One Quote Review: Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage

One of my clearest moments of pure childhood surprise was the evening my aunt called to our front door with a cycling cap signed by the inestimably great Sean Kelly himself. It was a gift for me. I dared to not wear it. I showed it to my friends on the road I grew up on but otherwise it stayed in my bedroom. It was a relic. It was a sacred totem. I owned a bright orange Super de Luxe bike that I inherited from my older siblings. Everyone else had a BMX. I didn’t even have brakes. It pushed the pedals backwards to stop. In retrospect, the bike I grew up with was an awesome piece of classic design but I couldn’t see that at the age of 8.

I still won all the impromptu races we’d run during the Tour de France, in that era when Kelly and Stephen Roche were the greatest riders in the world.

I don’t know where the bike or the cap went. I wish I still had them both.

I knew of another Irish professional cyclist, Martin Earley and distinctly remember him winning a stage of the Tour in 1989. That was the summer I fell in love with soccer and forgot my dreams of being a cyclist. But reading Paul Kimmage’s classic memoir of his years as a pro cyclist, my boyhood adulation of these heroes came rushing back to me. Kimmage was the one Irish professional I was not aware of as a child. I knew him as a journalist in the Sunday Independent. I came to read the soccer news religiously and so his name was just one of those bylines I didn’t really care to pay attention to because it was rare that he would be interviewing Alan Kernaghan or Andy Townsend.

Rough Ride is now firmly canonical within the pantheon of great sporting books. It tells of Kimmage’s passion for the sport, growing up as the son of an Irish amateur champion, with a brother who was a gifted rider as well and with a circle of friends that included Roche and Earley. It tells of his rise through the amateur ranks to eventually make it as a pro in France in his early twenties. And then it tells with crushing and compelling momentum of his heart-breaking realisation that the sport he has sacrificed his youth for is plagued by drug abuse. He quit after four years, his spirit broken by the realisation that to even continue to compete, nevermind to win, he would have to start doping.

It was published in 1990 and won prominent awards but it was met with scepticism. There was a culture within the sport of deriding those who “spat in the soup” by trying to lift the lid on steroid usage. Kimmage was dismissed as a bitter failure who was driven to explain the mediocrity of his results by exaggerating the scale of corruption. The massive drug scandals that destroyed the Tour de France in 1998 were the most stunning vindication of Kimmage’s long-held claims.

That a cyclist would then suffer cancer, go through chemotherapy, lose a testicle and go on to win an unprecedented seven Tours in a row and still not be seriously suspected of doping is remarkable. Lance Armstrong’s recent, final, long awaited exposure as a fraud prompted me to read this book. But what Kimmage’s book revealed to me was that my easy characterisation of Armstrong as a cheat is simply not accurate enough. Armstrong and Kimmage and every cyclist since the late 1980s has been caught in a system where competition was skewed by doping. The doctors, therapists, team directors, race organisers, sponsors, sporting administration bodies and journalists were all complicit in a complex drive to assure results at any cost. A more keen follower of sport might be able to argue that the problems facing cycling flow inevitably from the professionalisation of sport. Having read this book, any scepticism I might have held about doping culture in other sports has reduced to a minimum. Innocence is hard to protect when the drugs exist and the TV money is on offer.

My favourite part of the book is a paragraph in the middle detailing an especially hard climb on a fiendishly hot day up an Alpine slope in the Tour de France. The Prodigal Son echoes through the memory Kimmage shares:

The only regret I had was for my parents. They came over from Ireland on two weeks’ holiday to see the race with my youngest brother Christopher. My only bad day of the race was on the first mountain stage to Mondane. It was a scorching hot day and I cracked early on the Col de Glandon. I knew my parents were waiting for me at the top. I dreaded passing them so far down the field, and in my frustration I composed a speech that explained my role of domestique. On seeing them at the side of the road I planned to stop and say, ‘Da, I’m sorry. Look at me. This is the reality. This is what I am. I’m not a star and never will be. I am a water carrier, a domestique, a nothing.’ I never got to say the prepared words. He was standing two kilometres from the top, with a bottle of water. I smiled, pulled in and filled my bidon. He said I was doing fine, and pushed me off, encouraging me further. His enthusiasm lightened my heart and my speech was cancelled.

– Paul Kimmage, Rough Ride, pp. 110-11.

Your Correspondent, Needs a tagline like a fish needs a bicycle