Paul Kimmage and the unquenchable thirst for truth

Paul Kimmage comes across as a guy who could comfortably pick a fight with a mirror; because even in the world of journalism, there are mavericks and there are mavericks – and then, in a field all on his own, snorting and kicking up the dust, there’s Paul Kimmage.

To say the man is passionate about his beloved sport of cycling is like suggesting that Elizabeth Taylor was fond of marriage – he takes the whole thing so personally, you’d think he owned the sport.

And in a way he does – or rather he wants the sport to be owned by the people, by the fans and by the clean riders as opposed to the money men and the drugs cheats that he always has in his sights.

Rough Rider on RTE1 last week was an insight into the world of professional cycling, but it also provided a window into the mind and soul of Kimmage. The story is straightforward – Kimmage is joined by wife Ann, director Adrian McCarthy and crew as he makes the ferry crossing to cover the 2013 Tour de France.

He’s bouncing back after being let go by the Sunday Times, and the Sunday Independent has hired him to give his own unique take on this Tour which takes place under such a cloud of suspicion.

But this was mesmeric television as you followed the former rider, now multi-award-winning journalist on the toughest cycle race known to man, like a human thorn in the side of the establishment and those who would even dare to cheat.

Yet Kimmage himself cheated – three times by his own admission, even if the races were of little or no importance – and he was so disgusted by those clandestine acts that he quit the sport he so passionately loves.

That might have been the end of that, because Kimmage already had a second career – as a sports journalist with the Sunday Tribune – lined up and ready to go. It was a trade he was instantly successful in, and he was to go on and win international awards for his books as well.

But Kimmage doesn’t do easy and so he wrote Rough Ride, a book that exposed his own doping, but also by extension alluded to the fact that there was more chance of finding a nun in a brothel than a clean rider on the Tour de France.

By association, this cast a cloud of suspicion on Ireland’s cycling heroes – Kelly and Roche – and Roche in particular was devastated at the betrayal by a man who was his childhood friend and one of his closest allies in the sport.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment in this entire documentary came towards the end when all riders who’d ever completed the Tour de France were invited to a special viewing platform for the end of this 100th race – and as Roche shook hands with the world and its mother at the front, his old friend watched down from the back benches and presumably wondered how this might have been.

But Rough Rider wasn’t just about covering the Tour de France – it was the story of a man who put the scandal of drugs, and deaths that resulted from blood doping, above any loss of lifelong friendships.

It was the story of an old-fashioned journalist who, when he saw a story, was like a dog with a bone. Even when he was threatened with multi-million euro legal actions, he wouldn’t let it go.

He is the ultimate whistleblower, the perennial outsider, a man who might cause you to slip quietly out of a room if you saw him coming your way.

And then in complete contrast to this Mount Vesuvius of a writer, you had his long-suffering wife Ann, a voice of reason and balance . . . an Andrews Liver Salts to calm the eternal inner storm.

His own father – himself a former cyclist – had his own perception on it: “Paul was unlucky to be born perfect in an imperfect world,” he said, and for once in almost two hours of a documentary, even his son laughed.

Rough Rider was a wonderfully insightful piece of work that captured Kimmage the journalist but also Kimmage the maverick who is determined to clean up cycling, even if he has to do it on his own.

And clearly – despite the whiter than white claims of so many of the riders and teams – he will have his work cut out. But as he cycled to the spot where the British rider Tommy Simpson collapsed and died during the ascent of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, you sensed that this passion was unquenchable no matter what obstacles were put in his way.

He believes that his type of journalism is dead, that there’s no place for it in the commercial reality of today; if that’s true, then more the pity because while Kimmage himself is the first to admit that he’s a royal pain in the ass, without those who lift the stones and stir the pot, there’s just consensus.

And whatever else Paul Kimmage does, he doesn’t do consensus.