Circle is complete for Irish bike king
‘On my day I was good enough to beat the dopers’
PEOPLE like Martyn Irvine are rarities. Not only was he an Irish success story in a sport on the margins of the mainstream, he was a Commonwealth and European medallist and a world champion who had no relationship with exercise until adulthood.
He went from couch potato to one of the world’s best track cyclists in less than a decade, the consequence of talent, yes, but also torturous determination and hard work. That effort is in the gift of very few men, and the singleminded Irvine retired this week displaying the same hard-headedness that hauled him to the top.
‘I hated being a donkey last year,’ the 30-year-old explained. ‘I just hate to turn up every race and not perform as I should. I’ve had my run, I reckon.’
It was a scintillating one. By January 2012, Irvine had put himself in a qualifying position for the London Olympics. He guaranteed his place at the Games at the World Track Championships in Melbourne that April, and then announced: ‘I used to be Mr Pessimist, and even two years ago if you’d asked me what I did for a living I would have said I was unemployed,’ said Irvine.
‘I wouldn’t have said I was a cyclist. But Grace, my fiancée, has been a rock and she hammered the negativity out of me. And Andy Sparks, my coach, all his methods are about being positive, so I’m going to London now and I know the podium is reachable. There’s no point in hiding what you are doing.’
Irvine had finished seventh in the omnium event in Melbourne to qualify in that category for London. The omnium is comprised of six different track cycling challenges, including a one-kilometre time trial by two cyclists starting on opposite sides of the track, an individual pursuit race and the distinctive ‘flying lap’, a 250-metre time trial.
However, Irvine’s ambitions were not met at the Olympics as he finished 13th. The following February, however, he was a world champion. He took gold at the championships in Minsk, Belarus in the scratch race, a format that sees all riders start together and rewards its winner the old-fashioned way: first across the line wins.
Earlier that day, Irvine had won silver in the four-kilometre individual pursuit, becoming the first Irishman since Harry Reynolds in 1896 to win a medal in track cycling.
As admirable as Irvine’s achievements in his cycling career was the story of his route to becoming a world champion.
At 19, the Newtownards native was an apprentice mechanic, working at a garage in Bangor and living a life that had no room in it for exercise, let alone elite cycling. His free time was split between watching TV and tinkering with cars.
The kid who used to forge notes so he could skip PE classes had grown into an easy-living man.
‘Two or three years into my job, the guy in the garage I was in did cycling for fun, and I thought he was a madman,’ Irvine recalled in these pages before the 2012 Olympics.
‘I don’t know what happened; I must have got hit in the head or something. That summer, I just bought a bike and I thought it was great, and within a month I was racing.
‘I had bought this road bike and I did this race locally in Newtownards and did a hill climb or something torturous like that and I was sixth in it. So I was like, “That hurt, but it was good”.
‘The guys in the club got me out in the winter then. I was still working and didn’t see cycling taking me anywhere, I just thought it was great, out on Sundays with a group of lads, talking crap and just getting on with it.
‘The next year, I think I was 15th or something stupid in my first Irish open race, and then did the Rás — hadn’t a clue what I was doing (and got the) biggest kicking of my life. I suffered like a dog round that. And then it just snowballed.’
He took three months’ unpaid leave from his job to join the An Post Sean Kelly academy in Belgium, and he was an early enthusiast for their track programme. However, that eventually unravelled, and the death of Irvine’s close friend and a mainstay of the team, Paul Healion, devastated him.
He moved on to the omnium event and spent a year travelling the world to secure his London berth.
The Games ended in disappointment but world success followed within six months. A run of injuries in 2014, after winning silver in trying to defend his world title that February, checked his progress, though, and as he lost momentum the qualifying points he needed for Rio became elusive.
This week’s news was the culmination of a long, exhausting battle, but the singular Irvine, a story of one individual and his fierce determination, left of his own volition — and with something to say, too, of the drugs that have almost ruined cycling.
‘I can 100 per cent say I raced against guys like that,’ he says of dopers. ‘On my day, when the stars align, I am good enough to beat them.
‘That’s the mentality I took. Two or three times a year I would tear myself apart and perform pretty well and I could beat anybody.
‘I think that’s the mentality I had, to keep going. Maybe I have just really strong ethics or something, but I couldn’t sleep if I cut corners.
‘I am living proof that you can work hard and get results.’