Dunlop brothers show the right stuff

Feeling the fear. The current champion jump jockey in Britain is a County Antrim man called Tony McCoy. In most of his dealings with the media he is a shy, fairly reserved character but that natural diffidence is reduced to a nervous silence when you ask him about the constant, looming threat of injury that stalks jockeys every day of their working lives.

"I never think about falling," he says. "The day you do is the day to stop." Similarly, Joe Brolly, one of the best gaelic football forwards in Ulster this decade, says his trademark pace has more to do with eluding the attentions of barrel-chested corner backs than anything else. Fear as a means of escape.

In a predictably anodyne World Cup moment last Thursday Kevin Keegan memorably said that Roberto Baggio's penalty against Chile "wasn't about courage. . .that's not the right words. . .that was guts". But whatever "courage" it may have taken for Baggio to lay to rest the demons of four years ago pales into insignificance when compared to the heroism of the Dunlop brothers, Joey and Robert, on the roads of the Isle of Man last week.

To the uninitiated the TT races on the island appear like a faintly bizarre, quasi-religious celebration of motorbike machinery which culminates, get this, in a day called "Mad Sunday" when the ordinary punters can race around the island on their own bikes just as fast as they want. It comes as only a mild surprise that there is no speed limit on the Isle of Man and that countless fans have been killed over the years.

But the main focus is on the week long series of races and last Monday and Wednesday Joey and Robert Dunlop scripted a few more lines to be added to their brotherly legends.

The bald statistics are impressive enough. On Monday the 46-year-old Joey won the Lightweight 250 race beating a field of men half his age for a 23rd TT win. Robert's 125 victory on Wednesday was his fifth on the island and his week also included setting the fastest lap time and an unofficial 125 record into the bargain.

Context, though, is everything and the brothers Dunlop had a TT preparation so disrupted it makes England's World Cup build-up look idyllic and trouble-free. Never mind practise times and technical assessments, the weeks before racing were more concerned with medical examinations and doctors' reports.

At the Tandragee 100 last month Joey came off during the 125 race in a spill that had the watching crowds expecting the worst for one of the most popular Northern sporting figures. He survived but with a catalogue of injuries that included a broken collar bone and a cracked pelvis. Most serious of all he lost most of the wedding ring finger on his right hand which made the prospect of controlling a motor-bike at speeds of well in excess of 100mph just weeks later almost unthinkable.

Dunlop, though, draws on deep wells of inner strength and he dragged mind and body to the venue he knows so well to do the only thing he knows - race motorcycles. As the rains poured in the build-up to the 250 race, Joey's tactical acumen allowed him to develop a strategy to land the most unlikely of wins.

Intensive physiotherapy strengthened the injured hand but he reckoned that he still wasn't up to the rigours of three laps of the fearsome TT circuit. But Joey second-guessed the weather and went out with wet tyres expecting the race to be rain-reduced to just two laps. And the battleplan worked to perfection as he careered his Honda around the island for a victory of supreme courage over ferocious adversity.

If anything, Robert's success was even more unlikely. Four years ago he had a blood-curdling crash at the TT when his back wheel came off at full speed and he slammed into a stone wall. Robert's indomitable will got him back into a racing saddle and he became a familiar figure hobbling around the pit-lanes of the North.

An acknowledged master of the TT, Robert spent the spring building up his reserves of strength for another assault on the famous course. But he too suffered serious injuries just weeks before the TT, this time at the North West 200 in mid-May. Robert broke his leg and most sane people assumed the TT would have to wait for another year.

Not this man. He decamped to a Monaghan hotel and put himself through a fearsome, intensive rehabilitation course with the single, focussed aim of getting on a bike at the TT. A rudimentary medical was duly passed and Robert, whose braking hand had already been damaged in the 1994 crash, devised a way of strapping himself to his bike thus minimising the debilitating effect of the broken leg. So at a time when most patients would be in plaster and/or on crutches, Robert Dunlop was preparing for one of world motorcycling's greatest examinations - strapped to his bike.

He won. Of course. At the presentation ceremony that night Robert made the long journey from the floor to the stage for the presentation, walking with the aid of a crutch. It looked for all the world as if the TT had finally broken him. But when he reached the stage he took one mischievous look at the assembled fans and flung his crutch into the ecstatic crowd. A man vindicated.

For the first time in the 87-year history of the TT brothers had won races in the same week. But detailed self-analyses or succinct soundbites were firmly off the agenda for the Dunlops. The cloistered world of motorbike racing has remained largely untouched by the headlong rush of the rest of world sport into the welcoming arms of a voracious media. Joey, in particular, takes that to extreme lengths. Answers are invariably of the monosyllabic variety, as if too much soul-searching would point up the sheer absurdity of it all.

Comment, such as it was, remained the preserve of his younger brother. "People think I'm mad but there's nothing else I want to do," he said. "It's my life." Still feeling the fear. And still laughing in its face.