Going the Distance E-Book

Joe Barr

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In 2012, Joe Barr almost died from altitude sickness on the 11,000-ft Wolf Creek Pass in a Race Across America attempt. The infamous 3,200-mile race is non-stop ultracycling at its most extreme. In 2014, Joe returned and received the coveted Finisher's medal, and in 2019, at the age of 60, he went back again and won his category. This story of extreme perseverance begins on a yellow Raleigh Chopper on the streets of Co. Derry, where Joe, trying to escape the harsh everyday reality of the Troubles as a young Catholic boy in an all- Protestant school, went on long bicycle rides into the countryside, dreaming of one day taking part in cycling's grand tours. When his baby son was diagnosed with cancer, Joe got on the bike with a different purpose and won his first 1,300-mile endurance race. This is a story of unimaginable grit, and of what it takes to keep going when failure seems inevitable.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to four people.

First and foremost to my mum, Elizabeth, who taught me that kindness is an easy thing to give.

To Jillian, my one true compass. Thank you for taking my hand again and for making the greatest leap of faith. I will never let go.

And to my boys, Reuben and Ross; you teach me everything about unconditional love. I love you both to the moon and back.

For all those in the dark: keep the bike moving forward, the light will find you again.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

CHAPTER 1 Nurse Duffy and the Green Sunbeam

CHAPTER 2 A Golden Era

CHAPTER 3 Meanwhile, in the Back Seat of a Peugeot

CHAPTER 4 Blacked Out under the Flyover

CHAPTER 5 Never the Same Again

CHAPTER 6 A Bright Red Ducati 916

CHAPTER 7 The Tap of Metal Shoe Tips

CHAPTER 8 Nailed to a Fence in Navan

CHAPTER 9 Interlude – Downing a Mud Milkshake

CHAPTER 10 Half Dead on Wolf Creek Pass

CHAPTER 11 Wolf Creek Fallout

CHAPTER 12 Little Red Corvette

CHAPTER 13 Jackals Howling in the Night

CHAPTER 14 ‘Just Keep It Pinned, Joe’

CHAPTER 15 Up! Up! Up!

CHAPTER 16 She Never Judged Me

CHAPTER 17 Mr Boone’s Plastic Contraption

CHAPTER 18 Toast by Christmas

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

Photo Section

Prologue

I can still remember exactly how it felt.

The road ramped up out of the forest and onto the high bogland. Leaning hard on the pedals, I pushed ahead to the top of the climb, then pulled away over the crest. My heart was thumping fast and I reached down for my bottle, eased my aching legs and glanced behind me. Not a soul to be seen. I was off the front of the race in the dead silence of an Irish country road.

Over my shoulder, twenty hardmen were still toiling up through the forest, their bikes swinging from side to side. I shifted through the gears and swooped almost silently past stone walls and thorn bushes. A blackface sheep skittered across the way and over a ditch. In a mile or so the road swept steeply down to the left.

I relaxed my hands on the bars and slipped back a little on the saddle to shift the weight off my arms. These heart-stopping descents are payback time for the grinding climbs. Bum up, head down – body tensed for the pothole or the farmyard dog. My fingers twitched over the brakes, picking the exact line through the left-hand bend, leaning steeply through the apex. The tick, tick, tick, whirr of the freewheel and then powering on, down into the village.

It was the first time I’d broken away from a pack of experienced riders. The prize was almost within my grasp. At 16 years old I already knew this had to be my life, straining my heart, soul and sinew to throw myself head first across a finish line. I had to be away from the monotony of home and school, away from closed minds and a humdrum life to a place where the multicoloured peloton flashed across town squares and crowds filled the air with shouts of ‘Allez! Allez! Allez!’

Now, forty years later, I found myself slumped in the front seat of a crew car in the Arizona desert spooning oatmeal into my mouth from a plastic bowl. I glanced at my hands, swollen and calloused. Every part of my body hurt. I was at the rough end of a 3,000-mile race across the North American continent. That fleeting memory of my first win came at me out of nowhere. My fresh-faced, childish joy as I threw my arms high in the air and the bike spun across the finish line next to a lemonade warehouse.

Was I even the same person? My body laughed at the idea. Thousands upon thousands of miles pushing myself to the limit and beyond had left me with the usual cyclists’ unwanted tattoos. The scar tissue on my knees and elbows from countless crashes that left me surfing the tarmac. Broken bones – so many broken bones. My face held traces of reconstructive surgery, one smashed cheekbone still sitting higher than the other.

I wiped the salty sweat from my face and cast my eyes across the desert horizon.

‘I’m still that kid,’ I whispered. ‘I’m still that kid.’

chapter 1

Nurse Duffy and the Green Sunbeam

I can’t remember the first time I rode a bike. I’m told I was just three years old. It was a Sunbeam, a little metallic green thing with chunky tyres. I learned my handling skills between the ridges in the vegetable patch in our back garden. We lived in a place called Newtowncunningham, a small village that straggles along the main Derry to Letterkenny road, just a few miles from the border with Northern Ireland. It’s in County Donegal, not the mountainous, Irish-speaking west Donegal of the tourist brochures but a calmer, flatter, more everyday sort of a place.

We lived down a little road that ran from the village towards the sea and finally lost interest in itself and petered out into Lough Swilly. No one ever came down there apart from our neighbours and the birdwatchers going to the wildlife sanctuary by the coast. We had our own close little community, and many of the families still live in the same houses. The disused track of the old Lough Swilly Railway ran by our house and there was a railway bridge at the bottom of the garden.

I was born in June 1959. My mother’s family were local people and my grandparents lived a mile or so up the road. They were by no means wealthy and my grandfather had spent much of his life away in England working on construction sites. They were caring people who loved me a lot and I spent a big part of my childhood with them. My father’s family were from Derry. They had a wholesale grocery business, but they were also egg and tea merchants. My dad, his brothers and his sister worked in the Donegal side of the business, Barr Bros and North Western Tea Co., which had a tea-blending warehouse in Newtowncunningham.

My mum went out to earn money from an early age, living and working in big farmhouses over the border in County Antrim. She kept house, cooked dinner for the farmworkers and so on, making trips home every few weeks on the train. It must have seemed a pretty good decision at the time for her to marry into my father’s business.

The warehouse was a fascinating place for me as a kid. Big wooden tea chests arrived from all corners of the world with the names of exotic places stamped on them. There was a huge pine floor and they’d tip the tea out of the packing cases into little piles. Then the blenders would use their flat wooden shovels to mix the tea in precise quantities. They knew just the right amount to use without having to measure it. It was incredibly dusty work. There were days when you’d open the door and you couldn’t see my dad for the dust. The company provided work for some of the locals and it was well respected in the area. It produced a blend of tea called Moyle that came in a red pack and was sold all over Donegal. It was very popular.

My dad’s family would always have been seen as outsiders in the village. Even though it was only 12 miles from Derry there was a big cultural difference between the country people and the city folk. The business had a good reputation but my dad didn’t dress in pinstripe suits. A big old woolly jumper and tracksuit bottoms were more his style. He spent a lot of time in the village pub, and the people there were wary of him – he was known to be aggressive when the drink was on him.

If there was any money being made in the business it never seemed to make its way back to our house. I was the eldest of eight children and we had to squeeze into a two-bedroom semi. I can’t speak for my brothers and sisters, but I had a terrible relationship with my dad. He was abusive towards me; violently abusive. He used to beat me regularly and I never understood why. Here’s an example. We used to play football in the fields near the house. They were marshy and full of reeds. I developed a terrible cough that never really went away and the sound of that cough really riled my dad. If I coughed at night he’d come into my room and beat me. It got so bad that he came in one night and put a pillow over my face to stop me coughing, holding it there for so long that I was fighting to breathe. This kind of behaviour, controlling and angry, used to happen in a lot of Irish families and was never spoken about; it was all brushed under the carpet for decades. But before she died my mum spoke to me and my partner, Jill, about those beatings. It was a relief to me that she finally acknowledged it and spoke about it to someone outside the family. The situation was never resolved during my father’s lifetime.

The only solution I had to my dad’s violence was to run away to my granny’s. My mum did her best, but she wasn’t in a position to protect me in the family home. From the age of six I spent more and more time at the house along the road. I loved being there and my grandparents were awfully good to me. It was just such a sharp contrast with home, where I’d been living in terror of the next beating. Soon I was staying away from my parents’ for weeks on end and by the time I was ten or eleven, by which time my grandfather had passed away, I was living permanently at my granny’s. Mum used to walk up every night to help Granny before bed. Granny had chickens out the back of the house and I could play about on my bike. I felt free and happy.

That’s how I took this turn towards my mum and her family, I suppose. My mum was everything my dad wasn’t. She was loving and supportive. As a teenager she’d been a beautiful raven-haired young woman. When I began bike racing, she’d make sure I had my entrance fee, and my freshly washed kit would always be blowing on the line at the back of the house. I remember her sitting with me washing down the wheels of the bike at eleven o’clock at night. When I wanted to live with my grandparents, she gave me her blessing because she knew how things were with my dad. Sometimes, when she saw the coast was clear, she’d come up and walk me down to our house and I’d spend time with my brothers and sisters. I kind of blanked my dad and his family out of my thinking.

The thing with my dad, his outright hatred and anger towards me, festered for years until I was in my early twenties. I was living in Belfast at the time and came up home for the weekend. I’d never really fought back with him, but things came to a head that day and the two of us came to blows. I’m not proud of what happened, but he was being really nasty to my mum and sisters and I wasn’t having that. I’d always felt very protective of them. I’d arrived in the car and walked into this family row. ‘That’s it. You’re not doing this any more!’ I shouted. I finally stood up to him – somebody needed to. It got out of hand and someone called the Gardaí. The local policeman from the village showed up. He could tell I wasn’t the one to blame and advised me to head back to Belfast and let things blow over.

I put my father out of the house that day and he only returned once, to pick up his clothes. He moved back to Derry and I never spoke to him again. Looking back, it doesn’t give me any satisfaction – more a sense of sadness and pain that this had happened in my own family. When I became a dad myself I felt that lack of a father figure. Through my career there were always more experienced cyclists who took me under their wing, and some of them even took me into their family home. There’s definitely a link there with that failure of my relationship with my dad.

Back in those early days, though, when I’d first moved out of the family home, the district nurse would often drop by to see my granny. They did their rounds by bike back then. I wasn’t really allowed to go on the road by myself, but we came to an agreement that I could ride the mile to our house with Nurse Duffy on her old black roadster and me on the little Sunbeam. As soon as I saw the gates, I would open up and race to the finish line. It was my first taste of that feeling of independence you can get from being out on a country road on your bicycle. After I’d outgrown it, that bike kicked around my mum’s house for years. I’ve lost count of the times it was repainted when it was passed on to different kids in the family.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland kicked off in 1969, when I was ten, and despite being so close to the border we really wouldn’t have known the terrible things that were unfolding just a few miles down the road. Then one day in 1971, my dad announced that we were all moving to Derry. He’d always wanted to get back to the city. This was a shock to us all, particularly my mum, who’d only ever lived a sheltered life in a quiet village. We couldn’t have moved at a worse time. Derry was where the Troubles really began. It started out with rioting but by then the IRA and the British Army were fighting a war with lead bullets and bombs. My mum just freaked out – she hated every minute of it. We all did. It was so alien for us; we just didn’t fit in. There was this whole Protestant versus Catholic thing going on that had never existed for us in Newtowncunningham. Despite being in the Republic the village was a mixed community where people got along just fine.

Then my dad made the crazy decision to send me to Templemore, a completely Protestant secondary school. To put a little Catholic boy from Donegal into a school like that was asking for trouble and it felt like my dad did it to spite me. My mum pleaded with him not to do it but he ignored her. I went to Templemore for about a year and I was regularly beaten to a pulp. I managed to keep my background hidden for a while but when I was rumbled the bullying started up. They’d drag me behind the bike sheds for a kicking or beat me up in the corridors.

We lived in a house on Marlborough Street. It had three storeys and from the top you could look across the city over the Bogside to the famous city walls. There was a shirt factory at one end of the street and the British Army had a sort of pillbox there. So you had this weird situation where there would be factory women coming out of work and at the same time there would be rubber bullets flying around. Bloody Sunday in January 1972 was what finished Derry for us. The house looked out over Rossville Flats, where the worst of the day’s events took place. I saw it happening from the top of the house. As a 12-year-old boy I didn’t know what was going on, but I could tell there was crazy stuff happening a few streets away. You could see the smoke going up and hear the cracks of the rifles in the Bogside. Fourteen people were killed by the British Army.

And that was when my mum put the foot down. Living in the city was bad enough for a country woman like her, but living in the city with this war going on around us was on a completely different level. She gave my dad an ultimatum: ‘We’re going back home. You can stay here if you want but me and the kids are going.’ Luckily, they hadn’t sold the house in Donegal so we were straight back to Newtowncunningham. I was glad to see the back of Derry. I’d hated every minute of it.

One of the few good memories I do have of Derry was a trip to McClean’s shop in Great James Street in the city centre. My dad was attempting to convince us all that living in the city wasn’t such a bad thing and he agreed to buy me a bike. The shop was a proper Aladdin’s cave, full of bikes on a polished wooden floor. I stood open-mouthed staring at the bike in the window, a bright yellow Raleigh Chopper. The Chopper was an icon for kids of the seventies, with its ‘ape hanger’ handlebars, banana seat and gear lever that looked like it belonged in a sports car. Everyone wanted a Chopper. And if you rode a Chopper you were automatically cool. Buying the Chopper was the greatest the thing my dad ever did for me, and I don’t think he ever realised it.

As soon as I finished at Templemore on a Friday afternoon I got straight onto the Chopper and rode it to County Donegal to spend the weekend with my granny. It’s probably not much more than 15 miles, but when you’re on a Raleigh Chopper and you’ve never been more than two miles down the road, all of a sudden 14 or 15 miles is a long way. Because I was riding at the same time every week, I started seeing two guys on racing bikes who rode out from Derry towards County Donegal at the same. They were pretty nifty riders. One of them, I later discovered, was a fairly successful competitive racer. They used to fly past me as I struggled along the main road, but I eventually got a bit fed up with being passed so easily and tried to keep up with them. Each Friday I managed to keep up for a bit longer. Then one week I somehow managed to slipstream behind them all the way up the road and over the border. They couldn’t drop me and I could sense that they were pushing hard. In the end I was overcome by the excitement and rode straight past the turn-off for home. We headed right on in the direction of Letterkenny, the better part of 30 miles from Derry. The ego in me took over and just before we reached the town I exploded. This was my first experience of what cyclists call the ‘knock’ or the ‘bonk’. I ground to a halt. Every single ounce of energy in me was used up. I was like a shrivelled rag and I must have been a pitiful sight struggling back down the road. My granny gave me a packet of sticky Jacob’s Mikado biscuits when I staggered through the door and I ate every single one of them.

Once we’d moved back to County Donegal, I started school in Letterkenny and it seemed perfectly natural to ride there and back every day. It was a round trip of about 25 miles and I never bothered with the bus. Then one morning at the breakfast table I discovered something that was to change my life. It was a promotional gimmick on the back of a cereal packet, Rice Krispies or Sugar Puffs or whatever. You had to colour in pictures of cyclists taking part in something called the Tour de France. I’d never seen anything like this before. All these guys in exotic-sounding teams racing though the mountains on bikes. It was totally beyond my experience – so colourful and exciting. When the pack was only three-quarters eaten I took it and hid it so we could get another one.

I was desperate to know more about this new world of bike racing, but there was no Channel 4 or Eurosport back in those days, no internet. There was one glossy cycling magazine, Cycle Sport International; I used to flick though it in the newsagents in Letterkenny, but I couldn’t afford to actually buy it. The results they printed were probably weeks out of date by the time I saw them, but the magazine introduced me to some seriously cool cyclists. There was Eddy Merckx, the Cannibal, the greatest bike racer ever, although he was nearing the end of his career then. Luis Ocaña, a tragic hero who won the 1973 Tour. Then there was my inspiration – the tiny Belgian climber Lucien Van Impe. He won the Tour overall in 1976, but he won the King of the Mountains classification six times. I was the same size as little Lucien and climbing hills seemed to suit me.

I started really getting to grips with the Chopper then, taking it to bits on Granny’s kitchen floor and putting it together again. Raleigh kept making alterations to the design to make it more comfortable or cooler looking, but I was making my own alterations to make my bike faster and slicker. That’s how I took my first steps in learning to be a mechanic. The kitchen is still my favourite place for working on my bikes, not a fancy workshop. I have a couple of bikes sitting there now; they’re a bit more expensive than the Chopper but definitely not as cool.

Bike racers were quite thin on the ground in Donegal, although I did see some guys out on the road from time to time, like the ones I’d chased up the road from Derry. I was aware there was some sort of racing scene going on and I became determined to have a go at it myself. I persuaded my mum and dad to let me trade in the Chopper for a racing bike. We made the trip back to McClean’s in Derry and I came home with a very nice purple Falcon. It wasn’t a flying machine, but it was the right shape, with the drop handlebars and ten-speed gears, and I was soon out on the roads doing my best Van Impe impersonation.

I discovered that local cycling clubs held circuit races on weeknights during the summer. There was a circuit called Ballyholey about five miles from Newtowncunningham. It was basically a route around the country roads used for racing on a regular basis. There were lots of circuits across Donegal and if you said to a cyclist there was a race on the Ballyholey circuit next Thursday they’d know what you meant. Ballyholey is sort of nestled between Letterkenny and the little town of Raphoe. It’s still used for racing, and the main attraction is a long, steep hill.

I must have been all of 15 years old when I rocked up to Ballyholey on the Falcon ready for my very first race. I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for. I didn’t realise it at the time but three or four of the very best riders in Donegal were taking part. It finished up a bit of a disaster, to be frank, but a disaster with a happy outcome. Part way round the course you came to a sort of island in the road with a Yield sign, the same as a Give Way sign in the UK. You had to ride around the sign and go back the way you came. This being Donegal, no one had actually decreed which way you were supposed to go around. I had somehow managed to get myself to the front of the race with two of the best riders. I went around the island in one direction and Tommy Burns, who would have been Donegal’s top racer at the time, went the other. There was an almighty crash. I wrote off my beloved but cheap Falcon and absolutely trashed Tommy’s top-end thoroughbred race bike.

I’d ridden up to the race but the forks on the bike were now so badly bent I had no way of getting home. I couldn’t even get back to the start area. Then a guy a appeared in a car, a little green Vauxhall Viva, and he offered to give me a lift home. His name was Tommy Pyper and he was a cyclist himself. ‘Throw the bike in the back,’ he said. This was easier said than done. Tommy was a plumber at Letterkenny General Hospital and the boot of the car was crammed full of copper piping and all sorts of plumber’s tools. We had to shove them all over to one side to fit the knackered Falcon in. I noticed he had this funny way of driving the Viva. Once he worked up a head of steam, he’d switch off the engine and let the car coast for a bit. I can only think that he had just enough petrol to take me home and get back to Letterkenny. It must have been a way of saving money at a time when a lot of people in Donegal wouldn’t have been able to afford extra journeys in a car. I knew I’d be in for a beating from my dad if he saw the bike, and the first day of my racing career would also be my last. So when Tommy asked where I lived, I carefully directed him to my granny’s house.

I propped the bike against the hedge and went in to tell her what had happened. ‘Son, you’re going to get killed,’ she said. I just nodded. My mum was sympathetic when she found out, but my dad predictably went ballistic: ‘This bike racing nonsense is stopping now!’ And given the state of the bike, it probably would have stopped there and then, but my experience of fettling the Chopper meant I now knew my bottom bracket from my rear mech. I managed to straighten the forks and the bike was soon back on the road again. After the embarrassment of my first race, I was now eager to prove myself against the big boys.

Meeting Tommy Pyper was my first step on the pathway to real racing. I spent a lot of time with him in his tiny kitchen working on bikes. At one stage I pretty much moved in with the Pyper household. We had no proper tools so we improvised with his plumbing equipment. Tommy kept his bike collection hanging on racks in his coal shed. We used to make up one bike out of two knackered ones. Looking back at it now it was all so agricultural it was hilarious.

It was from Tommy that I learned the difference between the mass-market street racing bike I’d been riding and the hand-built lightweight frames used by professionals and serious amateurs. Tommy Burns’ bike, the one I’d knackered in the Ballholey crash, was handcrafted by the master frame builder Dave Moulton. It was worth eight or nine thousand euros in today’s money. Thankfully, he never demanded the money for repairs or I’d have been seriously screwed.

I somehow managed to get hold of a scruffy second-hand lightweight frame that I was sure would be the key to my cycling success. It must have been three sizes too big for me but I got a can of paint stripper from the shed and cleaned it back to the bare steel. I then lovingly applied a few coats of the most disgusting yellow aerosol paint. As far as I was concerned it looked the dogs. Tommy wasn’t sure. He went off and came back with a marker pen. ‘What name do you want on it?’ I thought for a minute. ‘Ken Bird,’ I said, naming one of the top frame-builders who regularly graced the pages of Cycling Weekly. Tommy carefully faked up the name on the crossbar with the pen. We stood back to examine his handiwork and almost pissed ourselves laughing. The next day we went out over the hills on a test run. Inevitably, the rain started to lash and the Ken Bird logo dribbled down the frame like wet mascara. It was the sort of fun I should have been having with my dad, and Tommy came to replace that relationship a little bit.

Tommy was busy with his own young family and his work but he still managed to find time for me. He was kind and supportive, could see some sort of potential in me and started coaching me about how to ride the local circuits – where you had to take care and where you needed to be sure you were in the right gear. Above all, I shared a lot of my crazy dreams of future cycling success with him and he never burst that bubble.

Even as a young teenager I was on a steep learning curve. I was training very hard, out on the roads getting the miles in every day. Apart from the weeknight club events, the main races in the Donegal cycling calendar were held in towns and villages across the county during the summer fair weeks. These festivals were advertised in the local papers, the Derry Journal or the DonegalDemocrat. There would be a parade, music, maybe a funfair and a bike race. The very best of the Donegal riders came to those races. There would be maybe 15 or 20 cyclists taking part.

Tommy was originally from the pretty little town of Ramelton and when the local festival race was advertised, he was able to brief me precisely on the ins and outs of a course he knew better than any other. I was maybe 16 years old but I was constantly out on the roads getting the miles in and, like my hero Van Impe, I was becoming a great little hill climber. I was ready for my first race win.

I’ll never forget that night in Ramelton. I don’t know why, but I decided to go flat out from the start until I couldn’t go flat out any more. The more experienced guys must have thought this young lad would blow up well before the finish. But my plan, if you could call it a plan, worked to perfection. I wasn’t 500m down the road before I was out on my own and I just rolled away from the entire bunch. Coming into Ramelton you cross a lovely old bridge on the River Lennon. To add to the excitement the route included a few circuits around the town before the finish. The streets were full of people there for the festival and they cheered me on. The finish line was by the bridge next to a local landmark, the crumbling old warehouse belonging to the McDaid’s soft drinks company whose fizzy Football Special is still famous throughout Donegal. I coasted to victory with my arms in the air, light years ahead of everyone else. For a young kid it was exactly like winning a stage in the Tour de France. I closed my eyes and thought: ‘This is it; I’ve arrived!’

The local papers used to do a write-up of all the races. Obviously, some journalist was just making most of it up back at the newspaper office but suddenly my name was all over the back pages. I wouldn’t say I got a big head over it but people started to take notice, even the little group of teenagers who met at the Orange Hall in Newtowncunningham on a Friday night. It would be: ‘I saw your name in the paper, Joe. When are you racing again?’

It was a real confidence booster and I’d have to admit I used that to my advantage. I had more than a few girlfriends in my teenage years and I suppose I did play the local sports star card from time to time. The problem was that I couldn’t put all my effort into cycling and expect to have a normal life outside school or work. If I was going to be successful, cycling would have to take all my energy.

I wasn’t particularly aware of local cycling clubs at that stage. When you looked at the Tour de France guys on the cereal packets, they were all in teams, but the club thing was different. When I started to look into it more seriously, I found there were two. The local Donegal club was just starting up, but the City of Derry Wheelers was a really well-established old club. I was introduced to a guy called Ivan Dunne at City of Derry, who impressed me with his connections to cycling in Belfast, and that’s how my connection with the club began.

Tommy Pyper was showing me the ropes around those Donegal races, but it was Tommy Burns, whose bike I’d wrecked that time in Ballyholey, who introduced me to cycling beyond the local festival circuit. He had a big reputation and took part in races all over the country. Tommy was able to show me stuff I’d never heard of before, like federations and licensing. In Donegal no one ever bothered with racing licences. It was hard enough just to get hold of kit, even a pair of shorts. You were usually given them by someone who had a couple of spares lying in a cupboard somewhere. I was racing in trade jerseys, what you’d call replica kit these days, but you couldn’t ride in proper national races in a trade jersey. It turned out there were all sorts of rules to this cycling game.

The first big ride I remember with City of Derry was out around the coast to the town of Limavady in Northern Ireland. Tommy Pyper was with me and we had to ride all the way back to Letterkenny at the end of it. It was something like seven hours in the saddle. This was a longer distance than I’d ever been on my bike before. I didn’t know the other cyclists and I didn’t know the roads, so it was all a bit intimidating.

I rode in the blue-and-yellow jersey of City of Derry Wheelers for a couple of years and I was able to get my racing licence. It wasn’t, as I’d once naively thought, a golden ticket to the Tour de France but it did open the door to the whole new world of cycling. With my licence I could enter the ranks of open racing. This was run on an all-Ireland basis with proper officials under the control of the national body. I was now a genuine athlete competing against serious, experienced bike racers.

As my cycling career blossomed, my school career was going nowhere. I passed my secondary level exams but I didn’t do any work for them. I’d already worked out that I wanted to build a career in bike racing, even though I hadn’t a clue how to set about it. One of the teachers, a geography teacher called Mr Dowds, got so frustrated with me: ‘You have to realise that this nonsense with riding bicycles is going to be absolutely no use to you. You’re never going to be able to get anywhere with it!’ I just dug my heels in and resolved to prove to all the doubters they were wrong. I suppose my one regret now is that I didn’t get the chance to go to university, but that wasn’t even on my radar at the time. Once I’d met Tommy Pyper the books were left in his house every day after school and I was off on the bike training.

I left school at 18 but you couldn’t exactly sign up to be a professional rider in Letterkenny. Training and racing were my top priorities and I found myself working in a big potato-processing factory in Newtowncunningham to earn money to go racing in the summer. The farmers from all around brought their spuds to the depot to be graded and put into bags. It was pretty grim work. I did everything in that factory from filling the bags to driving forklifts. I also worked as a farm labourer. Back-breaking badly paid stuff like potato picking. I never went back to my father’s business; that would have been asking for trouble. The casual work went on for five or six years, but somehow I held on to the dream that someday I would turn professional.

chapter 2

A Golden Era

I should have known better when Tommy Burns told me to sign my race entry with the name ‘Joe Brown’. In my late teens I’d started travelling what seemed like the length and breadth of the island with Tommy. He knew the racing scene inside out and I learned a lot from him. This particular race was in the County Leitrim village of Glenfarne, about five miles from the border with Northern Ireland. It’s best known as the site of the Rainbow Ballroom of Romance, where youngsters used to flock to dance to the showbands back in the sixties – they even made a movie about the place. I asked Tommy what the craic was with the false name and he said, ‘Look, it’s just a licence thing. You don’t give your right name. You just make one up and pay your fee. No harm done.’

The one thing Tommy had overlooked was what would happen if I won and it wound up on the back pages of the Belfast Telegraph. Which, of course, is precisely what happened. I’d not only won the race; I’d won the wrong sort of race as far as my Northern licence was concerned: a National Cycling Association race. My fake ID was soon rumbled and all hell broke loose.

You may like to take notes here as I’ll be setting an acronym test at the end of this paragraph. There were three cycling federations in Ireland at the time: the NCA, the ICF and the NICF. The NCA was a purely Irish organisation, a bit like the GAA, and it wasn’t recognised by the world cycling authority, the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale), for international competition. The ICF, or Irish Cycling Federation, was the internationally recognised body. It sent teams to the Olympics, the world championships and that kind of thing. The NICF was a sort of Northern Ireland counterpart to the ICF. The NICF and the ICF took part in each other’s races, but woe betide any cyclist who was caught competing with the wrong sort. The rivalry between the federations reached fever pitch in 1972 when members of the NCA infiltrated the Olympic road race in Munich in protest – one of them even hid in a wood with his bike until the race approached and then joined in. The NCA had some great riders, particularly from down in Munster, Kerry especially, and from around Dublin. There were also pockets of NCA membership in the North but, without putting a political slant on it, they would have been mainly in areas like west Belfast. Thankfully, the squabbling has since been brought to an end and cycling underwent its own kind of Good Friday Agreement.

The official line from the old federations was ‘ne’er the twain shall meet’, but up in far-flung Donegal the riders kind of made up their own rules as they went along. There was no malice in it – mostly it was due to the cost. But I was a member of the City of Derry Wheelers in Northern Ireland and the next thing I heard after my Glenfarne victory was that I’d been called to a tribunal in Belfast. If I was found guilty the penalty was a year’s ban from racing. That would have been a real punch in the kidneys. In the end I didn’t have to go to Belfast. Ivan Dunne from the Derry club managed to smooth things over with the NICF executive for me, but it was an early introduction to the small ‘p’ politics that dogs the sport of cycling.

I had a lot to learn. The races were held on a Saturday in Northern Ireland and Sunday down South. It took so long to progress up through the ranks and that became a problem later in my career because I was too late turning professional. Nowadays if you’re over 23 a professional team wouldn’t look at you. Back in my day there was still a sliver of hope for 28- or 29-year-olds to get a professional contract.

A lot of the Northern racing was based around Belfast and in the early eighties if I was riding on Saturdays and Sundays I’d sometimes stay over with a friend, Geordie Wilkes, in Dundonald, a loyalist area in the east of the city. I struck lucky in Dundonald, for it was there that Geordie introduced me to the Kane family. Ask anyone who’s been in the Irish pushbike racing scene since the 1960s and they’ll have heard of Dave Kane. He’s done so much for the sport all over the island and there’s immense respect for him. Dave raced all over the world for Ireland and Northern Ireland and took part in numerous world championships and Commonwealth games. He also owns one of the best bike shops in the country. As well as being a phenomenal bike racer, Dave had worked in the city’s famous Harland and Wolff shipyards.

The Kanes were a cycling family but Dave couldn’t drive so Geordie used to chauffeur them all around the country to the races. The sons Mark and Paul became very successful cyclists, but I could see immediately that their sister, Deborah, had something special about her. She was an incredibly talented rider at a time when women’s racing wasn’t taken as seriously as it is today. I got to know her better through hanging out together at the races and it wasn’t long until I’d asked her out. We were an unusual couple at the time for, although we had a shared passion for bikes and racing, she was Protestant and I was Catholic and that mattered in eighties Belfast, where some young couples struggled against the disapproval of their parents or local community.

I always looked up to Dave as a mentor. He was concerned by the long trek I was constantly making back and forth to County Donegal, so he and his wife, Maggie, started to let me stay over at their house. Here was another family who took me into their home – a pattern that was to be repeated several times in my life as a young rider. It started out with the occasional overnighter but eventually I was spending longer periods there and Dave took a real interest in my development as a racing cyclist. I’m the first person to admit that I’m not the greatest rider there has ever been, but I think he recognised the effort I was making and the work ethic I had. You don’t get ahead in the endurance cycling world I now inhabit without a shedload of drive and stubbornness.

I learned a huge amount from Dave and that learning proved to be the key to my future development. He took the raw, unformed talent that I had and knocked it into some sort of shape. I don’t mean in an aggressive way – Dave wasn’t that sort of guy; he’d just give you advice and patiently point out your mistakes.

I was forever straining at the leash, wanting to do things that were beyond my capability, but Dave would take me to one side and explain that I had to take things one step at a time. His methods were incredibly basic by today’s standards. There was no fancy sports science involved. He told me to leave the shop in Ballyhackamore and ride around the Ards Peninsula. When I could do that in three hours we could move on to the next thing. The peninsula circuit is a beautiful ride through the fishing villages by the Irish Sea, looping around Portaferry and back up along the Strangford Lough shore towards Belfast. Not that I noticed the stunning views – I was too busy knocking my pan in trying to hit Dave’s target. It was a bloody hard job and it took months, but I finally cracked it. I reckon I still know every bump in those roads. Dave’s method allowed me to gradually build up and maintain the speed that I needed to be competitive at a higher level of racing. I know for a fact he did the same for many other cyclists, including his son Mark, who raced for Ireland at the Olympics.

The other thing Dave had was an incredible race brain. He knew how to win a race even if he wasn’t the strongest rider. As a matter of fact, the chances of him being the strongest were slim to nil because he just wasn’t built the right way. He was lanky and an excellent climber but he didn’t have the power to be able to sprint to the finish line. What he did have was an uncanny ability to read the race in such a way that he’d won it before the sprinters stood a chance. I was no different from Dave in my physical capabilities – great in the hills, but when I started to sprint for the line it was like I’d hit reverse gear. It seemed hopeless. I desperately needed some of Dave’s tactical racing intelligence. He sat me down at the back of the shop over a cup of coffee and taught me precisely how to win a race – the Tour of Ards. I’d entered that race so many times and kept finishing fourth, or seventh, or ninth. I had the capability but kept getting blown away by the sprinters. The course ran around my old peninsula stomping ground with a pan-flat, very fast run in, finishing outside the football ground in Newtownards. This time I followed Dave’s instructions to the letter, conserving my energy in the pack until just the right moment. Then I opened up full gas far enough out on the Portaferry Road to leave the big sprinters for dead.

Dave was like an encyclopaedia of racing knowledge and knew his way around most of the big races in Ireland. With his help I was able to put that knowledge to good effect.

As racing began to take over my life, the amount of driving I was doing at the weekends was crazy. I’d pack up the car in Donegal, drive to a race in Northern Ireland on a Saturday, drive home again, up early on the Sunday and drive to a race in the South. It might be at the other end of the island. That’s the way it worked in those days. The Southern guys really only bothered with the Sunday racing. Some of them travelled, but not many. But the Northern lads tried to cram in as much as possible. So effectively we were having a double hit every week. At times I barely had money for the fuel and was driving home on fumes. I had four hours more driving to do than the Belfast guys and I sometimes had to sleep in the car.

Back then most of the northern races were run from Orange halls. There would be tea and home-made cakes for the cyclists after the races and we’d stand around socialising surrounded by Orange banners and portraits of Queen Elizabeth. I made a lot of great friendships in Orange halls down the years. There were no restrictions on the numbers, so some of the races had over a hundred riders depending on the importance of the race, the weather and whether some of the top riders were away on international duty. And they were long races too: 100 miles or more on open roads with traffic roaring past. Even juniors were riding 100-mile races.

The races were officially amateur so there was no appearance money. There’d be a big silver cup for the winner and brown envelopes for the first, second and third. It never amounted to much. A massive pay day – and I mean massive – would have been a hundred quid. Was it strictly legal? It’s hard to tell. Put it this way: the races were always hosted by a local club so the entry fees were divided up into so much for the club and so much for the prizes. There was no big commercial sponsorship so the sport just about paid for itself. Those brown envelopes still exist in amateur cycling today but the prize money hasn’t increased to match inflation – it’s hardly enough to keep you in inner tubes.

My first big win in open racing came in 1982 at the Tommy Givan Memorial event at Hillsborough in County Down. Hillsborough is a tidy little village that looks more like something from the English home counties than a typical Irish settlement. It has some classy pubs, an oyster festival and some of the steepest property prices in Northern Ireland. There’s a little square next to the castle, which was built by the Hill family hundreds of years ago.

The race started from the square, hung a sharp left up the road towards Dromore and went straight into a massive hill climb. Just the sort of hill that would suit a certain young lightweight climber from Donegal. I’d travelled up from home that morning and signed on at the inevitable Orange hall on the Ballynahinch Road. I can’t remember the exact distance, but it would have been around a hundred miles. The Tommy Givan was known to be an extremely tough race at the time and they don’t run it over that course nowadays. All the top riders in Northern Ireland and beyond were there, some of them internationals.

Call it the arrogance of youth, but after two or three laps I thought to myself, ‘I could do a job on these guys.’ And I did. I just opened the taps and rode away from them. Halfway up that hill I was confronted by a guy called Jackie Corkan shouting from the roadside. Jackie was a respected figure on the local cycling scene and had parked himself in the hedge on a camping stool to watch the race. Not much of a day’s entertainment when the bunch only flew past about once every half hour. ‘Catch yourself on, young fella. You’ll wear yourself out!’ he yelled. Looking back on it, there was no sanity in the way I rode that day. Hitting the front near the start and going as hard as you can is not the way to win a pushbike race. It defies common sense. But at the finish I was six minutes in front of the second-placed rider.

What I hadn’t realised was that the Tommy Givan was the final selection race for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. My rush of blood to the head caused quite a stir in the back pages of the Telegraph. Who was this kid who had blown away the entire Northern Ireland team? I’d won that qualification race by a country mile, or three. By rights a place on the team was mine, but the men in suits had made their decision months before. I have a heap of respect for the guys who went to Brisbane, but the selectors just ignored their own criteria and decided young Cinders would not be going to that ball. The whole episode left me with a bad taste in the mouth and the determination that when the next games came around, they wouldn’t be able to ignore me so easily.

The day of the Tommy Givan holds another special memory for me. I remember sitting on the wall outside the Orange hall after the race with Debbie Kane, just talking nonsense and enjoying each other’s company. It was around then that our relationship started in earnest. I’m pretty certain she’d won the women’s race that day – she usually did. We were somehow travelling along this curve together. I found her incredibly attractive, just a lovely person to be with. We had this friendship based on riding bikes and racing bikes and winning races. Then I thought to myself, ‘I’ve found my life here: this whole thing has become my life.’ I was emerging as one of the top young riders in Ireland and I enjoyed Debbie’s company immensely. It felt like it would go on for ever.