The Tour de France — the queen of all races
The Tour de France — the queen of all races — was the most exciting event I had ever witnessed.
Spoon-fed to your motorbike pilot for 3,500 km, you had to fight your corner against twenty other photographers, two Tour directors, dozens of team managers, support cars and motorbikes, the French Gendarmerie, and hundreds of others who didn’t want you there in the first place — among them 200-odd, finely tuned, adrenaline-pumped racers.
In honour of Ben Healy wearing the yellow jersey, after a fantastic ride two days ago, I’m sharing a few of my pictures of the Tour de France, when Stephen Roche was crowned winner on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, in 1987.
It was a very special day for Irish cycling.
Based in Brussels at the time, I had been covering the Tour and all the Classics for a few years, and would continue until Sean Kelly retired. Although he never won the Tour, he won dozens of Classics and I forget how many Paris–Nice titles.
King Kelly, as I christened him, had the strength of a JCB and was as clever as a Kerry cattle dealer. Roche, on the other hand, was more of a finely tuned Italian racing car…
Ten years or so earlier, I ended up, by chance, as an accredited photographer sitting on the back of a motorbike during Liège–Bastogne–Liège — one of the toughest Belgian Classics. After submitting my first black and white pictures of Paris–Roubaix — the worst muck-in-your-face, 160km ride on the atrocious cobbled boreens of France and Belgium — I was hired by Winning, then the top cycling magazine, to be their photographer alongside British veteran Graham Watson.
To cut a long story short: I became a bicycle racing photographer. I was hooked.
The Tour de France — the queen of all races — was the most exciting event I had ever witnessed. Spoon-fed to your motorbike pilot for 3,500 km, you had to fight your corner against twenty other photographers, two Tour directors, dozens of team managers, support cars and motorbikes, the French Gendarmerie, and hundreds of others who didn’t want you there in the first place — among them 200-odd, finely tuned, adrenaline-pumped racers.
To follow Kelly and the top descenders at over 100 km/h through sharp bends on the way down from snow-capped peaks — your guts in your mouth — NO FEAR… And then to be alongside them on the next climb, riding high on their pedals, sweat pouring off them, surrounded by hundreds of crazed roadside fans — it left me speechless.
One year, on the final day of the Tour de France, my Belgian motorbike driver had a moment of madness
and drove into the crowd. It was a miracle no one was killed.
As he lay screaming on the side of the road, he tore off his leathers and showed me where I’d been beating him black and blue for the last three weeks...
My life as a cycling photographer had become so stressful that I’d been taking out all my frustrations on him — fists clenched, shouting at him to take crazy risks to get me into the best photographing spots.
He screamed at me that I wasn’t using my cameras as toys anymore — they had become tools — and he didn’t want to work with me anymore!
Well, he wasn’t a great pilot, but he was right about that.
When Kelly retired, so did I.
I had lost the hunger needed to do such a mad job.
So here it is. It seems that, forty years later, most of us have survived.
All riders who still sit on their bikes at the finish on the Champs-Élysées after 23 days of gruelling, kamikaze racing are superheroes.
This is in praise of all the domestiques — whose names are rarely mentioned — and who, all of them, put the top three riders on the podium.
Paul Kimmage and Martin Earley, this is for you.
We’re currently digitising the remarkable cycling photography archive of Nutan.
For an early glimpse into this historic collection, click here to preview a selection of images.
The Belgian seaside
A blog written by Nutan about the Belgian seaside.
I was born in Belgium, probably the most surreal country I have ever been in. Living in Ireland for the last forty years or so, the coast at the sea evokes the wildness of cliffs, the roars of waves crashing upon the rocks, and a myriad of seagulls, terns, gannets, kittiwakes, and countless other species of birds circling overhead, searching for food or chasing each other for the sheer fun of it.
Not so in waffle country, where grey, boring concrete buildings line the straight 67 km of coastal sea road, towering over the odd turn-of-the-century stylish villas — reminders of a period when property developers, concrete mixers, and ever-so-uniquely boring architects were not directing that unglamorous scene, yet. Repeated endlessly in perfect order, you will find in each of the wee towns a succession of quick-tax-cum-bicycle rental places, followed by luna park arcades, followed by cafe-restaurants, followed by plastic bucket-and-spade shops... ad vitam aeternam...
When you reach the end of one lot of constructions, you have a kilometre or so of often-fenced sand dunes before you get to the next lot of constructions that marks the beginning of the next hamlet by the sea... By chance, Belgium offers dozens of delicious beers, aromatic hot waffles, and the delicacy of shrimp croquettes, waterzooi, and a great variety of Belgian dishes... Their chips, cooked in beef fat, are probably the best I’ve tasted in the world.
Thousands upon thousands of workers take their month-long holidays at the same time and flock to their seaside apartments, hotels, family pensions, or caravans. Most of them bring their pet dogs, which they walk endlessly up and down between the variety of commercial businesses, a hundred yards or so of grey sand, and the monotonous grey North Sea... The near horizon is dotted with ferries going to England, the odd sailing boat, and a few wandering seagulls looking for scraps, as the sea has long ago been nearly fished out by the local commercial fleet of small trawlers operating out of Zeebrugge and Oostende.
When I was a child, we went to Wenduyne or De Panne for a week’s Easter holiday. How blissful it was to spend your pocket money on a rented go-kart (quick-tax) or a bicycle with racing handlebars... The straight coastal road, when no cars could travel, was perfect for roller-skating. The smell of hot waffles was in the air. Old black-and-white Laurel and Hardy films were playing every night in the seaside cafés' covered verandas, where my hard-working father would allow himself a beer, my mother a cup of milky coffee, and my sister and I a hot chocolate each.
The cherry on the cake was a game of ping pong with my father in the cellar of the pension. We didn’t care about boring architecture; for us, the Belgian seaside was heaven. We did venture out on the beach in the dry mornings, where my sister would make and trade paper flowers for seashells. Ever the hunter-gatherer, I was appointed chief seashell collector by my father and mother, who would keep a distant eye on us, hidden behind their daily newspaper and women’s magazine.
At the time, the only danger was to find dog poo on your sandals and, of course, there wasn’t a mobile phone to be seen for another forty years or so.
Belgian waffles are bliss.
Click here to view the complete archive of the Belgian seaside.