The following is an extract from The Ascent: Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and the rise of Irish Cycling's Golden Generation, published by Gill Books and available in hardcover and e-book format (http://bit.ly/ascent-amzn)
Sean Kelly had been a professional for four years when his fellow countryman Stephen Roche joined him in the peloton in 1981. Roche promptly won Paris-Nice and the gregarious neophyte's early success saw Kelly begin to re-think the scale of his own ambition…
Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche were still some way off box office status in their home country in January of 1982, but a joint television appearance on the Late Late Show shortly before the season began suggested their achievements were beginning to stoke the curiosity of a wider public. Roche sat next to host Gay Byrne and on occasion leant towards the studio audience as he held forth on his ambitions for the years ahead, while Kelly, as ever, was more guarded of body language and response. He certainly wasn't going to be so gauche as to compare himself, as Roche did, to reigning Tour champion Bernard Hinault.
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"I've beaten him in time trials, I've been with him in the mountains, and I can fairly hold him or match him in a stage race. The French public, I think, are fairly browned off now with this fellow Hinault and they're looking for a successor, and I'm forced to be coming up. Whereas Sean will tell you, he's a different man altogether, he's a sprinter and he's there to win stages," Roche said, before adding almost as an afterthought: "And possibly the overall also." Pat McQuaid – soon to be appointed as Irish Olympic coach – was sitting in the audience and was invited to assess the new phenomenon. "They're predicting he'll win the Tour de France within a year or two," McQuaid said. "He's going to be a millionaire overnight."
If Kelly felt discommoded by the acclaim lavished upon the recent arrival at the top table, he wasn't going to betray those feelings before a national television audience. That night in Montrose and elsewhere, his public utterances were carefully deferential towards Roche's fine debut season and future potential. Besides, he had already expressed himself perfectly eloquently in his preferred, wordless manner a couple of weeks previously, when he lined up alongside Roche at Carrick Wheelers' traditional Hamper Race, a pre-Christmas handicap event that Kelly had been dominating since he was a teenager.
The two professionals set off in the scratch group, 10 minutes after the veterans and schoolboys who went out first. Kelly and Roche had downplayed their form beforehand, each insisting he had been training in the gym rather than on the bike, but once the flag dropped, competitive instincts overrode pre-race niceties. They worked together at first, shaving minutes off their deficit as they passed group after group, but once they caught the frontrunners, Kelly took off alone and left Roche behind. The race ended with 10 laps of a half-mile circuit in Carrick-on-Suir, and Kelly made sure to lap the chasers, Roche included, before the finish. Point duly proven in his backyard, Kelly turned his attention to reasserting his pre-eminence on the Continent.
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