Elliott, Seamus ('Shay') (1934–71), cyclist, was born 4 June 1934 at Old County Road, Crumlin, Dublin, the second of three sons of Jim Elliott, garage owner of Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin, and his wife Nell (née Farrell). His parents were part of the republican contingent that seized the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922 at the outset of the Irish civil war. The family moved to Crumlin during Shay’s childhood. He attended the Christian Brothers School in Crumlin, where he played hurling and football, and he did not take up cycling until he was fourteen.
Riding successively for St Brendan’s, the Southern Road Club and (from 1952) the Dublin Wheelers, he achieved various successes, winning the Grand Prix of Ireland (1952) and the Irish Road Race Championships (1953–4). In 1954 he came second in the An Tóstal race, winning the ‘king of the mountains’ title, and placed fourth overall in the 1954 Route de France, a prestigious under-25s amateur race. In early 1955, having just completed his apprenticeship as a panel beater, he joined a training camp for aspiring professional cyclists in Monte Carlo. Soon after he joined the Athletic Club Boulogne-Billancourt team, based in Paris. He won six races and was awarded the title of best amateur rider in France for 1955. Cycling on indoor tracks late in the season, he broke the world records for the 1,000m flying start, the 5km and the 10km.
He turned professional in 1956, joining the Heylett team, and impressed in his early seasons by regularly winning minor races and showing well in the important one-day classics. In 1958 he missed out on becoming the first native English speaker to win a stage of the Tour de France when he was blocked and had his jersey pulled in the final sprint. Within the space of eight days that year, he seemed poised for victory in the Paris–Roubaix and Paris–Brussels classics only to be thwarted both times by mechanical faults. Winning either race would have catapulted him into cycling’s elite. His victory the next year in the Het Volk in Belgium, considered a semi-classic, failed to prevent him from having to settle for the role of domestique, albeit a highly regarded and well-paid one. He rode for his team leaders, the five-time Tour de France winner, Jacques Anquetil, and Jean Stablinksi, who was Elliott’s close friend and later his best man and godfather to his child. Quickly integrating into French society, he married Marguerite ‘Gigi’ Steiger of Mulhouse, France, in early 1961; they had a son and lived in Paris.
An aggressive rider and a powerful sprinter, he was not a general classification contender for a Grand Tour event, as he struggled in the mountains and in individual time trials but was capable of landing either the World Championship or a big classic: his failure to do so can be put down to selflessness, peloton politics and naivety. Being one of the first anglophones to make an impression in professional cycling, he suffered from the clannishness that characterised the sport.
He won a stage of the Giro d’Italia in 1960 and of the Vuelta a España in 1962, leading that year’s Vuelta for nine days before coming third. In the 1962 World Championship race he looked the strongest member of the leading group of four and went clear near the finish. Stablinksi, however, struck a deal with the other two pursuing riders who worked hard at successfully catching up and then did nothing when Stablinski attacked decisively, leaving Elliott to trail in second. Elliott continued this great form into 1963 when he won another stage in the Vuelta a España and became the first English-speaking rider to hold the maillot jaune of overall leader of the Tour de France, heading the race for three days after winning the third stage with help from Stablinski. This also made him the first anglophone rider to win stages on all three Grand Tours.
His best years were behind him when his career hit a crucial turning-point in August 1965. A rider of immense loyalty to his team, he was devastated when, with his victory all but assured in the four-stage Paris–Luxembourg race, some of his teammates (including Anquetil and Stablinski) conspired to deny him victory. His friendship with Stablinksi broken, he left the team at the end of the year, joining the arch-rival Mercier team. In late 1965 he borrowed heavily to open his ‘Hôtel d’Irlande: chez Seamus Elliott’ in Loctudy, Brittany. The hotel was immediately in difficulties, and the attendant strain undermined both his marriage and his cycling. In desperation he took Benzedrine, a banned substance, in an unsuccessful attempt to cover his debts with prize money. At the end of a disappointing 1966 season, he left the sport and abandoned his hotel venture. He returned to Ireland penniless while his wife stayed in France with their son.
Thoroughly disillusioned, he sold a three-part exposé to the People newspaper in Britain on the widespread drug taking and race fixing within professional cycling. He admitted to helping other riders win in return for money but only in open races, such as the World Championship, where cyclists competed as individuals rather than as part of a team. Suspicions had been aroused when he came last in the seventeen-man sprint for the 1960 World Championship, and there is a photograph of him braking before the finishing line of the London–Holyhead race in 1965; conversely, the British cyclist Tom Simpson recalled how Elliott once refused his £1,100 blandishment. Elliott stated that he had not knowingly taken performance enhancing drugs prior to 1966 but was sure drugs had been put in his drinks by team doctors. On one occasion, a team car he was driving into Belgium was searched by police, who found drugs concealed inside a seat and arrested him; the case against him was eventually dropped.
He used the £500 he received for these articles to set up a garage on South Princes Street, Dublin, where he lived in a flat at the premises and built up a moderate trade. He cycled in the 1970 London–Holyhead race, was reinstated as an amateur and was to help prepare the Irish team for the Munich Olympics. He was on anti-depressants when, on 4 May 1971, he seemingly killed himself in his flat with a shotgun that had been his prize for winning a stage of the Vuelta a España in 1963. His family and friends always disputed the generally held view that it was a suicide. He was buried at Kilmacanogue, Co. Wicklow, beside his father, who had died two weeks previously. In 1998 the Tour de France passed his grave as a mark of respect; Bray Wheelers stage an annual event in his memory.