CYCLING/Profile Mick Murphy: Breaking a collarbone, escaping body-snatchers, stealing a bike, drinking cow's blood. Mick Murphy tells Peter Woods the extraordinary story of how, after taking up racing only in 1957, he won Ireland's premier cycle race the following year

On May 25th last, a barrel-chested old man got out of a car on the side of a hill called the Maum, between Castleisland and Listowel. The old man walked with difficulty on two home-made sticks. He was early.

Within an hour crowds awaiting that day's stage of the FBD Insurance Rás had begun to arrive. Soon the man began to attract attention as people moved toward him to shake his hand. The man was Mick Murphy, also known as "The Iron Man".

His win in the 1958 Rás is one of the epics of Irish sport. People talked about him on the Maum that day. They said he trained with weights made from stone, that he made a living as a circus performer, that on one stage during that Rás - when the freewheel on his bike had broken - he stole an ordinary bicycle from a farmer and chased down the leading pack. They said that he rode for four days with a broken collarbone, that he would cycle for 40 miles having completed a gruelling stage just to cool down, that he drank cow's blood and ate raw meat.

He was indestructible.

Mick Murphy was born outside Cahirciveen in 1933. At the age of seven he began to dream of the road, of escape as a circus performer. He was already training under the guidance of a neighbour, training that included balancing a ladder on his chin.

He was inured to work from the start, leaving school at 11 to begin a job on the bogs. In his early teens he was working in a local quarry, or "Van Diemen's Land", as he terms it. By his late teens he was a spailpín, or roving labourer, among the rich farmers of North Cork.

But he left the relative security of labouring jobs and sought a precarious living as a street performer, an act in pick-up circuses and a grass-track rider - selling on for cash the prizes he accumulated at meetings all over Munster.

His contact with the circus sparked an interest in weightlifting and he began a training regime, making a gym out of stone weights and weights he stole from farmyards where he could.

He developed an interest in diet, and was already cycling great distances and living alone in the woods near Banteer - training obsessively - in 1958, when he entered the Rás for the first time.

Mick Murphy has instant recall of every day he spent in a bicycle race; he says he remembers each race from the finish backwards. He can remember what was written about him the day he stole the bike from the farmer on the stage between Kilkenny and Clonakilty. Pursued by the team car and a local priest, he got to Cork and was given a racing bicycle.

Despairing, he was lifted by the screams of "the shawlie women", from whom he used to buy food when he busked in the city as a street performer.

"Defend the yellow mantle!" someone screamed, and he chased the pack down into Clonakilty, finishing seventh and still in yellow. "His instincts governed his reactions . . . Murphy rode like a dingo on the prowl," an Australian journalist wrote.

He remembers the day, coming down from the Curlew Mountains, he took a wrong turn and cycled past the main peloton going in the wrong direction. And the crash at the bridge in Kenmare, where he broke a collarbone - then he peels away his shirt to show his misshapen shoulder.

And how, afterwards, in hospital in Tralee, dazed, bruised and bleeding, he hallucinated that the medical team were body-snatchers and escaped out the window. The next day he was strapped on to his bike and rode through the pain and on to his only Rás victory.

Nowadays Mick Murphy is something of a recluse. He lives where he grew up. He stopped cycling, in the wake of the 1960 Rás - after another bad fall on the road into Thurles, the Dublin team hunting him down "like wolves". He had gone too far, "stayed too long". He took the boat to England.

The life he led after was in many ways equally dramatic. He made a living as a bricklayer, took up wrestling and even attempted to make a career as a professional darts player. He continued to work from time to time as a circus performer in England and Germany. His last job was in Covent Garden in the late 1990s - eating fire.

In many ways, returning home, he was facing the inevitable - he had one fall too many, from a scaffolding a few years before. He walks slowly with the aid of the sticks he made himself. He receives no pension. He has none of the accoutrements of modern living, beyond a radio.

He retains nothing from his career as a cyclist, except for a few grainy, photocopied newspaper articles and a copy of the chapter written about him in Tom Daly's book The Rás. He says he feels no pain, doesn't suffer from the cold. He shops every three months, cheese, eggs, fruit juice - much the same diet that sustained him as a cyclist.

By most standards, his circumstances are dire. But few things are that simple and there are few men in any walk of life as aware of their own mythology as Murphy.

He has always had a contentious relationship with Cahirciveen - the one time he was in a Rás that went through the town, he says, two people turned out to see him.

He was always an outsider, seen, in his words, as "mad, bad and dangerous". He lived "cowboy style". He dug "so deep he could hear the sheep in Australia".

He knows the history of cycling, can name legions of cyclists and is fully aware of his place in it all - a man with an iron will known only in his country, his story carried the most part orally. He was called "the Clay Pigeon" because he couldn't be killed - though his fall from the scaffold in London almost did the job.

The way Mick Murphy cycled became a philosophy of life. He had no predictable rhythm. He led from the front. "The dogs in the street knew my style . . . the more they waited for me to shatter, the stronger I got."

Told to wash so he'd look the part before a race, he tore a bit of a shirt he'd trained in and tied the rag around his neck. "You could smell it a 100 yards away."

It was like the reek of stale sweat at the start of a fight, or the adrenalin-charged smell of a gym: "Without those things you wouldn't be there. Something must hype you up."

In the end, what did for him as a cyclist was what made him what he was in the first place. He had, he insists, throughout his Rás career, no team. In fact, he did have a team - in the 1958 Rás, Gene Mangan won four stages and Dan Ahern one. Both were part of the Kerry team. Mangan's achievement in particular was remarkable and, in flashes, Mick acknowledges this.

The fact, though, that what Murphy achieved eclipsed all of that points up the epic quality of his triumph. What did for him was the team - the Dublin team in particular. His last stage win came in the final stage of the 1959 Rás when he beat Shay O'Hanlon into Phoenix Park. The day in Thurles - when they hunted him down "like a pack of wolves" - was a harbinger.

O'Hanlon, and that team, dominated Irish cycling in the 1960s. But when Mick Murphy got on the boat to England, Irish sport lost one of its greatest characters. It lost a man who did indeed lead from the front and, to this day, is remorselessly without self-pity.

He competed in an era before sports psychologists, but would no doubt have provided work for a team of them. To be fair to him, he would have done it with great humour and style.

On May 25th last, for the first time in 46 years, Murphy returned to the Rás - to the Maum, a climb between Castleisland and Listowel.

He was happy with the location - the only club he'd ever cycled for was Castleisland ("Cowtown", as he calls it) - but he did take a bit of persuading to go back at all.

He met Dan Ahern, his comrade from 1958. "This was a cyclist. When Mike Murphy would go to make a break all you would see was the bike warping," said Ahern.

Murphy's name was shouted up and down the hillside. People lined up to have photos taken with him. Young cyclists who'd heard of him shook his hand. One confessed to going on training rides past his house in the hope of catching a glimpse.

Later, at the stage finish in Listowel, Dermot Dignam - who was with the "wolves" in Thurles that day - presented Murphy with a yellow jersey. This, a modern-day jersey, is the only proper memento he has from cycling.

It reminded him of that day he got lost heading into Sligo - a day that almost cost him the Rás - and of that descent into Clonakilty and the voice, a voice he could never put a face to, screaming at him: "Defend the yellow mantle!"

Did he consider himself "a savage road-man"?

That, he said, was a term learned from "the Dublin men", one he never liked.

He was "a convict of the road" - an arcane term, born out of the early days of the Tour de France. The time when cyclists lived on their wits, stole from the fields and slept rough. Men like Maurice Garin, "the White Bulldog", winner of the first Tour, who was sold as a child by his father to a chimney-sweep for a bucket of cheese.

Novelist and broadcaster Peter Woods is series producer of the Documentary on One on RTÉ Radio 1. A Convict of the Road - produced by Peter Woods and Liam O'Brien - will be broadcast on Sunday, July 30th, at 10am.