Greatest sports stars’ achievements under dark cloud of suspicion

A DARK shadow hangs over the reputations of some of Ireland’s greatest athletes and nothing, it seems, can ever remove it.

Greatest sports stars’ achievements under dark cloud of suspicion

This week I interviewed Ireland’s most successful cyclist Stephen Roche about his new autobiography (an interview that was broadcast just hours before the revelations of the doping charges against seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong). It is 25 years since Roche’s remarkable achievement of winning the Tour, the Giro d’Italia, and the World Championship, the so-called triple crown. Only one man, the legendary Eddy Mercyx, had done it previously and nobody has done it since, so difficult is the task to achieve.

We spoke about that and many other things in his book: The break-up of his marriage as he struggled to cope with retirement from the sport and the cancer that hit his seven-year-old son five years ago (from which, thankfully, he is in remission). But, inevitably, and not just because the book deals with it, our interview turned to the issue of drug cheating in the sport and his own experience of dealing with allegations that he engaged in doping (which, it must be stated, he denies).

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