To get from Nice to Port-Fréjus, where Stephen Roche suggests we first meet, the motorway sweeps up and around the Cote d’Azur, bypassing familiar names such as Sainte-Maxime, St-Raphaël, and Saint-Tropez.
These are some of the same places where Roche announced himself to the cycling world in 1981, including when at age 21 he arrived, drenched in class, from the Dublin suburb of Dundrum and became the only person ever to win Paris-Nice as a first-season professional.
The plan is Roche will let me know when he’s on route from Grimaud, to aim for around 5pm. It’s about two hours after that when my phone rings.
[ Tadej Pogacar becomes first male cyclist since Stephen Roche to win triple crownOpens in new window ]
“You’re not going to believe this,” Roche says, panic in his voice. My first suspicion is he might be giving me the slip, but it turns out one of his two Weimaraner dogs – the one named Shamrock – had just bitten a neighbour, entirely out of character. The police were called, and Shamrock had to go to the vet, all that carry on.
It strikes me later that Roche frequently uses such expressions of wonderment – “believe it or not ... would you believe … ”. When we do rendezvous at the originally assigned spot, he is utterly apologetic for the delay.
He appears healthy and upbeat, showing no visible scars despite the complete meltdown of his business and much of his reputation over the past five years. After first losing his cycling holiday business of over 20 years in Mallorca, which left him with heavy debts, Roche ended up losing his hillside villa in Antibes, his pension, all his investments and many of his closest associates.
He appears slightly smaller than anticipated, his piercing blue eyes set against the soft Mediterranean tan of his face and neat silver-white hair. He admits he’s a long way off his once racing-fit physique, but then he turns 65 next month. One thing Roche hasn’t lost is his charm, or his curious enunciation of words, as if he’s speaking English to a foreigner.
“Would you believe, I fell over with the dogs there recently, when they pulled on the leash, and I was outstretched on the ground, tore some ligaments in my shoulder. So I haven’t been able to get out on the bike for very long.
“Apart from the weight, and this shoulder injury, I’m okay. The last few years, all the moving around, that was taking a toll on my mind, the mental side. But at the same time, there’s not much point in moaning any more about my issues, what’s happened has happened. It’s time get on with it.
“Morally, it was difficult to pick up the pieces. I think I was always an athlete, number one, not a businessman. When I retired from cycling, 30 years ago, I was in the same situation, had to start from scratch again. I have to kind of re-enact some of the same mentality, otherwise I’d be still down there,” he says, pointing to the ground.
It’s not the first time he’s been in a battle to salvage some of his credibility, even his legacy.
It’s easy to see why Roche has made this heavenly part of the world his home, and it also becomes clear from our conversations that he’s still trying to find some peace of life and mind here all over again.
Casting a shadow
On the short walk for lunch at Brasserie Jacques on the Fréjus marina, Roche is recognised by five or six people, not always instantly, but it’s a suitable reminder that he wasn’t just a sporting icon in Ireland. In 1987 he became only the second rider in history to win the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championships in the same season. His face was known all over Europe.
He tells me there’s a big bike show in town this weekend, which may explain things, yet once we sit down the sense is that plenty of people are glancing over at Roche thinking ... “is that him?”
As a prop, I’ve brought along The Ascent, by Irish cycling journalist Barry Ryan, the excellent account of the rise and rivalry between Roche and Sean Kelly at the height of their cycling superpowers during the 1980s – and which also details the questions that remain about his association with Prof Francesco Conconi, given the evidence he’d doped riders at the Carrera team with EPO in 1993, including Roche.
Roche shakes his head to say he’s never read it. My ploy to broach this subject is to tell him how, after texting a friend to say I was in the south of France to meet Roche, he replied with a one-word message: “Druggie”.
So how does that sit with Roche all these years later?
“Of course it’s difficult, but there’s nothing you can do about it. At the same time, if people took the time to read everything about the Conconi case, they would see there’s nothing there. It’s a big smoke but there’s no fire really.
“I was never, ever, ever convicted of doping. Never, ever even questioned about doping. Now you go on Wikipedia, you see that ... [his page includes a section with the heading “Doping”] I’ve been trying to get that removed, and every time I do it comes back.”
There is no doubt Roche is still deeply entrenched in his belief that doping had zero role in his cycling career, although he addresses the matter by turns with stern intelligence and childlike naivety.
“My first thing was never look at what other people are doing. I had my own programme of vitamins and minerals, whether in tablet form, powder form, or some injection form. And I never wanted to go to bed at night worrying about someone knocking on my door, saying you’ve got a positive test.
“That’s why I never got involved in any conversation around doping, because it wasn’t something that concerned me.”
Surely it concerned him when one of his own Carrera team-mates, Guido Bontempi, tested positive for testosterone during the 1987 Tour?
“Whether it was himself that administered it, or the advice of a doctor, I don’t know. I never looked at what other guys were doing.”
The Conconi files first came to light at the end of 1999, six years after Roche had retired following 13 years in the peloton, when Italian newspaper La Repubblica broke the news that police in Ferrara had raided the offices of Conconi as part of an anti-doping investigation, uncovering computer files which showed that along with former Carrera doctor Giovanni Grazzi, Conconi had treated athletes with EPO in 1993. According to their evidence this included Roche.
“Well, I met Conconi once only,” Roche says. “When I first went to Carrera, in 1986, they were using the University of Ferrera for medical tests, so I met him for the first and only time there.
I was never in that circle because I wasn’t into doing anything. I was straight. People believe or they don’t believe
— Stephen Roche
“In 1987 there was another doctor, Grazzi, a pupil of Conconi, who was the official doctor at Carrera. So he’d come to us once every three or four months, do our blood tests, bring them back to the university, then tell us we were low on iron, on vitamin B or whatever. End of story.”
[ From the archive: Some drugs in cycling are a matter of life and deathOpens in new window ]
Would he entertain any possibility that something could have been administered to him without him knowing?
“No, never. For example, when I went to Dr Müller-Wohlfahrt, in Munich – and he’s still like a father to me, an amazing man – when I went to him with my knee problems, in 1989, he takes all these vials down, puts them into my knee. I took one home, had it tested, and it turned out to be extracts of calf liver, that kind of stuff.
“So later, I was back in his office again and I told Dr Müller-Wohlfahrt I knew what was in there. And he was shocked, and said ‘Stephen, I’m 40 years in this business. I would never, ever give anything if I thought there was something wrong with it.’
“But I would never, ever take something from anybody, even a drink, if I thought something was wrong with it. That’s why I can say today that no one might have given me something I didn’t know about. Impossible.”
Roche is also adamant the first time he heard anything about the Conconi files was when he got a phone call from his biographer, David Walsh.
“I think it was New Year’s Eve of 1999, and David said he’d proof that I’ve taken EPO, had these files from Conconi, and it’s going to be front page news tomorrow. All that kind of s**t.
“The headline was very, very damaging, but if you blow up the details, anybody can see it’s totally impossible they were actually genuine results. All the values were all different on the same day even.
“Then they start relating all these surnames, that one name ‘Ronani’ was related to me. But why would I get into a programme at the end of my career, when nothing was riding on it?
“In the end the judge came out and said after four years she cannot get the information that is needed to determine what has been going on, so she must conclude all these riders are on a programme.”
Three weeks after that news broke, Roche went on The Late Late Show, alongside Walsh, and the planned 20-minute segment ends up being extended to around 50 minutes by host Pat Kenny.
“Well, that’s my problem, I’m a bit too open sometimes, but it was very intense. With these things, you’re never going to come out okay. People will interpret it the way they want. What can you do? I did try to take it further, was asked for 50 grand up front, just to start [the legal process]. For me, you could fight it, but not everyone is going to see the results. What’s said is done. But it was very damaging. Even today it is still very damaging.
“I never got a single phone call, nothing. I would have thought I would be at least interviewed to give my opinion. So in those conditions, you think it will just go away, because there’s nothing there. It’s easy to say now in hindsight I should have put up that 50 grand and fought it harder, but for me, I’d done nothing wrong.”
Does he regret not being more outspoken on doping?
“Well as a cyclist, I was never in that circle, because I wasn’t into doing anything. I was straight. People believe or they don’t believe. I know by saying it now, maybe people go ‘ah, he’s a hypocrite’ ... f**k it.”
Business woes
Like any tale of collapse into bankruptcy, what Roche tells me is complex and frightening. Things suddenly started to implode in 2018, when his company, Shamrock Events, which had organised his cycling holidays based out of two hotels in Mallorca since 1999, went bust.
In early 2019 the owners of the Ponent Mar and the Hotel Son Caliu petitioned the Spanish courts for the involuntary bankruptcy of Roche’s business, claiming unpaid debts of €392,446, before in 2022, Roche was ordered to repay €750,000 for negligently bankrupting his Majorca firm and removing assets to bankroll his lifestyle.
He was banned from acting as a company director in Spain for seven years, although on appeal Roche got this reduced to two years, and his debts also reduced to under €400,000. It was still quite the fall from grace for a company that was once doing about €1.8 million in annual turnover.
“But in and around then, I made a couple of bad investments,” Roche says. “I wanted to grow the business, because a lot more people were getting into cycling tours, and one of the things was to buy my own unit, in Palma, my own cycling base.
“So for me, there was no problem pulling out a couple of grand for a deposit. I can always put it back in.”
Around the same time, Roche invested €120,000 with a friend in Paris who was building a new luxury car company. He also had a share in a site near Saint-Tropez, originally valued at €6 million, of which Roche owned 10 per cent.
“Then the site didn’t sell – a big problem with the planning on it – so it was wiped out. Well, it wasn’t wiped out, but it became a garden; the buyer ran away and we lost the money.
“Then with this garage in Paris, we’d a theft – four cars were stolen and the insurance wouldn’t pay because the garage front door wasn’t conformed to the security measures.
“For the new unit in Palma, because I couldn’t get the money together to complete that sale, I lost my deposit (€50,000). Everything just snowballed. I’m panicking, then of course you start back-pedalling, trying to sort things out. I knew the pressure was on then, financially, started ducking and diving, while trying to fill the holes, and it just didn’t work out.
“I still don’t agree with it, but I’m settling for it [his debts being reduced to €400,000]. The problem was, I was totally negligent as to what actually was happening. A lot of people around me were close to me, I wasn’t really told ... someone should have grabbed me by the ear and said ‘Stephen, fix this’.”
He adds: “Nevertheless, I am guilty of a lot of stuff. But nothing was done deliberately or maliciously. It was circumstances and panic, being surrounded by the wrong ... not wrong – some people who were too close to me, that weren’t really painting the right picture. And I didn’t know what situation I was in. So I made some bad decisions.”
The big regret, he says, is not facing up to his problems sooner: “And also that I didn’t show my face earlier. People were telling me horrific things, like ‘don’t show your face in Spain, don’t get on a plane, Interpol are looking for you’. All this kind of stuff.
“The one thing I should have done, and would do tomorrow if it happened again, was go there and sit down, and say ‘what can we do?’. Instead, staying away, things got worse.”
Indeed, worse was to come, when Roche lost his hillside villa in Antibes, worth in excess of €1 million.
“That was separate again, but the result of it. I had a mortgage there, interest-only mortgage, because we were also running a business there, Airbnb, so this was my pension down the road.
“When the loan came up for renewal and the articles come out about the Spanish court case, the bank just said, ‘you understand, Stephen, we cannot renew your loan’.
“And this is coming out of Covid, no international buyers, so I found a guy who wanted a quick sale, I dropped the price ... meantime, the banks are charging me late repayment penalties, 10 grand a month. So I came out of it with my hat. It was really, really bad.”
Family ties
In 2022, in the middle of his financial crisis, Roche lost his father Larry and younger sister Carol within six months. His father had lived to 86, had never been badly sick in his life, He was taken to hospital with a nosebleed, where they discovered some kidney issues, and he died a month later.
Carol had always been careful to carry out cancer screening tests, one of which showed up a tumour in her colon; she was told she might only have six weeks to live; she died six days later, at age 61.
“Of course that was very hard on everyone,” Roche says, welling up. “I have lost a lot, not just financially. And the lows have been very low. But at the same time, I’m not dwelling on that, have tried to use the lows to make me stronger, to fight back again.
“Sometimes it’s still difficult to come to terms with how things could have crumbled so quickly. The signs were there, why didn’t I pay more attention? I was so focused on making things right, then I became unreliable.”
There was a little hut of a shop on the way back into Shankill and I stopped there, bought a bottle of Lucozade, three or four Mars Bars, sat there eating them all, and just thought, this is what I’m missing
— Stephen Roche
Roche has had breakdowns in relationships before, including his split and subsequent divorce in 2003 from his wife Lydia, who he married in 1980 and who is mother to their four children, Nicolas, Christel, Alexis and Florian.
Earlier this year, his ex-partner of 10 years, French citizen Sophie Desobry, won a court action against him, claiming she was owed €300,000 for works she contributed to on the villa they shared in Antibes.
I later meet his wife, Hungarian citizen Csilla Roche-Henschl; they’re currently living in rented accommodation in Grimaud, next to Sainte-Maxime. To bring the subject back to cycling, I ask him, where is the memorabilia from his all-conquering season of 1987? His pink jersey, yellow jersey, rainbow jersey?
“Well, a lot of it is still in Spain, locked up in Palma. One of the hotels where I was working confiscated it, which wasn’t very nice, and now no one can find it.
“But I’m not looking for any sympathy. I still love the work, sharing the passion of cycling [through the tours], still get a kick out of it. So there’s another chapter yet. There’s still a lot of stuff there that I couldn’t tell for the moment. To maintain credibility, and also some of my dignity as well.
“There are things I’ve done the last few years that I’m not proud of, there were certain situations I tried to manage as best I could, and now I can say they were the wrong decisions. But I can’t undo them.”
I ask him what plans he has in place to help repay some of his debts.
“So I’m still hoping to win the lottery,” he says (repeating that more than once). “And go back down there someday, put a cheque on the table, but say I’m only willing to give you the cheque if you return my memorabilia.”
“I am using some of my contacts now, to help a developer with planning, and I get some reward for that. And I enjoy that ... [and some] corporate stuff, and some cycling tours around Nice. I’m going to build that back up a little bit, we have three cycling tours next year, on the far side of Nice, associated around the pro cycling events, such as Paris-Nice, cycling and wine tasting. And trying to rebuild the website.”
He’s hopeful too of rebuilding the full trust of old friends and family: “It’s difficult, because of my lifestyle, but it’s a work in progress, and I’m hoping with time things will sort themselves out. Because of the way things happened, they also have taken a little bit of a distance.
“But I’m not angry or upset with anyone. You make your bed, you’ve got to sleep in it. Nicolas, Christel, Alexis and Florian, they all have their own ideas of what happened but don’t really know, and someday when things finally turn around, I can sit down and tell them my side of my story.
“The problem is, time is going on – things have taken a lot longer to fix than I’d anticipated. But I have not put anybody off. I’ve distanced myself from nobody; anyone who has distanced themselves from me, it’s their doing.”
New beginnings
Roche isn’t the first rider to use the word “depression” to describe his experience after retiring from cycling at age 33 and, looking back now, he says the physical void became as troublesome as anything financial.
“Basically, I first saw cycling as a chance to do something. But it wasn’t financially driven. My attitude was, the more races you win, and the less time you spend worrying about making money, the more money you’ll make.
“I was already earning good money at 16, in Premier Dairies, worked nights too, and had my own car at age 18. Then when I retired from cycling, for the first time there was no pay-cheque coming in. That was difficult to come to terms with, but what made it harder was, after I finished my last race, I had all these business cards in my pocket, from all these people telling me how great I was, how easy it would be to find a job.
“But no regrets about retiring too soon, no. Things were getting incredibly dangerous. Young riders coming through, pushing and shoving their way about, no respect for the older guys.
“In my last Giro, in 1993, I remember we got to the mountain stages, the last week, and when it came time to go on the descent, I’m hesitating ... ‘is there gravel on that corner?’ Before, I didn’t even think: I [would] get to the descent, and I’d be gone.”
He originally moved his family back to Ireland in 1996, buying a large house off the Ballychorus Road in south Co Dublin. Then, after three years, disillusioned with opportunities here, including for his children, they all packed up for France again.
“It’s a bit sad but, again, no regrets. I’d invested in some property, in Ireland and in France, but still needed money coming in. Which is why I went into cycling holidays, which were only getting going properly.
“But not being active was the big thing. One day when we were living in Dublin, and I hadn’t ridden a bike in a long while, I just realised something was missing. So I pulled out an old bike with flat tyres and rode down to my old friend, Peter Crinnion, living down in Kilmacanoge.
“There was a little hut of a shop on the way back into Shankill, and I stopped there, bought a bottle of Lucozade, three or four Mars Bars, sat there eating them all, and just thought, ‘this is what I’m missing’.”
[ Roche goes to the limit and beyond in bid for Tour de France gloryOpens in new window ]
Roche had hardly been seen anywhere in public for several years, until three weeks ago when he appeared at the finish of the World Championships in Zurich, where Tadej Pogačar, the Slovenian superstar, became only the third ever male winner to win the Triple Crown in the same year, after Eddy Merckx (in 1974) and Roche (in 1987).
So who invited him there?
“I invited myself, actually, I felt it was important. Well, not important, but it’s taken 37 years, it may not happen for another 37 years, and I thought associating myself with that is not a bad thing for me right now. And on the back of that I’ve already been invited to the Tour route launch in Paris later this month.”
In what capacity?
“Well, as an ex-winner.”
No denying that whatsoever.
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