‘I play the Euro Millions hoping for a windfall’
STEPHEN ROCHE is fed up with the negative publicity that has followed him since the
Irish Mail on Sunday first revealed his financial problems with the Spanish authorities five years ago. Now he needs a windfall from somewhere to see him clear for sure.
‘You need to find the guts of a million quid somewhere,’ I tell him when he calls from France on his wife’s mobile.
‘Yeah well,’ he sighs. ‘I play the EuroMillons every Friday night, you know.’ Mr Roche said news stories of his culpable bankruptcy in Spain have been devastating for him. ‘The repercussions of it have been totally enormous. You can’t imagine the damage it did to me financially, emotionally and everything else, you know.’ He has lost contracts. ‘I pleaded, got on my knees... to get back into Tour de France,’ he said before adding that he lost the gig because the organisers were concerned about possible negative publicity relating to his Spanish appeal.
He has also lost his prized French Riviera villa.
‘Losing my house, you cannot imagine how devastating that was,’ he said. ‘My whole pension was based on that house. It was two big apartments. I was living in one. The other was rented out – Airbnb €40,000 a year – so I had potentially €80,000 a year from renting it plus the upturn on the sale in [a few] years’ time. And the banks basically stole it from me.’
In fact, the banks, after becoming aware of the cycling legend’s problems in Spain, recalled their loan on the home. As a result, he was forced to sell quickly to repay the borrowings.
‘When you got the loan your company was in Mallorca, you had this, you had that,’ he said the banks told him. ‘Everything was positive. Now everything is negative, and everyone wants your assets so we’re very sorry, we can’t renew your loan. We’re recalling the loan.’
A luxury wellness guesthouse business on the shores of Lake Balaton has also gone.
Funded by friends as an investment, a combination of the pandemic, electricity costs and rising interest rates put an end to the enterprise.
‘Basically, my investor guy was starting to get a bit impatient because he couldn’t see any exit, so we had to, kind of, let it go, you know.’
Almost gone too, it appears, is his share in a development site at St Tropez he had previously believed could repay his debts.
‘It was my big hope and my big disillusion, you know. It was all promising, promising, promising, and if that had have come through everything would have been great,’ he said.
‘But the land never got the planning permission, so it never got sold and I haven’t got my money either.’
Even his memorabilia has gone missing, misappropriated, he claims, by others.
‘My Tour de France-winning bike, my Tour of Italy-winning jersey, my World Championship gold medal… I cannot find or get anybody to tell me where the memorabilia is.’
Mr Roche believes he could have asked companies such as Pepsi or Kellogg’s to ‘sponsor me for €200,000 or €300,000’ in exchange for the memorabilia.
Or he said he could offer it to ‘a potential saviour’ who could help to repay his debts.
He told the MoS: ‘That memorabilia could have helped me to generate income… but I haven’t been able to do it, because I haven’t got the material.’
Recently, Mr Roche said he has been working with a contact on ‘commission-based deals using my network here in France’ to assist with planning permission.
He said the small retainer he earns from this ‘pays for apartments or my Airbnb, wherever I’m staying, you know’.
But this enterprise also has its problems. ‘I’m realising now it’s much more complicated than I thought,’ he admits.
‘It’s all very well knowing the mayor and knowing the syndicates and everything else but at the same time they’re looking over their shoulders now. You can’t just, kind of, because you know somebody, look for favouritism for planning and everything else.’
He said he now realises his main source of ‘potential earnings’ will be ‘doing cycling camps again or consulting either in Spain or somewhere else where I’ve got a few contacts’.
One such camp he ran in Antibes and Nice last year to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his triple crown victories in the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and the World Road Race Championship, charged participants almost €2,000 for a five-day trip, excluding flights.
Mr Roche said the event was a success, as well as a follow-up camp. But they were not successful enough to earn enough to pay back any debts.
‘No, when I say successful, I didn’t lose money,’ he said. ‘The budget was like 50 grand, I spent 49.’
As he puts it, Mr Roche needs to ‘get around the corner so I can I can work properly’.
And one of Ireland’s greatest sporting legends doesn’t even have a place to call home.
‘At the moment I have no fixed address. I’m Airbnb-ing it and what-have-you, because I haven’t got sufficient documents for long-term rentals or anything else.’