In what year did Bono stand atop the winner’s podium at what was a great day for Ireland at the Vuelta a Espana?

The answer is 1962. Bono, Paul Hewson, of U2 fame, was but a 2 year old drawing on the walls in his house in Glasnevin in 1962. But, the Bono who made it on to the winner’s podium of the Vuelta 48 years ago was the little known Italian rider Ernesto Bono who claimed the biggest victory of his career by winning Stage 12 of that year’s race into the city of Logrono. The reason Ireland had cause to celebrate was that Seamus Elliott had retained the Vuelta race leader’s jersey. Elliott would go on to wear the jersey for a total of nine days that year only losing the jersey three stages from the end to eventual winner Rudi Altig of Germany.

Ernesto Bono, winner of a stage in the 1962 Vuelta a Espana.

In that 1962 Vuelta a Espana Seamus Elliott marked a number of milestones for Irish cycling. He won Ireland’s first ever stage of the Vuelta a Espana, he was the first Irishman to lead any of the three Grand Tours and he also finished the race in 3rd place, which meant he was the first Irishman to finish on the podium of a Grand Tour. This Irish presence at the Vuelta, established by Elliott, faded (as did the Irish presence in professional cycling in general) until Seán Kelly arrived on the scene in the late seventies.

Kelly won the race overall in 1988 taking the leader’s jersey from the Spaniard Anselmo Fuerte in the final time trial. But Kelly’s success at the Vuelta spanned much further than the year of his overall success. In total, Kelly won 16 stages of the Vuelta, the 5th highest tally of any rider, winning the points classification four times along the way, a record shared with Laurent Jalabert that still stands. Kelly is one of six riders who have won two Grand Tour points jerseys in the one year, the others are Rudi Altig (in that 1962 race), Jan Janssen, Eddy Merckx, Djamolidin Abdoujaparov and Laurent Jalabert. Kelly is also the only man to have won the points jersey four times in two of the Grand Tours, as he also won the Tour de France green jersey four times.

Kelly would have won the Vuelta in 1987 too if it weren’t for a saddle boil which forced him out of the race with three stages to go, whilst wearing the leader’s jersey. This would have led to the remarkable feat of Irish riders winning all three of cycling’s Grand Tours in 1987, as Stephen Roche went on to win the Giro and the Tour that year. Alas, it wasn’t to be, however, because the Vuelta took place in April back then, Kelly’s Vuelta victory the following year ensured Irish riders were indeed the reigning champions of all three Grand Tours.

Seán Kelly en route to taking over the leader's jersey in the 1988 Vuelta

Roche for his part, never focused on the Vuelta a Espana, usually preferring to ride the Giro d’Italia if a 2nd Grand Tour was in his race plans for the year. He only rode the Spanish Grand Tour once towards the end of his career in 1992 where he to took a top 20 placing by finishing 14th. Martin Earley finished the Vuelta twice during his career, also taking a top 20 place when he finished 19th whilst riding in support of his victorious team mate Seán Kelly in 1988.

Again, the Irish presence at the Vuelta was put on hiatus for a number of years until the current crop of Irish riders emerged. Dan Martin, Nicolas Roche and Philip Deignan have all completed the Vuelta at least once. The most successful of which has of course been Deignan who brilliantly won a stage and finished 9th in the 2009 edition. The year previous, in 2008, Roche also managed a fantastic 13th place overall in what was only his 2nd ever Grand Tour.

Roche and Deignan are currently competing at this year’s Vuelta. Deignan is recovering from an injury stricken season and is riding in support of his team leader Carlos Sastre. With the break up of team Cervelo, Deignan now finds himself without a team for next year and he will be hoping to prove his worth as a valuable team mate for the remainder of this year’s race in order to impress potential suitors. Roche on the other hand has been handed the leadership role of his AG2R team. So far, he has not shied away from the responsibility. Before the mountainous eighth stage he lies in 11th place on G.C. less than a minute behind race leader Philippe Gilbert.

While Roche is putting in a great performance he still finds himself in that G.C. purgatory of not being quite capable of pushing for a podium place, but also considered too much of a threat to be allowed up the road to battle for a stage win. Today will be a true test of his form and a gauge of his ability to challenge for the podium or even the top 10. Come this evening, if he has slipped down the G.C., I feel he should allow himself slip a little further. In two weeks time, would he prefer a 15th place on G.C. or a 45th place along with a stage win? His recent comments about his frustrations about his lack of wins in his career so far suggest he would prefer the latter, as would most Irish cycling fans I would imagine!

The recent death of Laurent Fignon has come as a blow to the whole cycling community. I have only recently finished reading his autobiography which was hugely entertaining, but scarcely revealing. The entire book is a narrative of his cycling career with barely a whisper of his personal life and relationships. From the many obituaries I have read it seems that he was indeed a thoroughly private man, but an animal of a competitor. As Jean-Marie Leblanc described him “Fignon was the precursor of the modern champions with…panache and impertinence”. He’ll be sorely missed.

There is no escaping the infamy of the eight seconds by which Fignon lost the Tour de France to Greg LeMond in 1989. But if I was to ask you, which is the smallest ever overall winning margin in any of the three Grand Tours? The answer, surprisingly is not eight seconds in the 1989 Tour de France, it is six seconds in the 1984 Vuelta a Espana, when the Frenchman Eric Caritoux beat the Spaniard Alberto Fernández by the slenderest of margins. Fernández entered the final time trial in the 1984 Vuelta with a 32 second deficit to make up on Caritoux over 33 kilometres. LeMond’s task was twice as difficult with only 25 kilometres to make up 50 seconds. The ‘real’ Bono once said ’sometimes you can’t make it on your own’. Fernández as it turned out, couldn’t. Unfortunately for Fignon, LeMond could. However, influenced by the cover of his own book, I for one will choose not to remember Fignon as the rider who lost the Tour by eight seconds, but as the rider who won the Tour twice.

Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond during the 1989 Tour de France

Luxembourg only have five riders currently racing on Pro Tour teams. Of these five, three of them are among the best in the world, Andy Schleck, Frank Schleck and Kim Kirchen. They have each won one of cycling’s classics, they have each won a stage of the Tour de France and they have each worn the yellow jersey. The fact that they have managed to produce such riders is made all the more remarkable due to the fact that the country has a population of  only half a million people with a land mass comparable to that of County Meath.

Frank Schleck had the misfortune of crashing out on the cobbled Stage 3 of this year’s Tour and has recently released a picture of his devastated shoulder. One of Kim Kirchen’s major goals for the year was to be the Tour de France, but he was unable to take part for a very sobering reason. He suffered a heart attack on the 18th June and as a result was placed in an induced coma. He was released from hospital last week and it is not clear when or if Kirchen will return to professional cycling. This leaves Andy Schleck as the sole representative of Luxembourg in this year’s Tour de France which he is hoping to win. He is currently the leader of the race and should he wear the yellow jersey all the way to Paris he will become the 4th Luxembourg rider to do so after François Faber (1909), Nicolas Frantz (1927,1928) and most recently Charly Gaul (1958). It is a very rich Tour history for such a small nation.

As a small country on the outskirts of the cycling stronghold of mainland Europe, Ireland can be equally as proud of its own history in the Tour de France. Only eight Irish riders have ridden the Tour in the past, but half of whom have won a stage in the race. Ireland’s first ever Tour competitor was Séamus Elliott in 1956, a race which he did not finish. However he was to return again in 1958 when he took 48th overall bagging five top 10 stage placings along the way, including a 2nd place finish behind the Dutch rider Gerrit Voorting. Elliott went on to take part in six Tours de France altogether, finishing three of them. His career defining moment came in the 1963 Tour when he won the 3rd Stage which finished in Roubaix. By winning the stage he also took over the race leader’s yellow jersey, becoming only the second rider outside of mainland Europe to do so, after the British Tom Simpson had achieved the feat the year before. Elliott went on that year to help his team mate Jacques Anquetil win his 4th Tour de France.

After Seamus Elliott rode his last Tour in 1964 there was a gap of 14 years before another Irishman entered the race. This was the formidable Sean Kelly who burst on to the scene in 1978 by winning a stage in his first Tour de France. Kelly was best known for his classics victories but he also had an immense record in the Tour. He finished the race in 7th place in 1983, 5th in 1984 and 4th in 1985. He also won five stages of the Tour, surprisingly his last came as far back as 1982.

But five stage wins doesn’t adequately illustrate the prominence with which Kelly presented himself at the Tour. He finished in the top 10 of a Tour stage on more than 100 occasions. In 1985 he finished 2nd on an agonising five stages, and finished 3rd on a further four. In 1984 he racked up a remarkable 16 top 10 placings and yet unbelievably he was pipped for the Green Jersey competition on the final day by the Belgian Frank Hoste.

However he did win the Green Jersey as the winner of the points classification four times, which was a Tour record until Erik Zabel went one better in 2000. He also won the intermediate sprints competition on a record three occasions. A record which is likely to stand forever as this contest was rendered defunct after 1989. In 1983 he wore the yellow jersey for one day. A day which he claims to be one of the proudest of his career despite the fact he suffered terribly over the Pyreneean climbs of the Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde.

Sean Kelly sparked off a golden era for Irish cycling. For the ten years between 1983 and 1992, Ireland had at least two riders competing in every Tour de France. One of the riders present in all but one of these years was of course Stephen Roche. The man from Dublin won the Tour in 1987 beating off the challenge of Pedro Delgado and Jean-François Bernard. He also finished on the podium in 1985 only four and a half minutes behind the winner Bernard Hinault and less than three minutes behind second placed Greg LeMond. He won four individual stages over the years, along with a team time trial win in his triumphant Tour in 1987. His last stage win, and Ireland’s last, came 18 years ago in 1992. Roche also finished in 9th place overall that year.

Throughout these wonderful years for Kelly and Roche, three other Irishmen also rode in the Tour de France. The most successful was undoubtedly the bespectacled Martin Earley who, whilst riding for Sean Kelly’s PDM team in 1989 became the fourth man from Ireland to win a stage in the Tour. The pair of them also helped PDM win the team classification that year. In total Earley rode eight Tours de France, finishing five of them. Paul Kimmage, now a famous journalist rode the Tour in 1986, 1987 and 1989. He finished the race at his first attempt taking two top 10 stage placings along the way.

In 1991, Stephen Roche started the Tour with his brother Lawrence in his team alongside him. Kelly and Earley also started the Tour that year. Of the four, Lawrence Roche was the only one of them to make it to Paris. After Stephen Roche rode his last Tour de France in 1993 there was another lull in terms of an Irish presence in the race. It wasn’t until 2003 that national interest returned when former Junior World Champion Mark Scanlon took to the startline for the French AG2R team. He finished in a creditable 89th place.

Then last year the third Roche to ride the Tour, Nicolas, revived the Irish presence in the race once again. He rode strongly throughout, defending the yellow jersey of his team mate Rinaldo Nocentini for over a week and he even took 2nd place on the stage to Besançon. Despite not riding specifically for the G.C. he finished his first Tour de France in an impressive 23rd position. This year however, Roche has expressed his desire to put in a strong G.C. performance. Until the race reached the high mountains, Roche had maneuvered himself into 8th place overall. A couple of tough days in the Alps saw him drop to 17th place, but a cheeky breakaway toward the end of Stage 10 allowed him to claw back over a minute and he moved up again in the G.C.

It would have been marvelous to have had Roche, Deignan and Martin all competing in the Tour this July. But Roche, like Andy Schleck, is doing a fine job of flying the flag solo for a country which has had a vast influence on this grandest of Grand Tours. He currently sits in 13th place overall, the same position his father finished in his last Tour 17 years ago. If he was to stay in 13th until Paris he will have achieved his goal of a top 15 place and he will have written another line in the proud history of Irish riders in the Tour de France.

Irish cycling fans have been hit with the news this week that there is to be no 2010 edition of the Tour of Ireland. In a press release, the organisers said:

“Despite significant commercial and public sector funding, current economic conditions have meant that the additional investment required to make the event viable has not been forthcoming in time.”

But the release goes on to give us hope for 2011:

“We fully intend to bring it back for 2011 when the private sector environment is stronger”

This will not be the first time that the Tour of Ireland has been shelved over the years. The race was first run in 1953 where it started as a three day event and continued until 1956 as ‘An Tostál Tour of Ireland’ by which stage it had become an eight day race. The race was not run in 1957 (the only reason for this I can find is a vague mention of the Suez Crisis of 1957). It was revived by the Cumann Rothaíochta na hEireann (C.R.E., translates as the Cycling Association of Ireland, a precursor to today’s Cycling Ireland), again as an eight day race. Although the race was run over eight days, in some years such as 1968 and 1970 there were as many as 11 stages with shorter afternoon stages being held on some days. The race received a boost in 1970 when both Raleigh and Dunlop came on board as sponsors which increased the prize fund from £450 up to £650.

The Raleigh Dunlop Tour of Ireland continued until 1978 when Dunlop decided to end their interest. However Raleigh continued on unperturbed and the race was renamed the TI Raleigh Tour of Ireland up to and including the 1981 race. In January 1981, Jim McArdle of the Irish Times wrote the following:

“In spite of the withdrawal of many sponsors from varying sporting events because of the recession, Irish Raleigh are continuing their involvement with the Tour of Ireland Cycle Race next August.”

A sentiment which the race could benefit from in the recessionary times of this decade! Despite this declaration from Raleigh, they finally ended their marriage with the race in 1982. The following year in 1983 the race received a huge blow when some team sponsors pulled out and there was a general lack of interest with only 26 competitors signing up for the race. At this stage Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly were major forces in international cycling but were not permitted by their team managers to return to Ireland to race in their national Tour because they had contracts to race in bigger events on the continent.

Sean Kelly wears the yellow jersey (complete with rip massive rip) in the Nissan Classic.

In 1984 the race made a return. Roche had made noises the previous winter that he could be persuaded to take part. With the prospect of Roche competing, interest in the race increased. Efforts were made to also get Kelly on board, with the race organisers even promising to change the route of a stage so that Kelly’s home town of Carrick on Súir would host a stage finish, if the classics ace was to agree. Eventually both Kelly and Roche decided not to appear, as the dates of the race which had been moved from August to May interfered too much with their preparations for the Tour de France. But the race carried on regardless and eventually the race organisers enticed Calor Kosnagas to sign up as a title sponsor for the race.

In 1985 Nissan came on board as sponsor and the race took on what has been its most famous guise as the Nissan International Classic. Nissan provided a huge financial boost to the race which RTE had agreed to cover every night on T.V.  Finally Roche and Kelly were persuaded to come home and take part in their national Tour which had been moved back again to the other side of the Tour de France, this time in September. Kelly went on to win the next three editions of the race overall. Along with Ireland’s two great sporting heroes, many more of cycling’s biggest names entered the Nissan sponsored race between 1985 and 1992. Tour de France winners Greg LeMond, Pedro Delgado, Joop Zoetemelk and Lance Armstrong all took part in those years, along with further big names such as Eric Vanderaerden, Phil Anderson, Steve Bauer, Erik Breukink, Johan Museeuw and Olaf Ludwig. Sadly, Nissan ended their sponsorship in 1992 and as a result there was to be no Tour of Ireland in 1993, not for the want of trying however as then race director Pat McQuaid said:

“Everything is being considered in the talks [with sponsors] and hopefully we will have something sorted out in the next couple of months. So much work has to be done well in advance that I will have to go ahead with mapping out a route but we will be aiming to make big changes to give the race a new different look….it is expected that there will be live television coverage next year so that would be a big attraction to a new sponsor.”

Alas, it was not to be. The cancellation of the race also corresponded with the decline and eventual retirement of both Roche and Kelly. Consequently, there were no more major Irish cycling stars in the professional peloton which made finding willing sponsors even more difficult. The race disappeared from the cycling calendar for 15 years.

The Tour of Ireland was resurrected under it’s current guise in 2007 sponsored by Fáilte Ireland and has been run successfully for the past three years. In 2007 and 2008 it had been organised as a five day stage race, but last year the race was reduced to three days due to financial reasons. Race director Alan Rushton said at the time:

“We have had to be realistic with the race budget in view of the recession, however, we continue to focus on gaining additional resources for future editions of the race”

Mark Cavendish wins his third stage in a row during the 2008 Tour of Ireland.

Despite the reduction of the race, arguably the two biggest draws in cycling Lance Armstrong and Mark Cavendish made their way over last year. If not most people’s favourite racers, they are certainly the biggest draws to the non-cycling fan. Russell Downing, now of Team Sky, won the race after a final stage which had to be reduced due to the typically appalling bad weather that had hit Cork City that day. The weather made the ascents of the outrageously steep St. Patrick’s Hill even more difficult. However, the global recession which has hit Ireland particularly badly has now ensured that the Tour of Ireland race organisers could not find the sponsorship required to stage this year’s race. According to race director Rushton it takes €1.5 million to make the race a reality. The lack of available finance  is so frustrating when we see in the papers everyday that the Irish government are throwing billions of euro at Anglo-Irish bank willy nilly.

The last time the race was cancelled, it took 15 years to resurrect it. Although the current race directors comments are comparable with those made by McQuaid back in 1993, hopefully the result will be different this time around. The recession monster is still peering over all our shoulders but there are major differences in favour of the race returning that were not apparent in 1993. This time around, Ireland does have major cycling stars on the rise. Nicolas Roche, Daniel Martin and Philip Deignan are all still young talents who will get better and better. In addition, the Rás Tailteann has shown us that there is more to come from young Irish racers, Sam Bennett and Philip Lavery to name but two, are looking like great prospects. The An Post-Sean Kelly team, although now registered in Belgium, provides a platform to which young Irish talent can be launched into professional cycling careers. There has never been more cyclo sportifs available for enthusiastic amateurs to take part in. I daresay that cycling in Ireland is the healthiest it has ever been. For these reasons I am hopeful that the Tour of Ireland will return next year. It is a great race with a great history and I look forward to standing on St. Patrick’s Hill in the pissing rain in August 2011.