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Last Updated: 2 Apr 2018 - 8:45:17 PM |
Remembering Brendan Carroll - A MAN CALLED HORSE
By Gerard Cromwell
16 Apr 2004,
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| Brendan Carroll |
It was on a winter spin that I first noticed him. You couldn't miss him really. He was about a year younger than me but he was way bigger than me. He was taller and had the physique of a boxer rather than a cyclist. He rode a massive, green, 25" Mercian bike. It was the biggest frame I'd ever seen and the emerald green colour just made it stick out even more.
I had been going out on these spins for a couple of winters now and had become accustomed to being the youngest in our club. The older lads were used to me now and passed on the usual titbits of information on training, diet and whatever else they thought I would benefit from. On my first spin, a few years previous, I had surprised everyone by hanging on until the last few miles, when the attacking started. Now, I could attack them if I liked, near the end. As I rode up through the line, he was on his way back from a stint on the front. We got talking and he seemed a nice enough bloke. Said his name was Brendan. He wore an old club jersey someone had obviously given him. The back of it was yellow and it had blue and green vertical stripes on the front. I smiled at the way the back of his jersey hung down over his arse, laden with food, tubes and other paraphernalia. This was his first spin with a group, he told me. It didn't show. He was as strong as a horse. In later years he even painted the word 'Horse' under his saddle in the kind of gold paint normally reserved for touching up the writing on the sidewalls of his motorbike tyres, another passion of his. This was partly done because of the encouragement he received from myself and some other young clubmates and partly because he liked the idea of having a knickname.
'Horse' suited him we thought. He was big and wild and headstrong, like a Palomino. He could be as gentle as a Shetland Pony and had the strength of a Carthorse. Brendan often raced on legs alone, while the cranial portion of his body seemed to be off on holidays somewhere. Still, he won races. More than me. As we became teammates, we became friends. When we were juniors he would call down to my house and stay until 2am some mornings, watching old cycling videos and chatting about our future professional cycling careers. He would win the green jersey in the Tour de France and I would decide betwen the polka dot jersey or numerous stage wins. My parents didn't even mind that we both had school or work the next morning. He was that sort of bloke. Likeable!
When he left school, Brendan got an apprenticeship as a carpenter and one of the first real jobs he did on his own was to roof a shed for my Da. He was a perfectionist. Everything was measured and re-measured and that little roof was his pride and joy for ages. I remember him looking at it years later and remarking how it had been his first job and how surprised he was it had stood the test of time.
Brendan's sheer physical stregth and tenacity saw him win his fair share of races. He won more than me and a bit of rivalry soon impinged on our friendship. We would never say it to each other's faces but there would be little digs now and then. Out training, he would inflict pain on my skinny frame on the flat or in a strong headwindwind. I would have to wait until the road rose sufficiently to get him back. Climbing wasn't Brendan's forte, although most of the time his sheer strength again would see him through. Brendan had this uncanny knack of being at the finish of almost every race I got hammered in. He would then comment on how 'well' I had done, with that big 'cheshire cat' grin of his that every mother, including my own, seemed to love.
He broke his leg in a motorbike accident one time and constructed a wooden contraption which he connected to the frame of a bike and he still turned up at local events, complete with leg in plaster. Guys would come over and just stare in disbelief at the timber holding Brendan's broken leg in place while he pedalled with the other leg. He was mad. Eccentric. On stage races he would do things to deliberately try and crack you. He would stroll into the room as you were about to doze off, pull open the curtains and announce that he had to sleep with the windows open! It didn't matter if it was snowing out! His kit bag would be ceremoniously turned upside down and relieved of it's contents all over the floor, preferably somewhere between the door and your bed. Nothing would be touched until after breakfast the following morning, when Brendan would simply pick what he needed for that day's stage out of the crumpled pile on the floor and refill the bag. If you didn't get up in time, you could find half your breakfast gone. He wouldn't take tablets or pills of any description either, said your body should be able to fix itself.
Brendan was good at fixing stuff. Bikes, cars, houses, it didn't matter and almost every club member got him to mend some part of their bike or do some job around the house at some stage. He was just as good at breaking stuff. Motorbikes, bikes, cars, he pranged them all. He was lucky though. If Brendan fell into a bucket of shit, he'd come out smelling of roses. He spent months in hospital one time after a motorbike accident and ended up marrying the nurse who looked after him during his stay! When he couldn't cycle any more, he became a motorbike marshal on the FBD Milk Ras and could be seen zooming past the bunch with both legs outstretched in mid-air. One year he swapped bikes with cyclist Julian Dalby for the neutralised section of the last stage. Brendan puffed through the bunch in full leathers and helmet while the equally eccentric Dalby sped past the bemused riders on Brendan's motorbike. On or off the bike, Brendan was one of the most colourful characters on the road.
On a cold and wet October night in 1998 though, his luck ran out. Brendan was on his way home from work on his motorbike. It was a wild, wet and windy night. On a back road, in the darkness, a stray cow wandered into his path and he swerved to avoid the animal. In doing so he hit an oncoming van and was killed. He was 27 and had just recently become a father for the first time. Even though we had drifted apart over the years, his funeral was one of the saddest nights I have spent. It couldn't happen to him, you thought. He was too young, too wild, too stubborn to die.
I was in my mother's garden last week. I went into the shed. The roof is still there, as good as new. On the back of the door is an FBD Milk Ras sticker. Brendan was there when I stuck it up. He always wanted to ride the Ras .Win a stage maybe. He reckoned he wasn't a good enough climber to win overall! He only ever rode once and had the misfortune to puncture after about ten miles of the first stage and spent most of the day alone. We laughed about it later, but I know he was dissapointed. He wanted to leave his mark on the Ras. We were the only two from our club to finish that year. On Saturday evening, our club will promote the Brendan Carroll Memorial race. It is one of the best supported races on the calendar and the ammount of motorbike marshals on the race makes it "feel like you're riding the World Championships" according to one winner. Sometimes people ride Memorial races and don't know whose memory the race is held in. What were they like? Were they a good cyclist? Brendan was what everyone tries to be. A good person, a good mate, a good son, a good husband and even a good cyclist. As a tribute to Brendan, after his death, the Ras motorbike marshals got together and gave a new trophy to the race. The Brendan Carroll Memorial trophy is now awarded to the best climber in the Ras every year. Brendan would have laughed at that. The size of him. He couldn't climb out of bed!
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