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news
Mick Murphy.JPGRadio 4 pays (belated) tribute to amazing Irish cyclist Mick Murphy
Sunday night's edition of BBC Radio 4's obituary show Last Word paid tribute to remarkable Irish cyclist and winner of the 1958 Ras Tailteann stage race, Mick Murphy, who died back in September.
Murphy was a circus acrobat and strongman who entered the Ras after just six months' training, and won despite breaking his collarbone and having to steal a farmer's bike in order to finish one stage.
The Iron Man, as he was known, lived in a ramshackle house in Kerry with no heating, boarded up windows and a sheet of corrugated steel for a door.
A genuine eccentric of the heroic era of cycling, Murphy trained using home-made weights with cement blocks on the ends, and ate raw meat. After a stage of the Ras he would ride into the country and using a small knife he always carried drain a cup of blood from a cow, which he would drink. The idea, he said, came from the Masai warriors and he believed it gave him strength.
It's the first item on the show and well worth a few minutes of your time.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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5 comments
"After a stage of the Ras he would ride into the country and using a small knife he always carried drain a cup of blood from a cow, which he would drink."
The original blood doper!
Probably was a great way to keep his red cell count up though.
A true legend! An Irish original - there are even songs about him! https://www.rte.ie/sport/cycling/2015/0911/727279-iron-man-mick-murphy-dies/
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06s1b92 (if you prefer streaming to downloading).
He didn't steal a farmers bike.
After breaking his own he elected to run with it, the farmer saw him and offered his own bike so he could continue.
There was a radio documentary, with interviews from Mick Murphy on Irish radio RTE Radio 1.
Listening to the documentary 'A Convict of the Road ' on the RTE DocOnOne. http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/