The Tour de France — the queen of all races

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.