PRESENT TENSE:Before the sweat has time to cool, Irish Tour de France competitor Nicolas Roche is dishing it out with a fury and honesty one could only describe as refreshing, writes SHANE HEGARTY
IF YOU have half an eye on the Tour de France, you will know that Nicolas Roche is the sole Irish competitor and is doing pretty well. If you’re paying more attention, you’ll be aware that Roche complained he’s not doing well enough, that he declared he was sick of the bloody thing and that during the week he went all out to implicate himself in any future murder of a teammate.
Specifically, he began a column by announcing: “If John Gadret is found dead in his hotel room in the morning, I will probably be the primary suspect.”
That’s the way to open an article. Grab the reader from the start. Shake him by the lapels. Wrap your fingers round his throat. Keep squeezing . . . Okay, Nicolas, that’s enough. Put the reader down.
Roche's columns in the Irish Independent, and posted on his website nicolasroche.com, have been fascinating over the past three weeks. They seem to be delivered immediately after each stage, with legs burning, mind racing, and thoughts still raw.
There are daily descriptions of the grind, the breakfasts, the routines, the determination, the doubt, the point of it all and the extraordinary ability of Irish supporters to turn up in big groups at the most unlikely times.
Sure, there are enough of us who have learned to doubt the integrity of the Tour, and the sport as a whole, but Roche’s honesty has brought a humanity to an event that has become known for dubiously superhuman feats.
Anyway, in headlines, his week went like this:
Monday: “I was so angry I had to ask the journalist not to air the interview.”
Tuesday: “I wanted to smash his head in. I couldn’t stand to be near him.”
Wednesday: “It’s been three weeks of suffering and stress. Now, I’ve had enough.”
Thursday: “I hope my Nana said a few prayers in Lourdes.”
Friday: “Sheep ran across the road. For a minute I thought I was on the Sally Gap”
His mood had improved a bit by that last one.
But what lifted his column into something close to unique news among a plethora of sportstars’ columns, interviews, press conferences and autobiographies, was his willingness to not just question a teammate’s motives, but to admit how much he wanted to pummel him. In an aggressive, hierarchical sport, in which domestiques must do their duty for the leader, sniping is not entirely unusual. Lance Armstrong spent much of last year’s tour taking pot-shots at teammate and eventual winner Alberto Contador (the winner’s retort: “On a personal level, I have never admired him and never will.”)
Roche went further, unapologetically, after getting a puncture during a stage over Col De Sheer Hell or some such place, only for Gadret to steam on without him against team rules.
Roche wrote: “I hoped he never asked me for anything again, because I would not forget today for a long time . . . By the time I got onto the team bus, [team manager Vincent Lavenu] was already in the middle of a blazing row with Gadret.
“Although I wanted to smash his head in, and had visions of a baldy French climber exiting through the windscreen, I let Vincent do his job as team manager and said nothing. I got off the bus as quickly as possible and travelled to the hotel in the team car. I couldn’t stand to be near him. I will have to keep my hands in my pockets at the dinner table.”
By Wednesday, he had calmed down. In the way an Icelandic volcano calms down. He’ll learn to live with the guy, he wrote, because he has to. By Thursday, he was writing about how his words had proved an attraction to the world’s media.
“Sometimes, I get myself into a bit of trouble. A period of time to cool off and reflect on something may stem my anger and frustration slightly, or even change my views completely, but at the time of writing, all I can do is be honest.”
In the journalism we’re used to, where current or former sports people are regular commentators, his attack on a teammate was almost taboo-breaking.
Across the international media landscape, such columns often deal in personal disappointment, many deal in blandness, and are increasingly controlled by PR. It means they seldom deal with the one thing the public and press always speculates about, which is the dynamic between teammates, who hates whom, who are the lazy, the selfish, the irritating, the useless: things, in short, that anyone who has played a team sport will immediately recognise.
The time of writing is key. Roche’s column is forged from exhaustion, pain, anger, adrenaline and lengthy ascents into dark parts of the psyche that few of us will ever reach.
And it has resulted in him sending home some vivid postcards.