Tragedies won’t dilute bikers’ devotion to Isle of Man TT

There is a chapter in the recently published biography Road Racer – It's in my blood by Michael Dunlop that is entitled 'I had to do it for him'.

It describes a road race in Northern Ireland, the North West 200 and begins with Dunlop riding a practice session with his brother William and father Robert.

In the course of the lap 19-year-old Michael comes across a man lying on the road beside what remains of his bike. When he gets closer he realises it is his father, who is dying, his engine having seized at 150 mph (240 kph).

Michael stops his motorcycle and runs over, just the two of them alone on the road. But his father’s injuries are catastrophic and the son can do nothing. Later that day Robert is pronounced dead.

Kerry ready and open for championship business

---

European rugby draws: Familiar faces and foes for Irish sides

---

Galway gunning for old rivals in pivotal western shoot-out

---

Baby Blacks reap revenge on Ireland with 66-point win

---

Between Robert Dunlop’s death and burial the sons decide to take part in the race. Michael describes how the stewards try to stop them having “decided we were mentally unfit to be in control of a vehicle”.

But the defiant brothers bully their way to their machines on the starting line. William breaks down on the practice lap and Michael, freighted with emotion and having to race past Mather’s Cross, where he found his father, wins the race.

“I went home,” he says. “It didn’t sink in what I had done…To go out and drive two days after your dad has died – who does that?”

The next day they buried Robert in Garryduff Presbyterian Church, near Ballymoney, the same church in which his brother Joey was celebrated eight years before, having also died racing on the roads.

This week 33-year-old Alan Bonner, from Stamullen in county Meath became the third person to die in this year's Isle of Man TT Race, his death following those of Jochem van den Hoek and Davey Lambert.

Last year four racers died bringing the number killed at the TT and Manx Grand Prix to 255 since 1911. Eight of those fatalities have been Irish riders.

In Ireland over 120 have died in Klinchy, Tandragee, Dundrod and around the triangle of the Northwest course between Portstewart, Coleraine and Portrush.

Why they race on lethal circuits, where dry stone walls, lamp posts and kerbs make it impossibly dangerous has been an ongoing question with Dunlop’s cavalier attitude giving an explanation, if not an understanding.

Heightened danger

The brutality of the sport demands an unusual relationship with death and life, death seen as an acceptable risk and its heightened danger one of the thrills. Watching the super-powered machines tear along country lanes the intrinsic emotion is fear.

It is a stunning spectacle, a throwback to pioneering days when no one ever questioned the concept of personal freedoms against obvious issues of health and safety. In that way it is fascinatingly archaic and defiantly out of tune.

But there is one important difference. Road racing has become more dangerous, not less, as machines develop and hitting a five bar gate is no less fatal than it ever was.

Speeds at the 1911 edition of the Manx races reached 41 mph (66 kph). Two years ago James Hillier rode his Kawasaki at 206 mph (331.5 kph) along the closed road. The on-machine footage is of trees and telegraph poles ripping past his head, an almost indescribable image of danger.

The deaths at the TT are never in one place but in an array of mystically named landmarks along the course, Greeba Bridge, Ballaspur, Keppel Gate and Gorse Lea, where Ireland's Derek Brien died in 2011.

Comprehending their clarity of choice to race has become both a philosophical journey and a money earner, the 72,000 population in the Isle of Man swelling by 40,000 for TT week. The Northwest 200 attracts 120,000.

Nobles Hospital in the main town of Douglas has built up a worldwide reputation on the back of the two-wheel blitz. Like the Royal Victoria in Belfast once was for gunshot wounds, Noble has grown expertise in safely removing one piece racing leathers in traumatic accidents.

They have people who speak most European languages and a list of questions printed in Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, French and Japanese. No crash victim is more than 14 minutes away but on a merciless course that is often too far.

Robert Dunlop, before he died, crashed at Ballaugh Bridge and from then to his death raced with a specially adapted machine because of the severity of his hand injuries.

But Robert, like Michael and William, have none of the modern infatuations with living long and living safe. They do not analyse their relationship with racing and death but see it through the prism of individual expression.

There is little judgement, their independence to race as they wish fiercely defended and all of them cast by outsiders as tragic heroic figures in the making.

“It’s in your blood,” explains Michael in the last line of his book. “

Weeks after his father’s death, he was back on the island riding too quickly over the majestic sweep of Snaefell Mountain.