Kelly has chance to tell it like it was

Wending towards the end of the century it seems appropriate that our snot-green little island should be so dismally lacking in fin de siecle gaiety. If all we have known about ourselves for the past 50 years has been lies and distortion, well there is little space left for the sort of backslapping, great-little-country-altogether celebration at which we usually excel.

As the swollen Irish ranks of child abusers, hypocrites, swindlers, cheats, frauds and liars jostle along with their victims to funnel through the turnstile into the next millennium, it's not a great time for waving flags or looking cross-eyed down our noses at our British neighbours.

Sport offers no escape from the grind of corruption. We are no sooner up from the table having digested the brazen stodge of Michelle de Bruin's public utterances when we are asked, more depressingly, to re-examine the life and times of Sean Kelly.

For some of us it is a different task made no easier by the sense of weariness still lingering from the de Bruin business. This column has never met Sean Kelly (I know and like his manager Frank Quinn), but through the '80s his stoic Irish countryman's demeanour and the steady drip of anecdote about his exploits were enough to prejudice most of us favourably towards him.

I liked the sly humour which never quite seeped out of his twinkly eyes, the sense that here was a man who would tell you nothing, yet around whom you could evolve like a satellite marvelling at his endurance and charisma. The first man to nod in answer to a question on radio, the standard flat-toned response he gave to broadcast hysteria, "yeah, super, super".

There is a story which the journalist Gay Talese once told about Frank Sinatra in a famous profile he did of the singer. Talese was following Sinatra for a few days and one evening in a bar while playing pool, Sinatra gratuitously picked a fight with somebody he didn't like the look of. Minders intervened and the business was hushed over and a few days later, when Talese raised the matter with Sinatra, he had all but genuinely forgotten about it. For Sinatra life happened too quickly for re-examination. He wasn't blithe but he was in a head-long hurry and reacted everywhere by instinct.

I've always imagined it to be the same with Kelly. All those tales about how relentlessly and ruthlessly he controlled the peleton, all those stories of his natural toughness to which others deferred. He calculated none of it, his cycling life was just an exaggerated form of survival. I wondered last week if when Willy Voet was stopped by police near Lille on July 8th last and not long afterwards abandoned and disowned by cycling when he began singing to the police if Kelly ever stopped and wondered where it would all lead. People who know him said no, he wouldn't ever worry about things like that.

And that was the charm. Kelly was one of the great heroes and the publication of Willy Voet's book, Chain Massacre, last week has diminished that standing somewhat, but there is still a magic about the man. Allegations that this giant was involved in switching urine with a mechanic, or that he dabbled in other drugs on other big occasions, still jar with those of us who have always retained a little mental asterisk beside his name since he tested positive twice. For me and many others the fact of him having gone to South Africa at a time when such a deed was reprehensible has always stuck in the craw as more of a betrayal than the positive tests.

At the time of those tests little fuss was made. The Irish sports media hadn't yet girded itself for the asking of hard questions. There was always the cheap solace of the empty argument that sure they must all be doing it. Anyway it was Kelly and he was special.

The thrilling aspects of Kelly, his bravery and durability and his charisma, are not lost on Willy Voet and he is at pains to point out that if drugs hadn't existed in the peleton Kelly would still have been a champion. Voet has spilled the beans so comprehensively that the term spilled scarcely fits. He has exploded the bean can. The beans are running down the walls and clinging to the ceiling. Fragments of reputations are everywhere.

One fondly imagines that Voet has a point when he says that Kelly would always have been a champion, but it doesn't hold water any more than does Ben Johnson's argument that everyone in the 1988 Olympic 100 metres final was on drugs and by winning he was the true champion anyway. Doesn't stand up. If it was wrong for Michelle de Bruin the rule applies to everyone else equally, no matter how great the natural talent they have been blessed with. If the most gifted take drugs to retain their edge, it merely ups the ante for the also-rans with the needles in their backsides.

After an epic career Kelly is half a decade into contented retirement. He is untouchable and essentially the allegations which Voet has made against his old friend are unprovable.

Yet Kelly knows things. He knows what the culture was when he rode a bike, he knows men who have died as victims of that culture, he knows where it all leads.

Kelly has a good and healthy life now, happy and at peace with his roots. I admired him when he declined to join the chorus of outrage which greeted Paul Kimmage's book 10 years ago, was pleased when I never heard him (as Stephen Roche did on Liveline not long ago) claim that cycling was clean when he rode in it. Voet's book and the corpse of every dead cyclist since Tom Simpson invalidated that claim forever.

Kelly isn't equipped for brazen hypocrisy. He has been absorbing Voet's book this weekend and has declined to comment until he has considered it all. There is the chance that he will dip the head down and pedal hard to his lawyer's office, pull down the shutters and deny everything.

Only he knows how valid the denials would be. Only Kelly knows if Voet has betrayed cycling by making up 60,000 words of the most detailed lies ever told against a sport, or if he has contributed greatly to saving cycling from itself by reluctantly laying the sport bare.

Only Kelly knows the truth, but if Voet is right or close to being right, Kelly can make one last gesture which will keep him in the pantheon. He can tell it like it was. The culture, the ignorance, the pressures, the mistakes he made and the mistakes others made. He can ask the questions which Voet has asked himself. If it were his son or daughter, would he be happy for them to take what everyone else took? Happy to release them into a culture which condoned this? That's the one question we all have to ask ourselves when we shrug our shoulders and turn away from drugs in sport stories.

Kelly has never rode a harder climb than the one he has to negotiate in the next day or two.