![]() “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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |