No longer a nuisance

If anything, he felt a nuisance.

Every time Martyn Irvine came through Dublin Airport, it seemed he was no more than an awkward obstacle as passengers jostled to get past and get about their business and their holidays. Even with his Irish track-suit top alerting people to the fact he was there in order to represent his country, there was always a sigh and an occasional tut from behind in the queue as he checked in or just took up space at the baggage carrousel. With three bikes stuffed into two oversized cases, nobody ever cared to ask who he was or what he was doing all these years, they just wanted him out of the way and the sooner the better.

Eight days ago though, in the barren surrounds of the terminal in Minsk, he got wondering if this time would be any different. With his world championship gold tucked away, he sent a text that read: “Not sure what storm is gonna hit me when I get home.”

“Put it this way,” you replied, “it won’t be the usual arrival.”

And it wasn’t.

He was no sooner off his flight than two Gardaí approached him.

“Are you Martyn?”

“Yeah?”

“We are here to escort you on your way.”

He laughed at the momentary recognition. “Different from the usual routine,” he smiles, “but then I started to feel as awkward as I did proud.” So awkward, he nearly yearned for the old days and lonely ways.

In front of you now in a restaurant, he’s the least likely person in the entire place to be a champion. He’s a reluctant winner, hates the attention, doesn’t like to stand out or talk in front of a crowd and would rather keep to himself. You ask to see his medal and it slowly appears but then disappears again. In fact his treat to himself when he got home from the World Championships was to go to the cinema. There, he started to laugh aloud as he considered how absurd his achievement was and while he got some strange looks, had others known the story they might well have joined in.

Irvine is 27 but asked to describe himself just a decade ago, he says straight out he was ‘a slob’. He used to empty a two-litre bottle of Coke each evening while with dinner, chips were always his greasy side of choice.

“I wasn’t obese, I could see my feet, but I was still unhealthy. Just a lazy bum.”

He’d skip PE in school, coming up with bland excuses that never went beyond feeling unwell as he attempted to earn a sick note. Sitting it out, and watching classmates bask in time away from the books, he never understood why you’d bother to raise your heartbeat when it wasn’t necessary.

“When I was 16, cars were my interest so I quit school and got a mechanic’s apprenticeship in a garage in Ards. I can see it clear as day now. Nothing changed. I was last in and first out of work, and then back home to watch TV and that was it. I’d get home at seven, hit the couch straight away, my mam made me dinner and there’d be the same routine the next day.”

Nine days ago, as Irvine got ready for the medal ceremony of the four-kilometre pursuit, his legs were screaming at him. In the semi-finals, he’d come within .26 of a second of the 4:20 mark he yearned for but that run had taken it out of him. With the final just over, he looked at the clock, saw he’d gone four seconds slower and had nearly been lapped by Michael Hepburn. Even if he went to the worlds aiming for the podium, and even if he’d been beaten by the very best, all he felt was a sense of humiliation and that screaming in his legs. He wanted out but there was a choice to make.

Back in December when Irvine got the schedule for the championships, it was like falling off his bike. He was planning to tackle the individual pursuit and also the scratch race — a 15-kilometre bunch event — but scanning the page he saw one was after the other on the Thursday. So, as he got ready to receive silver, he had numbers stitched on for the next event and with a half an hour break between the two, he collected his medal, hit the rollers to warm down and decided he’d go again.

“The way I saw it, the scratch would be a training run. The pursuit, it took a lot out of me, it’s pure torture, cruel. Mentally it’s the hardest thing. You know you are going out to hurt and you’ve just to control how much you hurt. My legs were screwed, my quads, there was nothing in them. It’s a horrible way to finish too because you get beaten. You are in a final but you are losing. People are happy but I wasn’t jumping for joy, the guy nearly caught me, you really feel second grade. All that in my head and with another race, I don’t know, what harm like, I said I’d do it for a laugh.”

Sixty laps and 17 minutes and 23 seconds later, he was champion of the world.

With 10 circuits to go, he decided he’d make a break and when nobody followed he knew the sprinters thought it was too much too soon. By the end Andreas Mueller was on his wheel but the effort to catch up stopped the Austrian sprinting by. Crossing the line Irvine was rocking and rolling in the saddle and could barely raise his arms, such was the exertion. But in the aftermath, even the dominant Great British team congratulated him — made all the more impressive as they never usually even bother with eye contact. In fact that night in the hotel he found a bottle of champagne awaiting him.

“Chris Boardman, the legend himself, buying me a bottle. That was kind of cool. I sat there and had dinner, went up and rang Grace [his fiancée]. She’s an accountant and I called her after the silver and she let a scream and when I called her after the gold she stood up in the office shouting. But I only had four or five hours sleep and was down at the track for nine the next morning, packed the bikes and I just got a taxi to the airport. Off home alone, that was it, nothing glamorous.”

All a little different to the last Irishman to take a title at the event. In 1896, Harry Reynolds won the world mile championship in Copenhagen and has a road named after him near to where Irvine lives in north county Dublin these days. Reynolds used to race the steam train from Balbriggan to Skerries to keep in shape and according to some reports, 150,000 showed up to welcome him home. It’s a figure that’s most likely been exaggerated by 1,000 people for each of the 117 years that have passed, you both agree. Regardless of numbers however, they wasted their time, as too busy celebrating, Reynolds missed his scheduled ship and arrived home two days later.

But it’s all a little different to the last time Irvine came back from a major event as well, you remind him. After all, at an Olympics you only tend to hear the hollers of joy, and not from the guy ashamedly sneaking out the back door. “Being there wasn’t enough,” he groans. “I learned to put out there what I wanted and I thought I could make the podium. I put a lot of work in but I turned up in London screwed, just physically wrecked. I was in a hole and kept digging. The worst I’ve ever performed (He trailed home 13th in the omnium). After that race I just left the village. Grace was over and I don’t like to slag the OCI, but they won’t let family in. It sucked for me because she was treated like an outcast having kept me going. A kick in the teeth. So we just got out of the place.

“I barely said goodbye to anyone. I felt sick. I watched the closing ceremony on TV at home. I just wanted to be out of there. No point being about happy people. Maybe it’s just my character. I got back to Ireland and there were a few from my family to welcome me and that was it. That made this time strange because I haven’t been doing anything different than I’ve done in the last two or three years. I’ve been the same off the track, doing the same training, doing the same racing, just a different result and now there’s all this.”

But if his transformation since August has been based around some gentle tinkering, his transformation from that teenage slob has been based around a complete overhaul.

Every day in the garage in Ards, he’d hear his colleagues talk about cycling and it drove Irvine mad. In the canteen as he sat reading car magazines they’d be talking about spare parts for their bikes. As he went back to work they’d be rambling on about their weekly cycles through the surrounds of Ards. Clive Bailey in the valet department was by far the worst. “I’m not lying, one day out of the blue I just went to a bike shop in Bangor and bought one. They went out once a week together, I joined in and thought it was great. This is what I can’t pinpoint though, I’ve no idea why I did it. Maybe I just had enough of listening to them.”

Many champions are groomed from childhood, but just 10 years ago Irvine started to cycle. At first he struggled to keep pace with the garage crew but as that summer of ’03 flitted by, he started going faster for longer, swapped the mountain bike for a racer, and began getting competitive. “In my first race all I could taste was blood, that’s the shape I was in,” he says. “That winter I can remember training and suffering and I still don’t know why I was doing it. Coming home, feet freezing, I didn’t have proper clothes or anything. I didn’t know how to eat when I was training.”

It seems a uniquely Irish trip to the top – fluke rather than a plan, sweat rather than science — as within a year of buying a bike, he competed in first nationals and within two years he was travelling abroad to Belgium to the Seán Kelly academy. “The road racing was grand, it wasn’t like I was getting a kicking, but I just wanted to be done with it. Then Cycling Ireland had some track lads coming out, staying in the Kelly house and going to Ghent to train. They were trying out people. I volunteered.”

He was committed at least, as he drove across the continent and hitched up in Cottbus for the European Championships. As for the talent, not so many were convinced. Competing as an U23, his time in the individual pursuit has been purposely wiped from memory. The team stuff was every bit as bad. Leaving it late to qualify for the Beijing Games, he eventually made it onto the four-man squad that failed because they didn’t know they’d to compete at every World Cup event. “Also, we just weren’t any good,” he feels needs to be added.

“They got Simon Jones over, a good coach from GB and he saw we were doing things the opposite of how they should be done. Technique, getting on the wheel, going up the track, controlled effort. We were trying to drop each other. But back then, I was terrified. I was telling myself I’d let the others down and get so nervous, asking what if this goes wrong. Planning on failing. That taught me a lot.”

But as he continued to learn, there is a giant full stop in the story. On the night of 16 August, 2009, dropping a friend home from a race in Louth, his teammate Paul Healion was killed in a car crash. Irvine went to bed none the wiser but the next morning he had 20 missed calls from Healion’s wife Ann. “A fun character,” he recalls. “It’s hard when you are on the road, you can get sucked into it and can be miserable and hate it. But he kept me at it, made me want to do it. He made me laugh and I made him sensible I suppose.”

For a while after, the team said they’d give it a go in his memory but getting nowhere it ended. Irvine kept pushing though, although at times he wondered why.

You question his mentality, sensing a lack of confidence, even in the aftermath of his greatest achievement. “People ask me that all the time. Andy Sparks is my coach and asks what it is I can’t see. I don’t know, I’m just not rational. It’s the same off the track. Even last week in Belarus in the hotel I was sitting on the bed looking at my medal but I was asking myself ‘Who is paying for this?’. It’s not right. Since I started that’s been there, there’s always this guilt lurking and doubt too. I’ve just never believed in myself.” Few did, and if it’s not the attitude you’d expect of a gold medallist, it’s not the journey you’d expect of one either. “That’s why it’ll take some getting used to,” he admits.

No longer a nuisance, suddenly he’s a champion.