Bike king was gracious and kind
ROAD racer William Dunlop has been remembered as thoughtful and gracious, as well as a great sportsman.
Dunlop, 32, died on Saturday following a crash during a warm-up session at the Skerries 100 race in Co. Dublin.
William was from a north Antrim racing dynasty which has been marked by tragedy over the years. His father Robert and legendary uncle Joey, also champion road racers, died following crashes.
Robert died at the North West 200 in 2008, and Joey was killed in a crash in 2000.
The narrow country roads around Garryduff Presbyterian Church, on the outskirts of William’s hometown of Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, were packed with mourners, many wearing road racing leathers, yesterday as the funeral service took place.
The Rev John Kirkpatrick said he considered it an honour to have been asked to speak at the funeral.
He also led the funeral services for Joey and Robert at the same church in 2000 and 2008, respectively.
Rev Kirkpatrick told William’s partner Janine, daughter Emma, mother Louise, brothers Michael and Daniel, and his grandmother May that this day was primarily for them.
‘You who knew him best, loved him the deepest, and miss him most,’ he said. ‘In preparing for today I have read and researched much about William’s life and career.
‘As I listened I’ve heard about his thoughtfulness as a child, his strong bond with his brothers, his kindness to his mum and his deep devotion to his dad. I have witnessed the moving love between William and Janine and his delight as a father to Ella.’
The Rev Kirkpatrick also paid tribute to Dunlop’s racing career which started at 17, and included 108 national and 11 International wins. The final words of Rev Kirkpatrick’s address were for Janine, who is expecting her second child. He said he had pondered what William might have said if he could, saying: ‘To Janine and Ella, you were my true chequered flag, you, the home of my heart. When I held you, Ella, for the first time, it was the beginning of new love. You made being a father the best of all podiums. When anyone sees you they will see me.’
IN my hometown neck of the woods – east Derry, running into north Antrim – the surname was always superfluous. To shopkeepers, teachers, doctors, football fans, to whoever you encountered when I was growing up, he was simply Joey.
The quiet, unassuming motorcycle racer, the man from Ballymoney with that Antrim drawl in his voice, the guy who drove a truck across Europe every year to deliver supplies to Romanian orphanages, the record-breaking 26 times Isle of Man TT winner and possibly the best road racer the world has ever seen – Joey Dunlop.
Loved as much in life as he has been in death, Joey Dunlop was sporting royalty in the North, admired on both sides of the religious divide. And the family surname was one that would deliver both great happiness and also utter devastation over the years as the risks of racing finally caught up, first with Joey when he was killed in Estonia in 2000, and then with his more flamboyant brother, Robert, killed during a practice race for the North West 200 in May 2008.
Loss
And now William, Robert’s eldest son, has also paid the ultimate price for his sport.
When I heard the news last Saturday evening that the immensely likeable William Dunlop had been killed in a practice race in Skerries, north Co. Dublin, I felt, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, an enormous sense of loss. Perhaps it’s that local hero phenomenon, that sense that he was one of my own, a Ballymoney boy from only 13 kilometres up the road from where I grew up.
Or maybe it’s that he was a genuinely nice guy, a mild-mannered, handsome 32year-old, in a happy relationship, and with a little daughter who will turn two this weekend and who will now go through her life with no memory of her father. As will also be the case for his other child – the one due to come into the world in September.
Why did he do it? Knowing all the risks, and having already lost his father, his uncle and countless friends and colleagues, why did William Dunlop keep getting on that bike and throwing himself around unprotected roads at unimaginable speeds? Time after time after time.
For the same reason that his hugely successful younger brother Michael will, no doubt, even with the tragic loss of his brother, continue to do exactly the same.
It’s in their blood, it’s a family birthright passed down the line. And they have to see it through.
It’s why, when Robert Dunlop perished after crashing at the Mathers Cross bend (since widened) on the North West circuit in 2008, William and Michael defied the race stewards who decreed them unfit to compete and got back on their bikes the following day. They wanted to honour their father by racing.
Michael Dunlop won the race that day and the thousands of spectators at the finishing line exploded with emotion. ‘My head was full of tears,’ Michael later said of that moment.
The following day he and William buried their father.
It’s a tremendously exciting sport. Even as a spectator.
The North West 200 road race takes place every May in the ‘Triangle’ – along the roads between Coleraine, Portstewart and Portrush.
Injury
When I was growing up the route went right past the front of our house in Coleraine. Back then practice night was a Thursday and the race was on the Saturday. We’d set ourselves up on the front lawn at lunchtime on the Saturday, as close as possible to the garden wall, to get the closest view.
The roads all around the course were lined with bales of straw (still are), as if hitting straw at 320 km/h was going to save you from serious injury. Token gesture stuff because, in reality, when it comes to a crash at those speeds, only luck can save you.
I can still hear the scream of the bikes, especially the whiney 125cc engines, one after another after another, as they flashed past our house, slowing ever so slightly in preparation for the corner at the top of the road. Once round that they opened up full throttle and hit the straight that would take them to Portrush, and from there around the coast towards Portstewart and the finishing line.
It was on that road, between Coleraine and Portrush, that Robert Dunlop’s engine seized at 240km/h, he hit his brake, catapulted off his bike, and died from his injuries. Michael and William were riding just behind and Michael recalls seeing ‘a man lying next to what’s left of his bike. That’s when it hits me. The man lying next to the broken bike is my dad.’
Yesterday, the Dunlops gathered in Garryduff Presbyterian Church in Ballymoney to say goodbye to William. His partner Janine, his little daughter, Ella, his mother, Louise, his brother, Michael, his other brother, Daniel (a British soldier who served in Afghanistan), and, of course, his grandmother.
Tragedy
May Dunlop, the family matriarch, has now lost her two sons and her grandson to motor racing. It’s hard not to see something of the JM Synge tragedy about her life, with that hovering cloud of death, and the awful inevitability of loss.
In Synge’s Riders To The Sea, that haunting one-act play of his, old Maurya sums up her loss in a sentence: ‘They’re all gone now and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me,’ she says of the loss of her drowned menfolk.
For May Dunlop it’s not the sea. It’s motorbikes. First Joey. Then Robert. Now William. What more can motorbike racing do to her?
Michael remains, of course. Michael Dunlop, a flintier, much more complex individual than his older brother. And a 17 times Isle of Man TT winner. Yet even Michael is not gung-ho enough to deny the fear. He knows it’s there. He just doesn’t focus on it.
‘I don’t do fear,’ he once said. ‘Yeah, I’ve been scared on a bike, but you don’t dwell on it. The important thing is to keep pushing.’
He’s now the last Dunlop racer left pushing. To tell him to stop would be futile. It’s what he does – it’s both his livelihood and his passion, and how many people are lucky enough to say that that is how they lived, whatever length of time is allotted to them?
Those who choose a dangerous path know what they are doing. They balance the risks and then they dismiss them. Until the next time.
After Robert Dunlop’s death in the summer of 2008, his wife Louise spoke about her loss. Devastated, she still acknowledged that motorcycle racing had been everything to her husband.
‘It was his life but he knew it would eventually kill him,’ she said. As it has now killed her son. But frightened as she must be for her other boy, Michael, I’d imagine that Louise Dunlop would be the last person to plead with him to stop racing.
She knows he’s a Dunlop. She sees the agony and the ecstasy. She accepts that this is how he has chosen to live his life.
Even to the death.