Cast your mind back to 1987 (or even better, check out our 1987 Triple Crown Mix Spotify playlist). A very different world. A time before mandatory helmets. A time before race radios, mobile phones, or social media.

Cycling was in flux. Hinault had retired, LeMond was laid low. Fignon was a shadow of the enfant terrible who had looked set to dominate the decade. The Tour - and the year - was wide open. In France, eyes turned to the potential of Jean-François Bernard and Charlie Mottet. Kelly was proving a GC rider as well as a sprinter, while the mountains were dominated by the gossamer climbers Pedro Delgado and Luis Hererra.

And Stephen Roche — graceful, tactical, slight… but brave — remained a tantalising “almost.”

He’d won Paris–Nice as a rookie in 1981, grabbed a Pyrenean Tour stage in 1985, shown he could ride on hilly courses—but injury cost him 1986. By 1987 his role in Carrera was uncertain. Despite a strong spring and near misses at Paris-Nice and Liege, doubters whispered he might never deliver.

Giro: the Sappada affair

At the Giro, Roche was nominally in support of Roberto Visentini, despite having worn the magia rosa most of the race until Visentini put two minutes into him in the time trial.

“I am totally devastated after having the jersey for eleven days. I had some great team-mates behind me, great encouragement, saying ‘come on Stephen, come on Stephen.’ Then you lost the jersey, you go back to the hotel and you are alone. I thought that was very devastating.

Then I put on the television and there is Roberto with two blondes, one on the left and the other on the right. He’s saying, “I am now the leader.

The journalists say, ‘Roberto, it is normal that Stephen Roche will ride for you…you are two minutes ahead. Then it is normal that you will go with him to the Tour de France.’

‘Oh, no no no. Stephen will ride for me, yes, but I am not going to the Tour de France…I am going to the beach.’”

The next day, Roche attacked on the Sappada stage into the Dolomites. He claimed it was a defensive move, to force Visentini’s rivals to expend energy chasing him down - but Visentini and the team management saw it as an act of naked betrayal. 

His team were instructed to chase him down, his directeur sportif threatened to run him off the road with the team car. Visentini’s camp never forgave him - and nor did the tifosi lining the roads.

“For the rest of the Giro I had people spitting rice and wine in my face … Back in ’87 I said: ‘Do what you want. I ain’t going home.’”

Visentini himself never shied from his anger. Asked whether he'd attend Carrera reunions, Visentini replied - 

“Why would I go to a Carrera party? To see the guys who made me lose the race?” 

The Tour: potential realised, at last

The ‘87 Tour was the most open in years, and one of the most entertaining, with the maillot jaune swapping between Mottet, Bernard and Delgado. Roche clung on, never far from the lead but never in yellow.

As the race entered the end game in the Alps Roche shipped time to Pedro Delgado on l’Alpe d’Huez and then came back from the dead on La Plagne.

With Delgado up the road and seemingly riding away with the Tour, Roche stared into the abyss.

“So I give it everything I have. I found resources. I need to claw back at least 45 seconds, but I can't see where he is - the crowds, the zig-zag roads. I've no race radio. Any information my own car might have had from the race director I won't hear because of the noise.

I feel myself working through my gears. There's a burning in my legs, but it's not a killing burn. It's hurting all right, but I can cope with this burn for 4km. The fire is lit inside. I'm riding almost to explosion, but if I explode I will drop.

Five hundred metres to go, the road opens out, and I put - crunch! - the chain on the big ring. It was like going from first gear to fifth in a car. For a moment I locked up, stalled. Then it picked up again and I got the chain turning over, waggh waggh, faster and faster, and then on the final corner, there was Delgado."

The Tour was saved. The following day, Roche attacked on the descent of the Joux-Plane, screaming down the technical descent “with my back wheel in the air”, stealing a few seconds and putting himself into range to take yellow in the final time trial.

“We were on French TV after the descent into Morzine … off camera he (Delgado) came up to me, hugged me, and said ‘Bravo, you deserve the yellow jersey’.”

Villach Worlds: Loyalty, instinct, opportunity

Come September, the UCI World Road Race Championships circuit in Villach, Austria was wet, brutal, and tactical. Roche entered nominally to ride for his compatriot Sean Kelly, whose form made him the natural favourite. He guarded, he shadowed, he covered moves.

On the final lap, both Irish riders remained in the whittled group, taking it in turns to make the moves, as Kelly recalls:

“I said to Stephen ‘look, the only thing to do here is one of us goes with one attack and the other goes with the next attack.' I went at least two or maybe three times with attacks. I'd get a little bit ahead and then I'd be closed down, and then Roche would go with the next one. Roche went with one. They looked at each other behind, and that was the one."

Into the final kilometre and still Roche waited for Kelly. But Kelly was playing cat and mouse with Moreno Argentin, who had sat on his wheel for most of the finale.

"I looked behind and could see they were stalling. I became anxious. I wondered what was happening. How could Kelly lose contact at this stage? What I did not know was that Kelly and Argentin were having their own private battle of nerves, Kelly refusing to lead the pursuit of a breakaway group that included his teammate, Argentin refusing to lead Kelly because he feared Kelly would then beat him in the sprint."

Fearing his lack of sprint, Roche committed. He had the legs, and had the timing. He launched from the back, up the inside. The hesitation behind was fatal. He soloed to the line.

The Triple Crown sealed

Looking back, Kelly was phlegmatic at another Worlds near miss.

"It could have been the other way. It could have been that I was in the move that stuck – it would have been with Argentin, of course, because he was on my wheel all the time. But that's the way it goes”

In 1987, Roche joined Merckx in an elite club: Giro, Tour, Worlds in one season. Roche himself said it simply: “I’m the only guy with Eddy Merckx to have won the triple. It’s nice to hold it, and long may it last.”

Roche’s career never regained that altitude. A knee injury in six-day racing in the winter of ‘87 curtailed his ability to dominate again.

But 1987 remains a year of pure brilliance — a collision of timing, will, talent, peloton politics and guts.

Shop Top Tens now