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By Brendan McKeown

Cycling legend Stephen Roche today explains why the Giro d’Italia has to be the world’s most passionate bike race – he risked everything to win it.

He told how he had to run the gauntlet of furious Italian fans after taking the lead, and that a bitter team-mate has yet to come to terms with his victory.

Roche admitted: “I still haven’t spoken to Roberto more than 25 years on.”

Dubliner Roche won the Giro d’Italia in 1987, the first in a remarkable trio of victories that included the Tour de France and World Championship in the same year.

To this day he remains only the second person after the great Eddy Merckx to have completed the sport’s triple crown.

But not everyone was happy at the then 27-year-old’s achievements.

His team-mate, Italian Roberto Visentini, felt he should have been the one wearing the coveted maglia rosa, or pink jersey, of race leader when the three-week tour wrapped up in Saint-Vincent.

And he thought Roche had fallen foul of one of cycling’s cardinal rules by defying team orders and riding himself into the lead – sparking one of sport’s fiercest rivalries, a vicious backlash among Italian fans and a debate that rages to this day.

Roche said: “Every time I go back to Italy people still joke about it to me.

They say, ‘Ah, Stephano, Stephano, I spoke to Roberto last night... and he didn’t ask me to say hello’.

“I didn’t realise there was still a problem. I’d tried to speak to him a few times over the years and before I retired we spoke a couple of times at races and to me there was never a problem.

“But I realised last year there was still a problem when Carrera had a 25-year anniversary for me.

"They invited the whole team back, and anybody who was concerned with Carrera, and Visentini was invited but didn’t come.

“I spoke to a journalist and said, ‘Hey I’m missing Roberto – have you any news from him?’ and he said, ‘I rang him up last night asking if he was going to come and I had to hold the phone away from my ear because he was screaming so much – how could I come up there after what that guy did to me?’.”

After a promising amateur career Dubliner Roche turned professional in 1981 and racked up impressive victories including beating one of the all-time greats, Bernard Hinault, in the Tour of Corsica before becoming the first neo-pro to win the Paris-Nice stage race.

His ascent continued with good wins and high placings, culminating with a third in the 1985 Tour de France, until the following year when a crash caused a knee injury that wrote off the season and blighted the rest of his career.

But in 1987 everything came good and, in the form of his life, Roche was co-leader of the Italian Carrera team going into the Giro.

The unwritten agreement was that Roche would ride as a ‘super-domestique’ in the service of defending champion Visentini – on the understanding the roles would be reversed in the Tour de France later that year.

But on the eve of the grand tour Visentini admitted that, while Roche would ride for him in Italy, when the Irishman slogged it out on the roads of France, “I’ll be on the beach”.

They were words that would come back to haunt him.

With Visentini in the pink jersey halfway into the tour, Roche got into a breakaway – an opportunistic move that in normal circumstances would have been seen as smart team tactics.

The impetus would be on other teams to chase him down, allowing Visentini and their team-mates an easy ride to the finish.

But Visentini didn’t see it like that.

Roche explained: “He was intelligent enough to know there was no big deal there – the big deal was he chased me down. I didn’t attack him, I just went downhill faster than him – OK it’s attacking but it’s not attacking – I just went faster than him.

“He could have followed me but he didn’t and there was a group in front.

" If it had been [team-mate] Eddy Schepers that went away nothing would have been said because he was just a ‘normal’ rider – and they say I’m a normal rider so why can’t I get away?

"So here I am up front, 50km to go, fininishing on a hill, knowing the other teams are going to chase me down because of my record...

“It was only when I heard Visentini was riding behind me I thought, ‘wow, what’s this, it can’t be’ and then I started reacting.

“I said to the team car, ‘tell Roberto if he wants to continue riding, that he keeps something under the pedal because when he catches me he’s going to need it’.

“I rode my eyeballs out and he caught me with 8km to go on the final climb and then the group went away and I went with it and Roberto couldn’t follow, and that’s the way it happened.

"Because he was so worried and nervous at the fact I was away and causing him problems that he worried himself away and he’ had no energy left on the final climb.”

Visentini used his waning energies to badmouth Roche to the press after each day’s racing and the tifosi, Italy’s diehard, partisan cycling fans lapped it up.

They would line the route to hurl abuse, threaten and even spit at the new race leader as he clawed his way up gruelling mountain stages.

At one point, fearing Visentini would run him off the road, Roche leaned across and grabbed his handlebars, saying: “If I go, you go as well.”

Another time Roche realised the front fork of his bike was cracked and could fall apart at any time but he knew his great rival would attack if he got wind of the situation. Instead the Irishman risked his life to finish the stage rather than show any sign of weakness.

And eventually with the help of some allies among the peleton, including Schepers and the Scottish rider Robert Millar, and with victory within his grasp, he was able to convince the rest of his team to back him and he held on for victory.

But speaking in Belfast ahead of the Giro coming to Ireland in May, Roche said the bad feeling among Italians had eased when they realised he was a worthy winner – with a bit of divine intervention as well.

He explained: “After I’d won, it wasn’t actually forgotten but it was tolerated. Visentini had kept talking and I kept riding and that was one of my best assets.

“I stayed away from the press – well, I didn’t stay away but I spoke intelligently – and not piping Visentini down, staying neutral, and every time Visentini hit me with a blow I hit back.

“And I rode to win the race rather than to beat Visentini. The Italians, at the end of it, appreciated that because Visentini kept talking about how strong he was but he wasn’t able to drop me, where I wasn’t talking but I was still beating him and that was a major factor.

“And then after the Giro I got an invitation for private audience with the Pope and that was kind of a statement that they’d forgotten the problems.”

Roche insisted the race still meant the world to him – despite the difficulties he faced during it.

He added: “That’s where it all started for me. My Triple started with the Giro so for me it’s very close to my heart, and the fact RCS accepted the invitation from Ireland to start here in Belfast, for me it’s a great honour.

“I was inducted into the Giro Hall of Fame a few weeks ago and that was also here in Ireland – it could have been in Milan but it wouldn’t have been the same. It’s a very positive thing – I’m just looking forward to the event getting here for a few days.

“Every time I’m out here on the roads I see more and more pink, hopefully there’ll be even more – there will be on the day – but hopefully people won’t hold back. In Italy when the race goes through different towns it’s amazing and it’s becoming fashion now to colour your house, colour your shoes, your hair or the river or whatever.

“When the Tour came here in 1998 we saw it happen and I’m sure that’ll happen again.”

Another of Stephen Roche’s great rivalries was far less hostile.

Sean Kelly was also a grand tour winner and between them they dominated the sport throughout the 1980s but off the bike, the pair remained firm friends.

Roche said: “It’s kind of bizarre the fact we went at it at the same time.

"If the likes of Sean and myself hadn’t existed then the likes of [Roche’s nephew] Dan Martin winning Liege-Bastogne-Liege last year or my son Nicolas coming fifth in the Tour of Spain would have been headline news as an incredible achievement.

“But people often compare it with myself and Sean winning the three grand tours and maybe myself and Sean were a little bit special.

“We were No1 and No2 for 10 years and coming from a nation that just wasn’t cycling was incredible. We were both ambitious and passionate and strong about our sport and we had the genes then as well.

“The good thing about myself and Sean was we were great rivals on the bike but once we got off the bike it didn’t matter. We had a few arguments on the bike but nothing ever stood in our way off it.

“I always said, when journalists asked who was the best, that they should be happy that we have the two best in the world, not worry about who’s the best. I didn’t have to be the best Irish guy and Sean didn’t have to be.

“Rather than pit us against each other, like the Italians and some other countries would be tempted to do.

“Hinault-Fignon, Moser-Saronni, De Vlaeminck-Merckx – there have always been rivalry in those countries when there’s two guys capable of doing well.

“But with me and Sean it was never a question of who’s the best but that we were both the best in the world.

“Put the whole international calendar down on a table and be happy that all those races have been won by an Irish guy. We were lucky.”

Disarmingly modest and unassuming, you’d be forgiven for believing Roche that luck had anything to do with it.