I don’t know if Paul Kimmage is laughing or crying these days. But he just took a huge, steaming dump on Sean Kelly’s legacy.
A couple of months ago I re-read Kimmage’s book Rough Ride, and it struck me as being even more depressingly bleak than I remember from my initial ingestion some 15 years ago. Talk about living the 12k dreamer’s life…Kimmage probably made about that much in salary each year, yet he was expected to ride a full calendar of Grand Tours and Classics. Kimmage only fessed up to taking amphetamines on 3 occasions in post-Tour criteriums, and I’m inclined to believe that was the extent of his doping. What he did expose to the world, however, was the spectre of drugs among his teammates and peers. The proliferation of personal “medicine” suitcases; the compact, modified syringes which came out mid-stage for a quick amphetamine shot in the *** on the peloton’s way to the Champs-Élysées; the “wink wink” about the ease of beating doping controls. Kimmage was simply trying to survive, and for most pros that was the impetus to juice. Random testing was virtually non-existent…you could dope up to your eyeballs in service of your team leader and then just make sure you didn’t win the stage or a jersey. Or die.
Kimmage walked away from the sport and his 4 year career as a professional cyclist when he quit the 12th stage of the 1989 Tour. As a pro is highlights were relatively few: Kimmage finished 2 Grand Tours (1986 Tour, 1989 Giro) and played a role in Stephen Roche’s 1987 world championship. As an amateur, Kimmage was an Olympian at the ‘84 Los Angeles Games and finished 6th in the road worlds. Since Kimmage hung up his wheels in disgust he embarked on a career as a journalist, an occupation he dabbled in as a pro (Kimmage supplied a weekly diary to the Dublin Sunday Times). These days he’s employed at the London Times, and if you plug “Kimmage” into the search box you’ll unearth Kimmage’s body of work over the past 5 years. There are approximately 65 interviews, all worth reading. It’s an enlightening view into a world of sports for the most part totally foreign to Americans. The bulk of his subjects are either either Brits or foreigners taking place in the world of British professional sports. Sports such as soccer, rugby, cricket, Formula 1 racing, snooker…Articles about cycling do appear, but always through the lens of doping. You can almost sense Kimmage’s gritted teeth permeating his cycling prose. To say he was a persona non grata among pro cyclists for publishing Rough Ride is quite an understatement, but who better to hurl a brick into cycling’s glass house than an angry Irishman wracked with Catholic guilt. And Ireland is ground zero for Catholic guilt…I lived in Ireland for approximately 6 months as a foreign exchange student, and there was a creepy placard on the dining room wall of my house which said, “Jesus Christ is the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener of every conversation”. Kimmage cracked…and his very public confession was his means of coming to terms with the farce of professional cycling.