Cycling

Picture credit: Killian Kelly

Remember the bit in the old baseball movie ‘The Natural’ when the eponymous Robert Redford is lamenting his sorry past (he was shot by Barbara Hershey), beating himself up to Glenn Close?

Redford: “But I didn’t see it coming.”
Close: “How could you know she’d hurt you? How could anyone?”
Redford: “I didn’t see it coming.”Close: “You should have?”
Redford: “Yes. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I?”

I’d like to see the Sundance Kid hurtling precariously through – as I did on Wednesday – the beautiful Ballyhoura Forest which hugs the border between north Cork and south county Limerick, on a sophisticated mountain bike.

I pulled on the gloves they gave me inside out, bunny hopped around the car park thanks to the teenager-sensitive front brakes and was told, with a smile, to fasten my ‘brain bucket’ helmet. Perhaps I should’ve seen it coming.

In total, Ballyhoura offers more than 90km of biking trails along this single track, as well as on forest road climbs, which marks it apart as one of Europe’s top mountain-biking destinations. These loops range from the relatively easy six kilometres of Greenwood Loop, which would take a slow-ish biker (hi there!) about an hour to complete, to the leave-it-to-the-experts 51km Loop.

This, the ‘brown path’, is for the absolute headers. It could take a biker up to five hours to finish, including as it does l’Alpe D’Huez-like climbs and tough-to-negotiate features in a slaloming, long descent.

Local company Trailriders rent out the bikes to those who visit the recently-developed facility (€25 for a nice bike couple of hours, for example). Jonathon Mansell has just completed his Leaving Certificate and is about to start an exciting outdoor pursuits course in Kinsale, Co Cork.

For now, he works full-time for Trailriders and is known around here as one of the most proficient mountain bikers to yet turn the pedals up the hill. At the moment however he’s staying out of the saddle due to a hip injury. Another clue.

“We’re pretty busy at the moment – we had about 47 bikes out on the mountain on Saturday – and guys just keep coming back.

“It’s not for everyone – some don’t know what to expect to be honest – but we had three lads earlier flew around in a couple of hours and then went for a trip around the green course. And that was their first time. So they’ll be back.”

Mansell wheels out one of their newer bikes and sits me up on it.

“The brakes are very sensitive, so just feather them like this,” he says, spreading three fingers across each lever and touching them softly. “You’ll be grand.”

Diarmiud O’Leary is a retired secondary school teacher from the local town of Kilfinnan. He’s kindly volunteered to spend his morning guiding me up – and then down – the mountain side.

A highly interesting man with a love of the locality having been involved in the development of the Ballyhoura Way, he peppers generous encouragement (“you’re more confident now, you have the fitness anyway etc”) with some saddle-soiling scare stories (see that rock there, the greatest advertisement for a helmet…)

I follow him tentatively as we wend up the incline in a narrow pathway which is hemmed with large rocks and carpeted in moss, earth, whatever. He explains later that one group walked their bikes around the trail having expected the route to be tarmaced. “I don’t know why they wanted mountain bikes, really,” he shrugs.

I soon grow a bit more at ease and happily tail Diarmuid’s wheel as he offers, like an F1 technician, insigts into little corners that cause trouble while he’s not afraid to stop and admire the impressive 180degree vista that swallows the Golden Vale to the Galtees.

After a lung-busting crawl to the top of our route, we begin to peel back down. O’Leary is fearless as he skids across long and winding 2-ft-wide timber bridges that stretch across yawning drops.

Surveying the footprints and wheel tracks in the soft mud below – evidence of past falls by better riders than me – I choose to dent my pride rather than backside and wheel the bike across the bridge like a small child crossing the road to school. I’m not ashamed to tell you this.

The US air force have an expression for the period of time immediately after a young pilot fully qualifies and arrogantly thinks they can do it all: the death zone.

As we reach the end of the trip and I’m comfortable enough to stand cautiously on the pedals as Diarmuid encourages me, so to better manoeuvre the bike beneath I realise that I am in fact a natural. If I come up a few times a month, perhaps London 2012 might yet be a possibility.

Then comes that rock. An innocuous nick of the pedal. A skid. A screech. And you’re picking yourself out of a rabbit hole.

“The most important thing is to get back on straight away,” said Diarmuid. “It’s like they say with horses isn’t it? You must always get back on.”

After a giddily enjoyable few hours in Ballyhoura, I’ll be getting on again soon I’m sure.

Ballyhoura Forest hosts one leg of the 2010 An Post cycle series on Sunday, September 12. The Rebel Rush presents cyclists and mountain bikers with a choice of three trails between 6k and 35km. Visit www.corkrebeltour.ie. Registration closes this Wednesday.

Adrian.russell@examiner.ie                                                                                              Twitter: @adrianrussell

Please mind your toes, reader; there’s quite a big name about to be dropped in a second or two.

Over a coffee in a Limerick city hotel a few years ago, cycling legend Greg Lemond (clang!) told me that the public, traumatic ordeal Floyd Landis put him through was beyond anything the Alps ever threatened.

The eyes that lasered into the back of double-crossing, pantomime villain Bernard Hinault all those years ago, were the same west-coast blue. In his 40s now, he’d fill a pair a yellow jersey more violently. He was greyer too and the Eurosport logo was not, as I remembered, constantly visible over his left shoulder, like a setting sun. But, yes, it was him.

Mid-chat, he quickly rang home to ask one of his children for his email password. As his kid scurried off, loudly tutting his father’s forgetfulness, Lemond placed his hand over the hand-set, twirled his finger around in the air by his forehead and explained to me: “I get these brain farts, y’know’’. I nodded.

Though F Scott Fitzgerald wrote that American lives have no second acts, LeMond long ago folded away the racing bike and forgot the aching glory of Tours de France. And this week too the curtain fell at last on the Californian’s ugly episode with Landis.

First let’s recall 2001; Lemond is about to see his position as America’s pre-eminent rider taken by Armstrong. When Lemond learns that the young superstar is working with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor who is about to stand trial for doping charges (he’s cleared) he criticises his compatriot for associating with him. It sparks an angry and ugly spat between the two which rumbles on still.

The pressure on Lemond is unbearable; former fans spit abuse onto the internet, business interests coldly warn him to not derail a gravy train. Lemond, through tears, issues an apology, identifying Armstrong as “a great champion”.

He refuses however to ignore the ubiquitous doping problem which courses through the sport he loves. Landis, a former team-mate of Armstrong’s on the US Postal team, wins the Tour in 2006, only to be caught using banned substances. In a private telephone conversation, Lemond pleads with Landis to come clean for the sake of cycling, before admitting he’d been abused by a family friend as a child. It was secret that had haunted him throughout his life.

Lemond later received a call – the night before he was to testify against Landis – from someone claiming to be his abuser and threatening to disclose Lemond’s secret if he turned up the next day. Shaking with rage, he traced the call on his Blackberry to Landis’ manager Will Geoghan.

The following morning, in a dramatic courtroom moment that could have been drafted in the Law and Order writers’ room, an attorney placed LeMond’s phone beneath an overhead projector and displayed the mystery caller’s number. Humiliated, Landis and his lawyers fired Geoghegan on the spot.

Lemond had stood up to the bullies. But in the war on drugs, one of the sport’s greatest champions was collateral damage. He had never told a soul before Landis of the abuse he suffered as a child. His personal wound now picked apart in public, and with a wonderful career behind him, a real darkness crossed his brow for the first time in years. His marriage disintegrated quickly and he left the family home.

Seven days ago, Landis at last dropped his long-time and flimsy protestations of innocence and confessed to doping throughout his career. He is the only man to ever be stripped of a Tour and, clearly, if his story existed in a vacuum it would be huge.

However, the headlines were set in Livestrong Yellow because Landis became the fifth US Postal team member to implicate his former friend: Lance Armstrong.

Inevitably, this blew a shutter-shaking media storm at Armstrong’s door all this week. The seven-time hero of the Champs Elysee whistled self-consciously and continues to brazen it out/ignore those annoying revelations form those around him.

That’s the big show, ladies and gentlemen. More ink will be spilled on Armstrong’s maillot jaune than oil in the Gulf of Mexico. But that is not our story, today.

No, please instead picture the kitchen of a large, comfortable house in suburban Iowa last Saturday. Lemond’s telephone rings. A familiar voice offers an apology. And Lemond – typically – accepts it immediately, though what’s gone before might warrant more.

Lemond went on to scale his demons, much like every other challenge in his life. When he was shot by his brother-in-law in the off-season after claiming his first Tour, he hung on for life and went on to win two more while dragging 30 pellets in his chest, around France.

When he lost his family, he won them back. When his childhood trauma was exposed cruelly, he set up a foundation for men like him.

“I accepted his apology, but that isn’t really what’s important,” Lemond said after his phone conversation with Landis, “Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made. I hope that as a result Floyd can begin rebuilding his life. More people should apologize, and more people should accept apologies when sincerely made.”

He might be liable to brain farts; but that sounds right to me.

adrianrussell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in today’s Irish Examiner newspaper

A FORMER rider in standard-issue team colours with neat red hair pinned down under designer shades, Kurt Bogaerts doesn’t really look it – but he drives like Evel Knievel, late for Mass.

The Belgian national is manager of the Sean Kelly/ An Post cycling team, and on the third stage of the recent FBD Insurance Rás, he’s hoping – and planning – for a good day.

The Carrick-on-Suir legend, Kelly founded the team in 2006, basing them in his academy in Belgium. Bogaerts runs the show and most importantly, as I fold myself into the passenger seat, he drives the car. He makes it look easy; it isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Eurosport commentary, Milan San Remo, 1992: “And it’s Kelly in there as well! A previous winner of the race; what a finish we’re going to have. The firemen are behind pumping in the coals to try to catch Argentin, anybody with anything left in their legs is trying to get in position before the descent of the Poggio.”

Many of you – those, perhaps, more familiar with recessions which are more PJ Mara than NAMA – will remember March. 21, 1992. That Sunday afternoon, Ireland kicked off their Five Nations campaign in the Parc de Prince, in front of 50,000 people with a 32-point drubbing; Right Said Fred’s Deeply Dippy may have pumped from the kitchen radio as you checked on the much-anticipated weekly roast and, Carrick-on-Suir’s Sean Kelly was about to earn his last-ever victory in a classic after a professional cycling career that creaked under the weight of achievement.

Never meet your heroes. I learned that harshest of lessons when former Stone Roses lead singer Ian Brown personally threw me out of an after-show party, with the wafer-thin lie that there was one too many bodies in the room and ‘the fireman’ wanted me out. But Kelly disagrees. The Tour of Ireland gets underway on Friday and with box-office names like Armstrong and Cavendish, the country’s budding pros and amateurs alike will be cast as supporting stars in a production sprinkled with a little Hollywood magic. Yesterday I too climbed on a bike, to cycle in the slipstream of greatness.

“The gap still looks about the same and Kelly is leading the chase. He’s got to do that because Sorenson is behind him and Sorenson won’t do any work at all.”

We’re at the bottom of Seskin Hill – a twisting, knotted climb on the outskirts of Kelly’s hometown. The intimidating slope is carpeted in a morning’s rain while loose pebbles see the former world number one skidding expertly along a lane which is hemmed by high ditches, dragging long marks like isobars on the surface.

In the meantime I’m furiously fumbling with a loose wheel and an upturned mountain bike in a pair of ill-fitting cycle shorts, odd socks and a borrowed An Post team top. Passing motorists slow to walking pace and wind down their windows to gape at the apparently professional rider on the side of a mountain in Waterford who looks like he thinks ‘the spokes’ are a trendy New York rock band. I see them, through a veil of tears, mouthing in astonishment: “Kelly’s team are gone to shite, anyway, Mary”. Read the rest of this entry »

Few phone snaps from yesterday’s spin with the Sean Kelly/An Post team on stage 3 of the Rás. Some men…