CYCLING | TOUR DE FRANCE

One day, I found myself on the back of a motorbike hurtling down the Champs Elyse’s in Paris, on the last stage of the Tour de France, when my driver had a moment of madness and drove into the crowd. It was a miracle nobody was killed.

As he lay screaming on the side of the road, he removed his leather jacket to show me where I had been beating him black and blue for the last three weeks — I was so tense as a photographer on the Tour that I had been passing it all on to him, demanding that he take me to the best places for pictures. He declared that he wouldn’t work with me again, that I had stopped using my cameras as toys and was using them (and him) as tools.

Well, he may have been a bad driver but he was right about me. The next day, I packed my gear and came back to Ireland.

Passage from the book “The Irish Today, A celebration of Ireland and the Irish diaspora”.

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I have photographed the Tour de France for a total of six years, including the year (1987) when Stephen Roche won the Triple Crown of victories in the Tour de France and the Giro d’ Italia general classification, plus the World Road Race Championship.

We are working on digitalising a beautiful selection of photographs taken during those years, so if you are interested to see more, please sign up for the newsletter here so we can keep you updated!