THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE is an extract from Joe Barr’s ‘Going the Distance.
As racing began to take over my life, the amount of driving I was doing at the weekends was crazy.
I’d pack up the car in Donegal, drive to a race in Northern Ireland on a Saturday, drive home again, up early on the Sunday and drive to a race in the South. It might be at the other end of the island. That’s the way it worked in those days.
The Southern guys really only bothered with the Sunday racing. Some of them travelled, but not many.
But the Northern lads tried to cram in as much as possible. So effectively we were having a double hit every week.
At times I barely had money for the fuel and was driving home on fumes. I had four hours more driving to do than the Belfast guys and I sometimes had to sleep in the car.
Back then most of the northern races were run from Orange halls. There would be tea and homemade cakes for the cyclists after the races and we’d stand around socialising surrounded by Orange banners and portraits of Queen Elizabeth.
I made a lot of great friendships in Orange halls down the years. There were no restrictions on the numbers, so some of the races had over a hundred riders depending on the importance of the race, the weather and whether some of the top riders were away on international duty. And they were long races too: 100 miles or more on open roads with traffic roaring past. Even juniors were riding 100-mile races.
The races were officially amateur so there was no appearance money. There’d be a big silver cup for the winner and brown envelopes for the first, second and third. It never amounted to much. A massive pay day – and I mean massive – would have been a hundred quid. Was it strictly legal? It’s hard to tell.
Put it this way: the races were always hosted by a local club so the entry fees were divided up into so much for the club and so much for the prizes. There was no big commercial sponsorship so the sport just about paid for itself. Those brown envelopes still exist in amateur cycling today but the prize money hasn’t increased to match inflation – it’s hardly enough to keep you in inner tubes.
My first big win in open racing came in 1982 at the Tommy Givan Memorial event at Hillsborough in County Down.
Hillsborough is a tidy little village that looks more like something from the English home counties than a typical Irish settlement. It has some classy pubs, an oyster festival and some of the steepest property prices in Northern Ireland. There’s a little square next to the castle, which was built by the Hill family hundreds of years ago.
The race started from the square, hung a sharp left up the road towards Dromore and went straight into a massive hill climb.
Just the sort of hill that would suit a certain young lightweight climber from Donegal. I’d travelled up from home that morning and signed on at the inevitable Orange hall on the Ballynahinch Road.
I can’t remember the exact distance, but it would have been around a hundred miles. The Tommy Givan was known to be an extremely tough race at the time and they don’t run it over that course nowadays. All the top riders in Northern Ireland and beyond were there, some of them internationals.
Call it the arrogance of youth, but after two or three laps I thought to myself, ‘I could do a job on these guys.’ And I did. I just opened the taps and rode away from them.
Halfway up that hill I was confronted by a guy called Jackie Corkan shouting from the roadside.
Jackie was a respected figure on the local cycling scene and had parked himself in the hedge on a camping stool to watch the race. Not much of a day’s entertainment when the bunch only flew past about once every half hour.
‘Catch yourself on, young fella. You’ll wear yourself out!’ he yelled.
Looking back on it, there was no sanity in the way I rode that day. Hitting the front near the start and going as hard as you can is not the way to win a pushbike race. It defies common sense. But at the finish, I was six minutes in front of the second-placed rider.
What I hadn’t realised was that the Tommy Givan was the final selection race for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane.
My rush of blood to the head caused quite a stir in the back pages of the Telegraph. Who was this kid who had blown away the entire Northern Ireland team?
I’d won that qualification race by a country mile, or three. By rights, a place on the team was mine, but the men in suits had made their decision months before.
I have a heap of respect for the guys who went to Brisbane, but the selectors just ignored their own criteria and decided young Cinders would not be going to that ball.
The whole episode left me with a bad taste in the mouth and the determination that when the next games came around, they wouldn’t be able to ignore me so easily.
‘Going the Distance’ by Joe Barr is published by Gill Books. More info here.
