Irish Cyclist Stephen Roche Looks Back--and Ahead

When Stephen Roche decided to give up his job as a maintenance worker in a suburban Dublin dairy and move to France as a professional bike racer, there were more than a few skeptics.

“People said I’d get as far as the Eiffel Tower, go once round it, and come home again,” Roche said.

Six years later, the charismatic Irishman with the curly black hair and deep blue eyes is still living in France--as the world’s undisputed No. 1 cyclist.

“I suppose I had always been regarded as a softie,” Roche said in a recent interview during a brief London stop-over. “I don’t think people realized I could race as hard as anyone else.

“Now, sometimes when I’m back home, they say I’m not the Stephen Roche they used to know. Well maybe they never bothered to look inside me to see how I was underneath.”

Few sportsmen have a had season quite like Roche, winner of professional cycling’s Triple Crown--the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and the World Championship, a feat performed only once before, by Belgium’s Eddie Merckx in 1974.

Roche said that each of his three victories has a special but different meaning.

“Italy was very important to me because I won it against all the odds,” Roche said, recalling how he was physically and verbally abused by the passionately patriotic Italian crowds lining the road-side.

“They are very biased,” Roche, 27, said. “I had to get a police escort from my hotel to the start of the race each day, and from the finish back to the hotel.”

The victory established Roche as the favorite for the Tour de France, following the withdrawal of injured American Greg LeMond, the defending champion.

The Irishman did not let his fans down.

“The Tour de France is undoubtedly the most prestigious race in the world but I felt going into it that even if I didn’t win, I’d already had a great season,” Roche said. “That made me more relaxed.

“My tactic was never to lose the race in a single stage and take such a hammering that I might never make up the time. It worked.”

As the first Irishman to win the tour, Roche received a hero’s welcome, complete with bagpipes, champagne and an honor guard, when he flew home to Ireland to celebrate.

Dublin city center came to a standstill as more than 250,000 people cheered him through streets bedecked with orange and green Irish flags.

Six weeks later, Roche completed a sensational series of victories by taking the world championship in Austria.

“The great thing about winning that was that I rode from the front, not just by sitting in the seat,” he said. “Also, you get to wear the winner’s rainbow jersey for a year, which distinguishes you from everyone else.”

In Dublin, at another mass turn-out by his fans, Roche became the first sportsman to receive the Freedom of the City. Past winners included U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Pope John Paul II.

Throughout his career, Roche has experienced a bizarre sequence of events. Every odd-numbered year brings relative success and every even-numbered year throwing him off course through a series of illnesses and injuries.

He hopes to change that in 1988.

“I realize the heat will be on and people will start saying I am finished if I don’t win anything next year,” he said. “But I’ve heard all that before, and have bounced back. I’ve got where I am through sheer hard work.”

That, said Roche, is a legacy of his youth.

As a teen-ager and one of six children, Roche worked every Sunday on his father’s milk delivery round, using any spare cash he had to pay for bike parts.

Once he left high school, he worked a maintenance fitter in a dairy and raced in amateur events whenever possible.

“I saw what it was like to work till two or three in the morning with ice, milk and grease all over you. I realized that becoming a cyclist wasn’t too bad although it wouldn’t have bothered in the least if I’d never been famous,” Roche said.

From now until March, with a break for Christmas, Roche will be training for his new team, Fagor, working mainly in Ireland.

When the season starts, the village of Sagy, near Paris, where Roche lives with his French wife and two children, will be his base again.