There is a moment I keep coming back to. A road somewhere in Belgium, on a steep and unremarkable hill called La Redoute, outside Liège. My friend Tanya, her husband Marcus, their two children. A crowd of people from all over — families, groups of regulars with cans of beer, a couple in a caravan who travel through Belgium and France following races all season. All of us waiting.
We were there for Liège–Bastogne–Liège, one of the five Monuments of professional cycling. And we were there, more specifically, in the hope of seeing what might be the greatest cyclist in the history of the sport.
Two years before that day, I had had no interest in cycling whatsoever. This is the story of how that changed.
My first encounter with professional cycling was not La Redoute. It was Cork, in 1998, when I was seven years old — the year the Tour de France came to Ireland.
What I did not know at the time was that 1998 was one of the most notorious Tours in history. The Festina Affair — a doping scandal that exposed the extent of systematic drug use in the peloton — was unfolding in real time. There were police raids, hotel searches, arrests. It was the darkest moment the sport had known.
But I was seven. I did not know any of that. I was there with my father, somewhere near UCC, waiting for Marco Pantani.
Pantani was one of the great climbers of his era — a superhero of the sport, at least as far as the public image went. We learned later that the reality was more complicated. He died in 2004 after a cocaine overdose, his career and personal life having unravelled in the years beforehand. But that afternoon in Cork, he was the man my father had come to see. Il Pirata. And apparently they waited a long time, and then the riders came, and then they were gone — in the blink of an eye.
My father loves sport. He always has, and sport was central to our house growing up. Hurling is his true passion — that was always the constant. But he keeps an eye on most things: soccer, Gaelic football, rugby, cricket. And the Tour de France. He has always followed it, in the way that someone with a broad sporting interest does — not obsessively, but attentively. If it is on and there is something worth watching, he is watching.
My mother is less of a dedicated follower, but she comes alive when the Olympics arrive, or the European and World Athletics championships. Wimbledon too, if there is a good match and a bit of a buzz around it.
Sport was in the house. That is the point. And it was through my father that cycling entered the picture at all — his interest in the Tour going back, I think, to the 1980s, when Seán Kelly and Stephen Roche were among the best in the world. If you are not familiar with those names, consider what they achieved: Roche won the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the World Championships in a single year — 1987 — a treble only Eddy Merckx had managed before him. Kelly won La Vuelta a España and nearly every Monument going. The one that eluded him was the Tour of Flanders, one of his favourite races, as it happened.
The Tour de France was not quite the centrepiece of my summers the way other sports were. But I knew my father cared about it. He had books on it. When the opportunity arose — on holidays especially — he would try to watch.
I remember one afternoon in Lagos, Portugal, around 2005. We caught the final kilometres of a stage. Alejandro Valverde beat Lance Armstrong. My father told me that Armstrong had still effectively won the Tour. I did not understand what he meant — Valverde had just won the stage — and I moved on. This sport, I concluded, was too complicated for me.
Three years later, in 2008, we were back in Lagos. I was sixteen, it was our fourth visit in six years. I cannot fully explain what was different about that summer — I was just not as enthusiastic as I had been before. Less drawn to the pool, less caught up in the routine of it. Something about being a teenager, perhaps, or simply the familiarity of returning to the same place. Nothing dramatic. I just was not feeling it.
My father, similarly, had little interest in the pool. So during the hottest part of the day — tiempo siesta — he would sit inside and watch the Tour on ITV4.
And I started watching with him.
Within a few days, I was hooked. I understood what was happening. I knew the stories, the main characters, the dynamics between teams. When we got back to Ireland, I followed the final stages to see how it ended.
That, I think, is the key to the Tour de France, and maybe to cycling more broadly. It is a television series and a sport occupying the same space. Once you understand the stories and the characters, you are in. And once you are in, it is very difficult to look away.
After that Tour, I started buying cycling magazines — Cycle Sport, Pro Cycling. Through them, I discovered that the Tour was only part of the picture. There was an entire world of racing I had not known existed, and every race had its own history, its own dramatis personae, its own logic.
I learned that the team I had been following that summer — Saxo-Bank — had a complicated past bound up with the sport’s long history of doping. I learned that Cadel Evans, who had struck me as the villain of the piece during the race, had lost the Tour the previous year by 23 seconds. Heartbreak, not villainy.
Reading about these people as people — rather than simply as competitors — changed how I understood the sport. And it kept me watching for a few more years.
The 2009 Tour was a remarkable piece of theatre in itself — not just for what happened on the road but for what was happening inside one team. Alberto Contador returned to defend his title, but so did Lance Armstrong, coming out of retirement and riding for the same squad. The tension between them was barely concealed. Contador won, but the story of that Tour was as much about the friction between two egos sharing a bus as it was about the racing.
2010 was the year of the great controversy. Contador versus Andy Schleck — a genuine rivalry, two very different riders, an absorbing three weeks. The moment everyone talked about at the time was the stage where Contador attacked while Schleck’s chain slipped, riding away from a stricken opponent. It felt unsporting. It felt like the defining moment of the race. And then, months later, it turned out Contador had tested positive for clenbuterol, a banned substance, and was eventually stripped of the title. Schleck was declared the winner in the record books. I do not dispute the decision — the rules exist for good reason. But you cannot unwatch something. The race I followed that summer had a different winner on the road, and that is the one that stayed with me.
And then 2011 — perhaps the most purely enjoyable of the three. The Schleck brothers, Frank and Andy, working together. Tommy Voeckler in the yellow jersey for what felt like the entire race, riding beyond anything anyone expected of him, refusing to crack day after day. And Cadel Evans — the man who had lost by 23 seconds in 2008, who had finished second again in 2009 — finally winning. The stage that stays with me is Andy Schleck attacking alone with 60 kilometers still to go, over the mountains, a move of almost reckless ambition. Evans, largely on his own in the difficult sections, refused to let the gap grow beyond reach. He won the Tour in the time trial on the final road stage. It felt like justice — not the dramatic, cinematic kind, but the quiet, accumulated kind. The kind that takes years to arrive.
After the magazines and those Tours, I drifted away from the sport. It was not one thing. It was several things, none of them decisive on their own.
The Lance Armstrong scandal was part of it. Books like Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race pulled back the curtain on just how rotten the doping culture of that era had been — not one or two bad actors but a systematic, industrialised corruption of the sport across years. That is worth reading about. It is not easy to watch a race in the same way afterward, at least not straight away.
Then there was the Sky Train — Team Sky’s dominance of the early 2010s. Whatever you thought of the methods, it produced a particular style of racing: controlled, suffocating, efficient. Not unimpressive, but not exactly a spectacle. And at a time when attitudes toward Britain and Britishness were becoming complicated — Brexit was doing its work on the cultural atmosphere — a sport that felt like it had been reduced to a British procession was not pulling me back in.
Beyond all of that, I had simply lost the thread. I did not know the current stories. I did not know the new faces in the peloton or what narratives were building between them. Following a sport like cycling without that context is like arriving at a long-running series several seasons in — technically possible, but the investment required is significant. I did not make it. And so, gradually, it went quiet.
The way back came in the summer of 2022. I was in southern Italy for my cousin’s wedding. My girlfriend got COVID near the end of the trip, and on the final day — too hot, stuck indoors, the desolate heat of the Italian south in July — I found myself scrolling through my podcast feed.
There was an episode of The Cycling Podcast about Michael Rasmussen and the 2007 Tour. I had been half-following the podcast anyway, as the Tour that year was starting in Copenhagen. I listened to it on a walk.
And I was taken back immediately — to Lagos in 2008, to those afternoons with my father, to the names and the storylines I had once known well. Alberto Contador. Denis Menchov. Cadel Evans. All the old characters and their unresolved plotlines.
I tried to watch the Tour on that last day in Italy but could not find a stream. When I got back to Germany, I watched every stage.
The stage that changed everything was Stage 11, to Col du Granon. But to understand what made it so significant, you need to understand what the 2022 Tour had been up to that point.
Pogacar had won the previous two Tours. He was the dominant force in the sport, and he rode that way — attacking relentlessly, almost daring the rest of the race to respond. Stage after stage, he went on the offensive. And for much of the race, nobody had a convincing answer.
Wout Van Aert was doing something extraordinary in parallel — contesting sprints, chasing down breakaways, protecting his team leader, and somehow accumulating enough points to put the Green Jersey in play. That one rider could operate across so many different terrains at such a level was remarkable in itself, and it gave the race a secondary storyline running alongside the main event.
But the central question of the Tour was whether anyone could crack Pogacar in the mountains. And on Granon, Jonas Vingegaard and Primož Roglič provided the answer — together, and from a long way out.
The attacks began well before the final climb. Rolling, coordinated pressure — not one decisive move but a sustained campaign designed to drain Pogacar of his reserves before the road tilted upward for the last time. By the time the peloton hit Granon itself, the damage was already accumulating. And then came the moment that defined the race: Pogacar lost the wheel. Not gradually, not ambiguously — he cracked, and Vingegaard rode away from him, and the gap opened, and kept opening.
Watching it, there was something almost Shakespearean about it. The invincible champion, isolated, watching the challenger disappear up the road. It was not just sporting drama. It was something closer to a chess match at altitude — a team effort coordinated in real time over a mountain finish — except that chess does not make your legs give out on a 9% gradient.
Then came Hautacam, a few days later. Van Aert and Vingegaard working in tandem to finally blow up whatever was left of Pogacar’s resistance. By that point the race had a shape and a logic that felt almost narrative — each stage a new chapter, each attack a line of dialogue in an argument being conducted over three weeks and two thousand miles.
I went online after Granon and read the comments beneath the Guardian’s match report. Not something I usually recommend. But that evening the comments were something different — people from all over the world, analysing the attacks, discussing Roglič’s role, dissecting the team tactics that had made the stage possible. No animosity. No point-scoring. Just people who had witnessed something and wanted to talk about it.
I knew then that I was back in.
After Le Granon, I subscribed to GCN+, found The Cycling Podcast as a fixture in my listening, and started following the spring Classics — the Belgian races in particular. De Ronde van Vlaanderen. E3 Harelbeke. Gent-Wevelgem. And Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the oldest of them all, first held in 1892. La Doyenne.
Which brings me back to that road in Belgium, on La Redoute, in April 2024.
Watching a race at the roadside is unlike watching a match or a game. You wait for hours. You are on the streets and hillsides of ordinary towns and villages. And then the riders come to you — not you to them. They do not arrive in a stadium you have paid to enter. They arrive on the road outside, and there is nothing between you and them.
Pogacar made his move about 100 metres down the slope from where we were standing. There was a change in the atmosphere — gasps, noise, a kind of collective intake of breath — and then he was there. In front of me. I could have touched him. Two metres away, at most, ascending the hill at a speed that should not have been possible given how far the race had already gone.
It is a strange sensation. On one hand, you are aware of what you are looking at — an athlete whose physiology is simply not comparable to anything most of us understand. On the other hand, he is right there. Reachable. Unguarded. Genuinely vulnerable in a way that no professional athlete in a stadium setting ever is.
It lasted perhaps five or ten seconds. And then he was gone.
After Pogacar came Mathieu van der Poel — one of the greatest Classics riders of the current era. Then Richard Carapaz, Giro d’Italia winner in 2019. And the rest of the peloton behind them, stretching down the hill.
And then the road was empty, and it was just us again, and Belgium, and the ordinary afternoon.
One of the unexpected advantages of living in Germany is proximity. Most of the major spring Classics are within reach — a drive to Belgium, a train into northern France. I have only been to a handful of cycling events so far, but several more are on a list I intend to get to in the coming years, and at some point I hope to be at them with my children, the way my father was at the roadside in Cork in 1998, waiting for Il Pirata.
When I think back over the sporting moments that have stayed with me, I notice that I never think about results. I think about the moments themselves, and the people I shared them with.
Setanta Ó hAilpín scoring a goal in the 2003 All-Ireland final — nineteen years old, the crowd shaking around us, and the feeling that we were watching the next decade of Cork hurling arrive in real time. None of us knowing he would be gone to Australian Rules football within months. In that moment, the future looked impossibly bright. The shaking stadium… my dad, a veteran of thousands of matches, said he had never felt anything like it that day.
Being in Semple Stadium in Thurles in 2004, watching Paul Flynn score a bullet goal against us from an impossibly far out free — the silence on our end, the Waterford celebrations, the goal appearing on the scoreboard, and my brother and I looking at each other. How?
Seáni Maguire scoring in the dying minutes of the FAI Cup final in 2016 against Dundalk — all hope of avoiding penalties gone, the ball worked to him from a throw-in, Stephen Beattie the supplier, and then it trickling over the line into our end. The eruption around me. We had won.
These are not cycling memories. But they are the same kind of memory — moments where the sport briefly exceeded itself and became something else. Something you carry.
The cycling memories are fewer, for now. But they are growing. What stays, across all of it, is not the results. It is the stories — the personal ones, and the ones built into the events themselves.
Watching Pogacar on La Redoute, two metres away, on his way to winning Liège–Bastogne–Liège — that one has made the list too.
Oisin O Mahony Blog 
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