Most of my cycling experience had come from books on Roche and Kelly, glamorising the more successful side of the sport, only this is more about the squalid lodgings and crappy food and the desperate need just to make it through, often far away from the Tour de France. Parts of it are written in diary form, and as a distance runner starting out at the same time some of the grind felt appealingly familiar it's also a read that demands complete involvement, as if experiencing every pedal of the rough ride with him.

Kimmage was 27-years-old when he started writing Rough Ride, his four seasons in the pro peloton cut short when he abandons that 1989 Tour de France. Now the last cover, which came out in 2007, is for me a truer reflection, of both my own personality, which is dark, and what the book is all about.” “And that cover lent itself to that prejudice. But to me, that was something for my detractors, mostly the Irish cycling community, who could say ‘look, he was never any f***ing good, there he is on Alpe D’Huez f***ing hours behind everybody, he’s no f***king good, he’s a moany c***, and this is just a begrudger because he’s no f***ing good’. Here’s a fella, you can see the fillings in his teeth, getting it hard on Alpe D’Huez. “And it’s maybe why you like it, because it is me suffering on the bike. “I actually don’t like the cover of the original edition,” he tells me. Over 30 years and two updated editions later (the title sharpened to Rough Ride for the 1998 edition) it remains one of the seminal books not just in cycling but in sport, talk of which still finds Kimmage at his most passionate and unabashed, starting with our slightly differing judgment on that original front cover. In his final season in the pro peloton, in 1989, Kimmage and Roche were riding on the same team, Fagor, both abandoning that year's Tour de France, and taking decidedly different paths from there.įirst published that May of 1990, it didn’t take long for A Rough Ride to make an impression, only not in the way Kimmage had ever planned or hoped. In 1990, Kimmage is already known to me and most fans of the sport as one of the Fab Four of Irish cycling, along with Stephen Roche, Seán Kelly, and Martin Earley. What set it apart then as now is both the writing and the telling of it: by turns darkly humorous and tortuously bleak, Kimmage doesn’t just strip down pro cycling to raw tales of punishment on the bike, utterly devoid of any glamour off it he also introduces the reader to the needle and the damage being done, of amphetamines being handed around like Smarties to such reckless extent he eventually answers to them, in the end presenting pro cycling as a largely poisoned culture where doping is rife and the governing body appears to turn two blind eyes.Īll written, in other words, in a way no other rider of the time had even dared.

Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage