No second act, just tragedy for Shay Elliott

ATHLETICS: The story of Ireland's first great cyclist has echoes of Lance Armstrong's – but with a far sadder denouement

I HAD an amazing dream last night in which I was riding up Mont Ventoux behind Lance Armstrong and Shay Elliott.

We were about halfway to the top, in sweltering heat, hysterical crowds either side of us, and I was wondering when to make my breakaway.

That's what happens when you've watched five hours of the Tour de France every day for three weeks, then gone to bed having watched the new documentary, Shay Elliott, Cycle of Betrayal.

There’s been something highly infectious about this year’s Tour, and the main reason for that is Armstrong. Rarely have I been more consumed by a sporting event. On several occasions this week I’ve been roaring Armstrong on, and even if I still don’t entirely believe in him, here’s a guy, older than me, giving it absolute socks. It makes you wonder if the big Texan is superhuman after all.

Obviously F Scott Fitzgerald didn’t have sport in mind when he said there are no second acts in American lives. Sport is full of comebacks and Armstrong, as we know, is now in his third act. Having won the world title in 1993, his career should have ended three years later when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Maybe the exact circumstance of his recovery to win a record seven Tours will never be known, nor this latest comeback, but nobody can argue with the ruthless single- mindedness with which he goes about it.

Because cycling rarely does fairytale endings, Armstrong’s third act, having sat out of the sport for three years, must be the envy of every man who has ever ridden a bicycle for a living.

That’s what I was thinking at the end of the Elliott documentary, which goes out on Setanta tomorrow evening. With uncanny timing, it captures in grimly fascinating detail the flip-side of professional cycling.

In many ways the scale of Armstrong's success is only put into context by the scale of Elliott's tragedy. Two riders, at one point on a similar journey, but ending up at the opposite ends of it. Cycle of Betrayal, the best Irish sporting documentary in years, presents all the glamour of professional cycling and, at the same time, all the treachery of it. Few riders went from one end to the other as quickly as Elliott.

It must be the saddest story in all of Irish sport, and, 38 years after his death, it seems more shocking than ever.

There is so much classic archive footage in Cycle of Betrayal that it’s hard to know where to begin, but the clips of Elliott attempting his comeback, when, just like Armstrong, he was three years out of the sport, are the most resonating.

Had Elliott been any way as successful in his comeback, would he still be alive? After Alberto Contador made his decisive strike for the maillot jaune on the climb to Verbier last Sunday, it seemed Armstrong’s comeback, at the age of 37 years and 10 months, would also be cut short. Contador, 10 years his junior, gained a minute and 35 seconds inside the last 5km. It would have been perfectly understandable had Armstrong dropped out right there and gone back to the beer and pizza he’d been enjoying for three years.

Instead, on the following mountain stage he chased down the breakaway riders on the Col du Petit St Bernard with the same brute force that won him those seven consecutive Tours from 1999-2005.

On Wednesday, the years fell away again as he accelerated over the top of the Col de la Colombiere to minimise Contador’s advantage ahead of him. The pain of this effort was written all over Armstrong’s face, which only made it all the more impressive. Given the Tour’s history, you know these riders could test positive at any time, but if you can suspend your belief it’s been one awesome spectacle.

Contador then confirmed his status as the best rider in the Tour by winning Thursday’s time-trial, and only a massively shocking episode on today’s penultimate stage up Mont Ventoux – although hopefully not a repeat of Tom Simpson’s death there in 1967 – will deny the Spaniard overall victory. But if Armstrong can hold his place on the podium it must be the most remarkable Tour finish of all.

Unless, of course, he comes back and betters it next year.

“It would take a lot to win back what I had,” Elliott said of his comeback, “but from a personal point of view I can win back a terrible lot.”

That was the spring of 1970, and Elliott was 35. His life up to that point was already extraordinary, a tale of rags to riches and back again. Growing up in Crumlin, the son of a motorbike mechanic, who only learned to ride a bike at age 14, Elliott achieved the previously infeasible by breaking down a series of barriers – cultural and physical – to make it into the peloton. In 1955, age 21, he became the first foreigner to be ranked the top amateur in France.

“This Irish lad came to France to learn to cycle,” they said, “but we think he has come to teach us.”

Elliott wasn’t quite as romantic about it: “Due to an ambitious curse, I think, I just wanted to go further afield.”

His reputation for courage, and class, earned him a place on the Helyett-Potin team, the best around, alongside French greats Jacques Anquetil and Jean Stablinski, the son of Polish immigrants. Although Stablinski became a dear friend, Elliott would eventually leave the team suspecting both riders of sabotaging his chances for victory, most infamously the 1962 World Championship, where he finished second to Stablinski.

After 11 years as a professional, Elliott retired in 1967, the first English speaking rider to wear the leader’s jersey in all three major tours – the Giro (1960), the Vuelta (1962) and the Tour itself (1963). Most riders would have lived off that for the rest of their lives, but Elliott returned to Ireland with only the same small suitcase he left with. He split from his French wife, Marguerite, and lost his life savings in a dodgy hotel investment in Brittany. “Just one of those things,” said Elliott, “that happens to somebody that’s nice.”

Four years later, at the age of 36, he would be dead.

He'd started up a panel-beating business, which provided some refuge, but inevitably he missed cycling, and the lure of riding the 1970 World Championships in Leicester proved irresistible. This would be his comeback. But, having sold his stories of sabotage and of cycling's drug-taking to the Peoplenewspaper, he found himself an outcast from the sport he once charmed.

On the morning of May 7th, 1971, two weeks after his father’s funeral, Elliott was found in the small apartment above his business on Prince’s Street. A gunshot wound to the chest had fatally ruptured his heart and liver, and the coroner’s report deemed it “self-enacted”.

Few of his close friends actually believe this, and instead claim it was a tragic accident. Either way, there was no second act in the life of Shay Elliott.

Shay Elliott, Cycle of Betrayal,is broadcast tomorrow evening on Setanta Ireland at 7.45pm.