'There’s almost an omerta around fear. We’re not allowed to be scared' - Dan Martin on being different
A TIME TO REFLECT: Dan Martin has left the fears of cycling behind...but the love will always remain. Pic: Chris Auld/Future Publishing via Getty Images
When Dan Martin retired last year as the only Irish rider to have top 10 finishes in all three grand tours, it was seen as the departure of one of the last great romantics of cycling. Now he’s written an ode to his sport but also a gritty depiction of how painful and fearful it can be too.
‘There’s always a moment when you’re ‘bound’ to crash. Fifty kilometres into my debut appearance in Fléche Wallonne, I ended up in a big crash. I shut my eyes. It’s an instinctive reaction; you close your eyes to protect them from a piece of plastic or metal. Or perhaps it’s just down to the fact that the body refuses to register that split second when it believes that pain is imminent. It saves you from a single second of suffering… I was in pain. I was alone. The peleton was disappearing into the distance. I never wanted to abandon. I reached the Mur de Huy, one of cycling’s sacred places. Even walking up it, you have to battle against the slope. Fans picnicking in a field urged me to hang on. Blood ran down from my knees onto my pedals. I loved that day.’ —
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Although it was written out of love and is about that love, Dan Martin didn’t want his book to hide away from pain. Or at least fear. The fear of doping. Of being a team leader. Of being told at 24 there might be a tumour on your brain. Of bolting down an Austrian mountain at 112 kilometres an hour. And of crashing. Over the course of his career and penning the book, he’d work out “a little theory” or rather tens of them, such as “to be successful in this sport you have to be crazy. Not brave, but mad. Courage is about overcoming fear, while madness stems from the absence of fear. The riders who love descending also love falling.” Martin didn’t love descending; he constantly feared it, which might explain why he was more normal than mad, albeit brave. Yet he came to an accommodation with falling and pain to still be successful in his sport.
In one of the many sharp insights that characterise his book, he philosophises, “I’ve often found that crashes don’t occur by chance: you’re actually drawn towards them. You accept them. In certain situations you even hope for them. People talk about ‘the wrong place’ or the ‘wrong time’ but I’ve experienced something even more disturbing; my bike being drawn towards a crash like a magnet with an uncontrollable pull, as if it were absolutely necessary for the crash to happen.
“Don’t get me wrong. I hated crashing. I hated the pain that came with it because it wasn’t a pain that I’d chosen like the pain from pushing myself to the limits in training. Yet crashes built me up more than they broke me. They taught me about myself, about my profession, about others, about the world.” He elaborates on this theme over a pot of tea in a Dublin hotel, bringing you back to the opening stage of the 2014 Giro d’Italia, a team time trial. It was in Belfast, just up the road from here. “It’s an incredible feeling to be at a home race and to have all that support and be up on that stage,” he says. “Even now I get goose-bumps thinking of the atmosphere in Belfast that day. Then I crashed.
“Looking back, that was a massive pressure release. Because there’d been all this expectation. ‘What’s Dan Martin going to do in this race? He could be on the podium.’ Whereas immediately after that everyone was saying, ‘He would have been on the podium if he hadn’t crashed.’ It’s an escape route. So many athletes are hampered by this feeling. You subconsciously make mistakes to avoid disappointing the fans.” Does he believe that subconsciously he wanted an escape route that day? He doesn’t think so, but can’t rule it out. But what he does fully believe in is fate. He didn’t mean to crash that day but he was meant to crash that day.
“I think everything happens for a reason. By crashing that day I got to spend time with my now wife who I’d just met two weeks earlier, whereas if I hadn’t [crashed], we wouldn’t have seen each other for another five weeks. I then went on and won [the Giro di] Lombardia and in the Vuelta [a Espana] had my best finish in a grand tour [seventh] to that point. I probably wouldn’t have achieved those results if I had finished the Giro. So it worked out for the best.
“But obviously at the time it [the crash] was a negative experience. I took down half my team. I was just following the guy in front of me and he went through a hole, I hit the hole and lost control of my bike. That’s what happened. Did I subconsciously make that happen? I don’t think so. But maybe [I did].” Martin’s museful, quirky nature revealed itself in how he went about the book. He’s known his ghostwriter Pierre Carrey for over 15 years; they even lived together for a year back when Martin was starting out as a professional rider and Carrey already a writer on the cycling beat. Yet they haven’t met in person since Covid. They haven’t even had a meeting or interview over Zoom. Instead they did it all by WhatsApp. Every couple of days Carrey would send over a list of ten or so questions. Then Martin would sit and reflect on them and send on a stream of voice messages and consciousness.
“I’m fortunate enough to have a brain that remembers silly little things. At least it’s fortunate if you’re writing a book. I must have dictated over a hundred hours. We wrote it in French first, then wrote it in English. It’s been very intense. I don’t think any book has been written like this.” That’s kind of what attracted Carrey to Martin and a project like this in the first place: the fact it’d be different because he was different, authentic. Carrey initially floated the idea over a decade ago only for Martin to decline. “I wanted to finish my story first.” Last year it was time. Time to retire, time to tell his story. Again though he wanted it to be like him. Different. Honest. Raw.
“I wanted to bring up topics that nobody in cycling ever talks about. There’s almost an omerta around fear. It’s almost like we’re not allowed to be scared, that you’re not allowed to talk about the time I let the wheel go because I figured I was going too fast downhill. I’ve talked about the gravel stage in the Giro last year when I admitted at the finish line that I’d been scared of crashing and didn’t think it was worth the risk. Suddenly you’re getting slaughtered on social media and even by some commentators, ‘Man up. You shouldn’t be cycling if you’re sacred.’ “But the thing is that feeling of fear was everywhere that day. No one was saying it publicly but almost everyone was feeling it. People talk in code. If you say ‘That’s a really dangerous finish’, well it means you’re scared that there’ll be crashes. You can use words like ‘dangerous’ but not ‘fear’ or ‘afraid’.” But just as he’s not afraid to say that he used to be afraid, he’s unashamed to declare with almost childlike enthusiasm that he loved and still loves the sport. A motive for writing the book was that it might ignite and inspire some kids the way the sport raptured him growing up in the 90s on the outskirts of Birmingham and show them it can be done and it can be fun.
“Most cycling books have dark covers with serious faces, serious titles. It’s all about how difficult and grim it all was. And yes, cycling is a hard sport. But it’s also magical. At least I found it was. That’s why we have bright colours on the front and the back. The title that we have [fate had it that some of the biggest moments and stage wins of Martin’s career coincided with either someone dressed as a panda or a real panda being in the vicinity].” Before he was chased by pandas, he used to chase his Dad. Neil Martin was a fine cyclist himself, representing GB at the Moscow and LA Olympics and riding on the continent for a few years before at 28 he went back to being a printer “to put food on the table” for his family. As a schoolboy Dan never had any posters of cyclists on his wall, a quirk he attributes to a couple of things and one of them was that he already had a hero in his father.
The other was even more telling. “In hindsight I think it was because I didn’t want to put anyone on a pedestal when I’d be later going up racing against them.” He was that assured he’d be a professional rider. “I suppose it was almost like going into the family business. There wasn’t a doubt. It wasn’t a dream, or even a goal. It was just a fact. I was going to be a Tour de France professional rider.” That he would. In fact he’d go on to do something not even his uncle Stephen Roche (Martin’s father is married to Roche’s sister) or the great Seán Kelly would: have top-10 finishes in all three grand tours (albeit Kelly only cycled the one Giro and Roche only the one Vuelta) and win at least one stage in all three of them. He’d never win any of those grand tours outright like his illustrious predecessors would (“I think any Irish cyclist is up against it from the start because we haven’t a chance of beating or matching the two lads!” he laughs). Still, to have six top-ten finishes and five stage-wins in the grand tours to go with the several one-day classics he won, made him one of the most respected riders of the past decade.
“That was the advantage of doing the book when I did. When you’re in the sport you bounce from race to race. Even when you win something you hardly enjoy it because you’re moving on to the next race right away. Whereas now that I’ve stepped back and being able to reflect, I now realise, Jesus, look at what I achieved. I won feckin’ Liege-Bastogne-Liege! Less than a hundred people have won that race and I’m one of them. Okay, the Tour de France is incredible but there are 21 stages of the Tour de France each year. There’s only one Liege each year. To win it and [a Giro di] Lombardia, I mean, some of the greats of cycling never won either of them. Chris Froome never won a one-day classic.” More so, he won and did it his way. He devotes a chapter to the topic of anti-doping, a stance he was renowned and respected for on the circuit and he details the lengths which would go to adhere to it. It was rooted in a moral code formed by his father’s disapproving look back home in the 1990s of false gods; then joining the team that he did. After a series of workshops and brainstorming sessions, Team Slipstream prided themselves on being “winners, friends, genuine, stylish, aggressive, clean”, or as one teammate piped up, “Not US Postal!” Yet he didn’t want to be preachy, or more so to drain his own energy by being preoccupied or distracted by how others were possibly illegally enhancing their own energy.
“Before races, people would ask ‘What result would you be happy with today?’ And my answer always was, ‘I just want to do my best.’ Because the result depends on how good the other guys are and I can’t change that. And that’s how I looked at the whole issue of doping. I couldn’t control or change what others did or didn’t do, so what was the point in worrying about it?
“My generation when we started riding as kids, we almost got used to seeing cyclists being led away in handcuffs. After that you had the biological passport could come in which helped set the tone. Maybe other guys were still cheating but you know what, I wasn’t. To me my whole career was about my own performance.” Could he have won more and gone faster if he’d succumbed to doping? He says he never contemplated it. But could he have won more and gone faster if he’d followed some of Sky’s less contentious marginal gains? Now that he thought about, but again it wasn’t for him.
Little about Sky was. Back in 2005 he met with David Brailsford and was told there was no spot for him in British Cycling because he’d also have to take part in their track programme. “I couldn’t see myself racing around a velodrome like a hamster in a wheel,” he writes. “I needed the sky. I wanted to feel the rain and sun on my skin. I wanted to see the silhouettes of trees.” He’d like to think the book will show some kid you can compete and “still have a smile on your face”, just as he did, but on the other hand he realises that time and way may be gone.
“I enjoyed every moment of my career and I did it in a sustainable way, living a relatively normal life. Okay, maybe if I had gone and done training camps in Tenerife and been 100 percent hyper-focused I’d have won a Tour de France, but there are more important things than just success and winning races. But now it’s almost like a military operation. That’s why guys are so successful so young now. They’re always eating the right things. It’s all bike, couch, bed: cycle, rest and recovery. But I don’t know if they’re going to have the fun or longevity that I had.
“There’s been a massive generational swing in the peleton the last few years. From about 2013 to 2018 you had pretty much the same riders finishing in the top 10 of the Tour de France, and we got to know each other. But now all the guys I’d go and have a chat with have finished up. And there isn’t that same kind of chatting in the peleton anymore. Ten years ago in the first race of the year you’d ride along and talk away through the whole thing. Now you got a race and you don’t have that kind of mixing and interaction. It’s all very serious, very focused, from the start to the finish.
"That’s one of the reasons why I stopped cycling last year. I felt my motivation was beginning to slip. I had achieved everything I was going to possibly achieve; realistically at 36 I wasn’t going to go and suddenly win the Tour de France. I stopped because I wanted to be able to wake up in the morning and go, ‘You know what, I’m going for a bike ride today.’ And because of that I still really love riding my bike whereas I know so many guys who stayed on one year too long and have never touched a bike again because they came to feckin’ hate it.”
In all, he thinks he’s maybe cycled a hundred hours this past year, about the same amount of time he spent pressing record, speaking into his phone and sending on a message to Carrey. The bike still thrills him, intrigues him, but doesn’t consume him.
A few years ago to help with his inevitable transition from pro cycling, a friend encouraged him to set up an investment business with him. So that takes up a good bit of his time now, as does being an ambassador for the Tour of Britain and a series of cycling equipment manufacturers. He and Jess and their four-year-old twins are based in Andorra, thriving in new-found freedoms like being able to go on holidays at times in the year that the tyranny of the cycling calendar once used to prohibit.
“When I was a rider and my kids got sick, I’d to almost avoid looking after them, I couldn’t be a proper father because you had to think 24/7 about the bike! But now I can take them to the park, not have to worry about what I eat.” The fear is gone from cycling. But not the love.
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