Sean Kelly (cyclist)

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Sean Kelly (cyclist) bigraphy, stories - Road bicycle racer

Sean Kelly (cyclist) : biography

21 May 1956 –

John James ‘Sean’ Kelly (born 24 May 1956)Walsh, David (1986), Kelly, Harrap, UK, ISBN 0-245-54331-7, p29 is an Irish former professional road bicycle racer. He was one of the most successful road cyclists of the 1980s, and one of the finest classics riders of all time. From turning professional in 1977 until his retirement in 1994, he won nine monument classics, and 193 professional races in total. He won Paris–Nice seven years in a row and the first UCI Road World Cup in 1989. He won the 1988 Vuelta a España and had multiple wins in the Giro di Lombardia, Milan – San Remo, Paris–Roubaix and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Other victories include the Critérium International, Grand Prix des Nations and smaller tours including the Tour de Suisse, Tour of the Basque Country and Volta a Catalunya.

Kelly twice won bronze medals (1982, 1989) in the World Road Race Championships and finished 5th in 1987, the year compatriot Stephen Roche won gold. Kelly was first to be ranked No.1 when the FICP rankings were introduced in March 1984, a position he held for a record six years. In the 1984 season, Kelly achieved 33 victories.

Amateur career and Olympic ban

Kelly won the national championship again in 1973, then took a senior licence before the normal qualifying age of 18 and won the Shay Elliot Memorial race in 1974 and again in 1975 and stages in the Tour of Ireland of 1975. Kelly and two other Irish riders, Pat and Kieron McQuaid, went to South Africa to ride the Rapport Tour stage-race in preparation for the 1976 Olympic Games. They and others rode under false namesJ. Burns, G. Main, D. Nixon, P. Nugent and A.Owen because of an international ban on athletes competing in South Africa, as a protest against apartheid.

The Irish were suspended from racing for six months. They were racing again when the International Olympic Committee banned them from the Olympics for life.

Unable to ride in Canada, Kelly rode the 1976 Tour of Britain and then went to Metz, in France, after a London enthusiast, Johnny Morris, had arranged an invitation. The club offered him £25 a week, free accommodation and four francs a kilometre for every race he won. Kelly won 18 of the 25 races he started in France and won the amateur Giro di Lombardia in Italy. That impressed two French team managers, Jean de Gribaldy and Cyrille Guimard. De Gribaldy went to Ireland unannounced to discuss a contract with the Flandria professional team. He didn’t know where Kelly lived and wasn’t sure he would recognise him. He took with him another cyclist, to point out Kelly and translate the conversation. Kelly was out driving a tractor and de Gribaldy set out again in the taxi that had brought him from Dublin, hoping to find Kelly as he drove home. They found him and went to Kelly’s stepbrother’s house. De Gribaldy offered £4,000 a year plus bonuses. A week later Kelly asked for £6,000 and got it. He signed for de Gribaldy with misgivings about going back on his promise to return to Metz, where the club had offered him better terms than before.Walsh, David (1986), Kelly, Harrap, London, ISBN 0-245-54331-7, p66

Kelly left for France in January 1977 and lived for two years at 18 place de la Révolution in Besançon, de Gribaldy’s home town. He shared with four team-mates.

Footnotes

Personality

Fellow pupils at Kelly’s school [see above] felt Kelly fell silent because he felt intellectually outclassed. The lack of words continued even after Kelly had proved himself one of the best racing cyclists of his era. The writer Robin Magowan said:

"On the bench, swivelling his body away as you approach, chary of words when not downright hostile, Sean Kelly remains for a journalist the hardest of the great riders to fathom. In an age when most of his brethren rate themselves, and are paid, according to the amount of publicity inches they have gleaned in a season, this farmer’s son… remains very much the exception, closed, withdrawn, and extremely suspicious. Yet one has only to look at him joking with Stephen Roche, or know the respect with which he is held by the peloton, to see that he gets along very well without us."Magowan, Robin, and Watson, Graham (1987), Kings of the Road, Springfield, UK, ISBN 978-0-947655-20-4, p65