1. Seamus "Shay" Elliott was an Irish road bicycle racer, Ireland's first major international rider, with a record comparable only to Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche.
47 Facts About Shay Elliott
1. 2.
Shay Elliott was the first Irish person to ride the Tour de France, first to win a stage, and first to wear the yellow jersey, and first English speaker to win stages in all the Grand Tours.
3.
Shay Elliott came 2nd in the 1962 World Road Championship at Salo, Italy.
4.
Shay Elliott died in unclear circumstances at the age of 36.
5.
Shay Elliott was from the working class area of Crumlin in Dublin, the eldest son of James Shay Elliott, a motorbike mechanic, and Ellen, always known as Nell.
6.
Shay Elliott played Gaelic football and hurling and didn't learn to ride a bicycle until he was 14.
7.
Shay Elliott joined a small cycling club, St Brendan's, attached to St Brendan's Catholic Church, Coolock, when he was 16 and took part in races of about 20 miles that the church organised around the city streets.
8.
Shay Elliott came second in his first race, riding a "scrap" bike with a single fixed wheel that led his pedals to bang the road on corners.
9.
The club broke up soon afterwards and Shay Elliott joined the Dublin Wheelers, one of the most active clubs at that time, in March 1952.
10.
Shay Elliott won the Dublin-Galway-Dublin two-day race, winning the race back to Dublin in a sprint.
11.
Shay Elliott fell on the tricky turn at Governor's Bridge, shortly before the finish, but came fourth.
12.
Shay Elliott said that Elliott was one of several riders asked to strip for examination by the soigneur Raymond Le Bert, who normally worked for Louison Bobet.
13.
Shay Elliott did not return permanently to Ireland at the end of the training camp in early 1955.
14.
Shay Elliott had just finished six years as an apprentice sheet-metal worker and he and his family in Old County Road in Crumlin, had decided that he had mastered panel-beating and would have a trade to return to if his efforts to become a professional cyclist failed.
15.
Shay Elliott contacted a former French professional, Francis Pelissier, for advice.
16.
Shay Elliott planned to move to Ghent in Belgium, where he could race several times a week and, as an amateur, win money denied to him in Ireland.
17.
Leulliot remembered how Shay Elliott had won the Tourmalet stage of the 1954 Route de France, which Leulliot's paper, Route et Piste, organised.
18.
Shay Elliott was the first foreigner to be ranked top amateur in France.
19.
Shay Elliott signed as a professional for the Helyett-Felix Potin team.
20.
Shay Elliott won his first race, the GP d'Echo Alger in Algeria, outsprinting Andre Darrigade.
21.
Shay Elliott won the GP Catox and the GP Isbergues.
22.
The break was caught near the finish but Shay Elliott's form was noted.
23.
Shay Elliott became a team-mate of Jacques Anquetil and Jean Stablinski, staying with the team under different sponsors for much of his career.
24.
That season Shay Elliott rode the Tour de France, then run for national teams, in a mixed team that included the Englishman, Brian Robinson.
25.
Shay Elliott remained with Robinson, chivvying him, pacing him, pouring water on his head as the Tour's doctor, Pierre Dumas administered glucose tablets.
26.
Robinson had started the day ninth: it was Shay Elliott who was sent home.
27.
In 1960, Shay Elliott became the first English-speaking rider to take the pink jersey in the Giro d'Italia.
28.
When Stablinski attacked, Shay Elliott refused to chase and the Frenchman won alone.
29.
Shay Elliott admitted he had sacrificed his chance for Stablinski's benefit.
30.
Shay Elliott won by 33 seconds, enough to give him the yellow jersey of leadership.
31.
Shay Elliott spent his career as a domestique, a rider who sacrifices his chances for his leader, but with the right to sprint for wins.
32.
Shay Elliott rode and won the professional race on the Isle of Man, the Manx Premier.
33.
Shay Elliott was contracted to ride London-Holyhead in 1965, at 275 miles the longest single-day race in the world not to use pacers.
34.
Shay Elliott had his hands tugging his brakes before the line.
35.
Shay Elliott pushed off and caused all sorts of consternation and the only people who could get across to him were Simpson and the guys he'd brought across with him, and Hitchen.
36.
Shay Elliott refused, speculation being that he had been offered more by someone else.
37.
Shay Elliott later wrote a newspaper article suggesting that he made more money by selling races than winning them.
38.
Shay Elliott moved in 1966 from Anquetil's team to the rival Mercier-BP, sponsored by a bicycle company and an oil company and led by Anquetil's rival, Raymond Poulidor.
39.
Shay Elliott planned for retirement by opening a hotel in Loctudy in Brittany.
40.
Shay Elliott had no prior experience in the hospitality trade and that project took so much of his time that he could ride only local races.
41.
The hotel, too, failed and Shay Elliott lost all his money.
42.
Shay Elliott returned to Dublin in 1967 and set up a metal-working business in Prince's Street in the city centre, with his father.
43.
Shay Elliott tried a racing comeback in Britain in 1970 with the Falcon Cycles team and came 21st in his first race, London-Holyhead.
44.
Shay Elliott once ran for vice-president of the Irish Cycling Federation, but lost to Paddy McQuaid.
45.
Two weeks after his father's death, on 4 May 1971, Shay Elliott was found dead in the living quarters above the family business premises, at the age of just 36.
46.
Shay Elliott was laid to rest alongside his father at St Mochonog's Church, Kilmacanogue, County Wicklow.
47.
In 2009 a documentary film, Cycle of Betrayal, about Shay Elliott, was shown in Ireland and the UK.