Paul Kimmage

Rough Ride
What’s it like to be a wonderfully talented amateur bicycle racer who gets thrown into the meat-grinder of professional cycling? Kimmage answers the question in honest yet depressing detail.

An example: This book explains that the fatigued riders who did not place in the final stage of the Tour wouldn’t be tested for dope, so they were free to take amphetamines. Reading “Rough Ride” is a lot like driving by a car crash. You really want to avert your eyes but can’t. show more Kimmage’s story of life as a cycling domestique is fascinating.

Kimmage makes it very clear that he is only telling his own personal story and not accusing any other rider in particular. But the practices he exposes clearly indict the entire profession. His revelations of the culture of doping within the peloton brought him withering criticism. He wasn’t the first to get in trouble for revealing cycling’s nasty underside. Bernard Thévenet almost died of liver failure from overuse of corticoids. When he confessed that doping was the cause of his health problems and that doping was a common practice within the peloton, the 2-time Tour winner suffered terrible opprobrium from the press, his sponsor and his fellow racers.

I believe Kimmage’s book is the first (at least in English) to detail at length what life as a professional truly entailed. Since then former professional Erwann Menthéour has also written a memoir about doping in cycling which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been translated. Both he and Kimmage explained that the term for revealing cyclists’ doping to the public is called “spitting in the soup”. Menthéour’s (who was caught using EPO) reply was "People are saying I am spitting in the soup, but it is necessary when it is poison." In the last year the wall of silence regarding doping has come tumbling down and several famous racers have confessed their misdeeds.

Yet Kimmage’s book is the seminal tome and writing it was an act of courage.

The book is more than about doping. It details Kimmage’s own failure to properly train and prepare for some seasons. He also describes the gut-busting exhaustion that the lesser riders suffer as they work at their limits for their more talented team leaders.

“Rough Ride” is a well-written book about racing in the 1980s but its lessons apply to the present. It is important reading for any cycling fan with an interest in what it takes to produce the spectacle we so enjoy watching. show less

Kimmage, Paul. Rough Ride. Yellow Jersey Press, London, 1998. I bought this in my bike craze (I've been riding my bike steadily for the past two months now). It's the story of a minor-league professional cyclist in the 1980s. He was one of only four professional cyclists from Ireland at the time. He rode in the Tour de France three times, finished once, but never won a major professional race in his career. The book is good for two reasons. First, it shows the gritty side of sport---the show more aspects that make this work, and not glamor. Second, the book is very frank about the use of drugs in cycling. This edition was published before the scandalous 1998 Tour de France, which shows how right Kimmage was. When he wrote the book in 1990, he was one of the few who spoke out about cycling's drug problem. The sport organizers did nothing about it, and many of Kimmage's friends turned on him for what he wrote. I wonder if he feels vindicated now. show less

Interesting insight into the life of professional cycling. I'm sympathetic with cyclists like Kimmage but when I hear him interviewed and as I read his book I mostly hear a lot of whining. Perhaps his bitterness is justified but it isn't particularly appealing.

Cool going back to the yesteryears of cycling, enjoyed the last section - passionate call for more doping controls.