In mid-September Paul and I went to beautiful Senlis, about twenty miles north of the capital for the start of the Paris–Brussels semi-classic. It was a working assignment for me but we both went there as fans, wanting to savour the atmosphere and hoping to catch up with Kelly before the race left town.
We got to him about thirty minutes before the start and as he sat and chatted with us, we could have been speaking to the lowliest rider in the peloton, not the number one. Through those years people continually asked, ‘Kelly, what’s he like?’ My favourite answer was that he was the kind of fellow that if he found a geyser he wouldn’t come back and tell you he’d invented hot water. Paul had grown to love him too.
After shooting the breeze for twenty minutes or so, it was time for Kelly to get himself to the start line. He stood up, hopped on his bike and, as he was wont to do, he bounced the rear wheel off the road a couple of times to check he had the right pressure in his tyre. As he did, there was the unmistakable sound of pills rattling inside a small plastic container in his back pocket. I looked at Paul, silently asking, ‘Did you hear that?’ He had. Then Kelly was gone and we were silent; kids who had got close to Father Christmas and seen the glue that held his beard in place.
‘Could it have been anything else?’
‘No, it was definitely the sound of pills.’
‘Why would he need those in a race?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Me neither.’
I wondered if they could be supplements but we knew no rider was going to use supplements during a race. It should have been a seminal moment. We had inadvertently seen the realities of professional cycling, but we weren’t ready for that. I had a biography to write, one in which the hero is a farmer’s son from Carrick-on-Suir, a man who as a boy had eaten raw turnips when hungry.
He got to the top because he never lost that hunger and he was loved because he remained true to the modest background whence he had come. Pills rattling against plastic didn’t fit into the story. When you’re a fan, as I was, you don’t ask the hero about the sound that came from his pocket. Still, Paul and I could never forget it.
Kelly finished third that day, went to doping control and failed. The banned drug Stimul was found in his urine. What I remember now is how Sean Kelly looked that evening. A small semi-circle of journalists stood around him at Rhode-Saint-Genèse asking about his third-place finish but it was his deathly white face and the enlarged pupils that struck me. He didn’t look like himself.
When the news of his positive test was made public, he did what all cyclists did: denied using Stimul and said there had to have been a mix-up in the doping control room. One of his arguments was that there were six or seven people in the room when he was giving his sample as opposed to the stipulated two. If Kelly had used Stimul, he had behaved very stupidly because it was an easily detectable drug and by finishing third he had ensured that he would be tested.
Robert Millar, the Scottish rider, was dismissive of the charge, not on any moral grounds but on the basis that Stimul was passé, a seventies drug no one used any more. Karl McCarthy, international secretary for the Irish Cycling Federation, flew into Brussels to plead on Kelly’s behalf, and when the Belgian Federation still insisted he was guilty, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) sent the case back to them and asked them to reconsider.
Sixteen months after the race, the UCI confirmed the original result stood.
Kelly was fined 1000 Swiss francs, which was approximately one sixth of what he earned for showing up at a village race, and given a one-month suspended sentence. When I wrote about the 1984 Paris–Brussels in the biography, I didn’t mention the rattle of pills in the morning and I tried to make the case that it was hard to believe Kelly had used a substance so easily detectable. I chose to see the ridiculous leniency of the authorities as proof that, at worst, it was a minor infraction. It wasn’t how a proper journalist would have reacted. At the time I knew what I was doing.
Things changed over the following fifteen years.
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