Ireland’s Unique Bike Race, is easily on a par with its Continental cousins.
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First raced in 1953, the Rás is a child of the political struggle that was going on in Ireland at that time; both across wider society and more specifically within the sport of cycling.
In 1947 the Irish cycling federation, the NCA, had been kicked out of the UCI after the British federation complained about the NCA’s claim to govern cycling in the six counties as well as the Republic.
Ireland was just one of several countries to suffer this fate in the post-war years as the map of the world was redrawn and borders redefined. Like the other nations that had been booted out of the international cycling family, members of the NCA were banned from participating in all UCI-sanctioned events; from the Olympics and World Championships down to local races.
In 1949 a number of NCA clubs broke away and formed a new federation; Cumann Rothíochta na hÉireann (CRE). It restricted its activities to the 26 counties and quickly gained UCI recognition.
Rivalry between the CRE and the NCA was strong, at times even intense; both on and off the bike, with attempts to sabotage one and other’s races being frequent.
Initially, the CRE seemed to have the upper hand on the road, with more events that were also superior. And the future of the NCA was challenged. In 1953 Joe Christle decided to stick a spoke in CRE’s wheel in the shape of the Rás.
Christle is to the Rás what Henri Desgrange is to the Tour de France. And his role in the birth of the Rás is a story that can easily challenge the alleged role of the Dreyfuss affaire in the creation of the Tour. In his book, Daly quotes Tim Pat Coogan’s tome, The IRA:
“Joe Christle has a quality that I can only describe as ‘whoosh’ – energy, anarchy, male supremacy and learning all canalised into a brand of patriotism that finds its outlet in everything from fomenting strikes and laying up explosives, to bicycle racing. Apart from organising the round-Ireland Rás Tailteann he cycles twenty miles before work every day himself."
"His home is continually in turmoil. Phones ring. People rush in and out. Beethoven booms from the record player. Large men in track-suits carry bicycles through the hall. (Like most things surrounding Christle, there is more purpose to this activity than meets the eye.)”
From the get-go the Rás was both a sporting and political event. The first edition was just a two-day affair, running from Dublin down to Wexford and back. In Dublin it started outside the GPO, that great shrine to 1916.
In Wexford the riders laid a wreath at the monument to the pike-men of 1798. Back in Dublin the riders partied the night away with a céilí in the Mansion House, where the first Daíl met in 1919. For Christle, sport and politics went hand in glove.
On the sporting side of that first Rás a few things had been overlooked; not least the ability to actually pay the winner the promised prize. Christle came up with a bold solution to this conundrum that would have made even Desgrange laugh at his impunity: he told his brother Colm, who was riding the race, that he’d better win the bloody thing, or else. Which, fortunately for all, he did.
Nationalist politics were part and parcel of the early editions of the Rás. In the same way that Henri Desgrange used the Tour de France to challenge the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine in the pre-War years by taking the Tour to Metz, Christle used the Rás to keep alive the belief in a united Ireland by taking the race north of the border.
In 1956 this led to the infamous 'Cookstown incident', where Christle’s flying of the tricolour from his lead car led to the RUC trying to close the race down and a minor riot breaking out between riders and police. A stage of the race was cancelled and the Rás jumped from back-page to front-page news throughout the country. For Christle, the sacrifice of a stage was worth the publicity given to the nationalist cause.
Daly’s The Rás is not simply a year-by-year, stage-by-stage telling of the history of the Rás. One of the areas where it is most interesting is when Daly moves beyond the Rás itself and looks at what else was going on at the time in Irish cycling, particularly on the NCA side of the schism.
The stories of the NCA’s attempts to disrupt World Championships and Olympics are particularly interesting, but what is perhaps even more so is the manner in which men of the Rás retained their allegiance to the NCA even when it cost them the chance to race on the Continent.
And, as Daly explains, several of them did try to take that chance; moving to France and racing under pseudonyms or forged licences until found out and forced to return home.
Such stories help put into perspective some of the better known tales of the English-speaking riders trying to make a go of it in the Pioneer years of the 50s and 60s, well before the foreign legion arrived in the 1980s.
Daly’s book is far from being of interest solely to Irish readers or those abroad who can call themselves Men of the Rás. The story of how a breakaway federation struggled and survived is relevant in an age when talk of schism – albeit in a global rather than domestic context - is again the order of the day as the AIGCP and the UCI try to prise more money out of the purses of the race organisers.
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Of course, the Rás is also an international event and the manner in which it attracted foreign riders is another of those tales fit to challenge some of the legends around the likes of the Tour de France.
With the NCA being black-listed by the UCI, getting international riders to participate in the Rás was no easy task. In this regard the Rás is comparable to the Rapport Tour in South Africa made famous internationally by Pat McQuaid and Sean Kelly riding it in the 1970s, with long-term consequences to their international amateur careers.
The NCA was not alone in being outside the international cycling family. There were other black-listed governing bodies, such as the Fédération Sportive et Gymnique du Travil in France (organisers of the GP de l’Humanité), who sent riders to the Rás.
But Christle and the Rás’s most spectacular achievement was the manner in which teams from behind the Iron Curtain were brought in during the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet riders gave the Irish men of the Rás a lesson in cycling while Christle sought to use their participation to give the world a lesson in international politics.
The first Soviet-sphere participants came from Poland, in 1963. Through connections with the BLRC in the UK – itself another of the federations that was once exiled from the international cycling family – the Polish federation was spun a story about the brilliance and beauty of the Rás and asked if it would like to give the race a whirl.
It wasn’t until after the whole thing was over that anyone bothered to tell the Poles that the Rás was a blacklisted event in the eyes of the UCI, and that UCI-licensed riders participating in it could expect to find themselves on the receiving end of a ban.
Not that this actually bothered the Poles at this point in time: cycling was split between the professionals and the amateurs and the Soviet-sphere countries were the real powerhouse in the latter category.
British or French riders who were caught participating in the Rás illegally could be punished; but punishing the Poles would have had consequences that simply weren’t worth the candle.
Much of my own interest in Daly’s book is piqued by these international and political tales, but the book is also full of stories of the actual racing; with the on-the-road action of most editions of the race well covered.
Obviously Daly focuses his stories on the overall winners of the race, and through this we get good portraits of men like Gene Mangan, Shay O’Hanlon and others.
In terms of the on-the-road action, we must also turn here to the book’s subtitle, The Story of Ireland’s Unique Bike Race. Unique is one of those words tossed around with gay abandon and often with little understanding of its actual meaning.
But here Daly does try to make the claim that the Rás is truly unique, that it has a style of racing unlike any other race: a balls-out attacking-from-the-gun style that is almost impossible to control and makes the Rás a particularly challenging event.
While not offering any comparisons, Daly makes a good case for the Rás having a style of its own, driven by its own nature. Or – as Daly himself acknowledges – it once had a style of its own.
This point is perhaps where Daly’s book is somewhat weak and in need of a fresh take. Originally released in a slab-sized hardback edition in 2003 that was great for building up your arm muscles, this new 2013 edition of The Rás is a handy – but still hefty – soft-back size.
Unfortunately, no attempt has been made to update the text to take account of events in the last decade; Daly’s history ending with the race’s golden jubilee in 2002. Most cycling books struggle to deal with recent history, in terms of understanding the full context and consequences of relatively recent events, and The Rás is no different in this regard.
Here this is problematic considering the evolution of the race through the 1990s and into the new millennium and – obviously – throughout the last decade into the professional era.
Off-the-road politics are again important in the way the Rás has evolved over the last two decades. As Irish cycling moved through the 70s and into the 80s, attempts were made to heal the divisions between the competing governing bodies and to create what is today Cycling Ireland.
One of the impacts on the Rás of this new unity in Irish cycling was that the race found itself within the international cycling family and on the international calendar. Consequently, the character of the race has evolved.
Whether the Rás’s style of racing today can be truly called unique is something that, perhaps, we need still more distance to judge than was available to Daly when he originally wrote his book. Perhaps here it is fair to say that an opportunity has, regrettably, been missed by not updating the work for this soft-back edition.
That quibble notwithstanding, Daly’s The Rás is an important book for what it tells us about the history of one race and the domestic – and to a lesser extent international – context it has sat in down the years.
Daly proves in The Rás that there are stories aplenty to tell about Irish cycling, and that they are stories that are up there with some of the best you’ll find elsewhere on the cycling shelf of your local bookshop. The Rás may pale in the shadow of the Tour de France but The Rás is easily able to hold its own against most books about the big buckle.
@fmk_RoI
Tom Daly’s The Rás: The Story of Ireland’s Unique Bike Race is published by The Collins Press (2012, 342 pages)
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