The Roche Family and Irish Cycling

[Dan2016]

Re: Re:

No offense taken Spud, I'm just messing about.

And yeah La Plagne stage '87, absolute classic. I remember watching that like it was yesterday. Great memories.

I heard him recounting the story of that stage a few years ago. You probably know the story already: he was stuffed all day, really badly stuffed. When Delgado broke away he knew he would have only one big late effort to try and limit the damage.

In those days the race communications didn't work in the last x number of kilometers on mountain stages. Delgado wouldn't know what was happening behind him in this 'black-out' zone. Roche left his effort to that short window of opportunity, and as you know, drove himself to the point of physical collapse.

I still remember the complete shock from the commentator seeing Roche appearing from the mist just after Delgado crossed the line. It was a genius bit of tactics. A real classic stage. Makes me all nostalgic for the 'good old days'.

That commentator was Phil Liggett -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQojh-wqL04

Go to 1:50 in for the best bit.

Things were 'better' in those days in my view - maybe cos I was a teenager and life was fun and easy ...

Great stuff, cheers, good memories watching that again.

 

[fmk_RoI]

In Nige Tassell's new book about the 1989 Tour de France, we get the following:

While it would be naïve to imagine that every single rider in the peloton was squeaky clean, it is fair to judge this race as one of the last classic encounters before EPO arrived and changed the game entirely. 'In the '80s and early '90s,' explains Stephen Roche, 'you'd feel a guy with natural talent could still come out and win, because whatever was on the market could increase performance by three to five percent. So somebody who had a lot of class could beat a guy who was taking something. In the late '90s and early 2000s, some of the products on the market at that particular time added 30-40 per cent increase in performance. So no matter how much class they had, it was impossible for someone who was trying to be clean to beat somebody who had taken something.'

I have to confess to feeling .... admiration, yes, admiration for the way Roche paints himself as a clean hero in a dirty world, the drugs of his day offering only marginal gains while the drugs that came along after his retirement, after the early 1990s, were boosting performance by 40% and making it impossible to win clean. (I'm also really, really impressed by how this differs from the nonsense Roche was talking in 1998.)

 

[Benotti69]

Re:

In Nige Tassell's new book about the 1989 Tour de France, we get the following:

While it would be naïve to imagine that every single rider in the peloton was squeaky clean, it is fair to judge this race as one of the last classic encounters before EPO arrived and changed the game entirely. 'In the '80s and early '90s,' explains Stephen Roche, 'you'd feel a guy with natural talent could still come out and win, because whatever was on the market could increase performance by three to five percent. So somebody who had a lot of class could beat a guy who was taking something. In the late '90s and early 2000s, some of the products on the market at that particular time added 30-40 per cent increase in performance. So no matter how much class they had, it was impossible for someone who was trying to be clean to beat somebody who had taken something.'

I have to confess to feeling .... admiration, yes, admiration for the way Roche paints himself as a clean hero in a dirty world, the drugs of his day offering only marginal gains while the drugs that came along after his retirement, after the early 1990s, were boosting performance by 40% and making it impossible to win clean. (I'm also really, really impressed by how this differs from the nonsense Roche was talking in 1998.)

Roche clean......... :lol: