martinvickers wrote:good post. the semi-adoption of the irish by the british media of the time spoke of the huge gap left by the ban on road racing; the irish had to make up the ground, in a way.
There's a book somewhere which says that Kelly, while clearly Irish, was stylistically closer to the old Flemish riders - specifically that he was hard as nails. Certainly the idea of multiple green jerseys, multiple classics, a dose of Paris-nice's and a grand tour win with a couple of near misses is an unthinkable span of talent in this day and age - unless Sagan really kicks on and becomes the new new cannibal.
Possibly this quote:
[quote="Robin MacGowan"]It is customary to talk of Kelly as quintessentially an Irish rider. For my part, though, I think it helps to place Kelly better as a cyclist to see him as the last of the Flemish riders. This is usually a title associated with the post-war rider, Briek Schotte who has become appropriately enough the man in day-to-day charge of the de Gribaldy teams. As exemplified by Schotte it stood for a certain type of mentality, willing to suffer, narrowly focussed, and hard, hard, hard. Kelly had all this in him from his Irish small-farm background: the outside loo]
It's from Kelly's Wikipedia page, and the citation says that it's from
Knights of the Road by Rowan MacGowan and Graham Watson. Certainly Kelly was a man with an unnatural ability to endure pain; in Rough Ride, Kimmage said that Kelly frequently put himself into the kind of pain Kimmage only experienced once or twice in his career. That is, in a way, the lot of a top classics rider - given that the old Flemish riders in question were classics riders I suppose the way the comparison fits is sort of inevitable.
Kimmage made a very good point about his notability in Rough Ride as well, now I come to think about it. He is quite rare in that while he was a mediocre rider, he was a very close friend of two of the true greats of his era; at that time there were only 4 professional riders from Ireland so, along with the fact that Kimmage grew up knowing Roche, he ended up spending quite a lot of time with him and Kelly.
For a comparison on Roche and Kelly we might also look to how they've treated Kimmage. Kimmage, so far as I know, is still on speaking terms with Kelly and considers him a friend, despite Kelly's notorious habit of going mute whenever doping is discussed. Roche on the other hand disowned him the moment he admitted his doping. In my book that says something about the two.