The Sean Kelly Story is subtitled "An Irish Cycling Legend," and for good reason. In the tough world of professional bicycle racing, Kelly stood out as an exceptional sprinter who turned out to have staying power as well. His career list of victories includes the Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain), Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Milan-San Remo, and Paris-Roubaix twice each, the Tour of Lombardy (three times), the Tour of Switzerland (twice), and Paris-Nice (an astounding seven years in a row). With his success in the Classics, it's no surprise that he took home the "Super Prestige Pernod Trophy" (the precursor of the modern World Cup competition) three times. In the Tour de France, he won the green points jersey (for most consistent daily finisher) a then-record four times, as well as winning four stages of the Tour and briefly wearing the yellow leader's jersey.

Considering that a rider like Lance Armstrong has achieved his Tour de France results by devoting his entire year to preparing for a single race, it's particularly impressive that Kelly would ride the entire competitive season from spring to fall, from one-day Classics to three-week Tours, while racking up wins along the way. Not only that, Kelly often won in style: consider his unforgettable downhill pursuit and capture of Moreno Argentin in the last stretch of the 1992 Milan-San Remo.

The Sean Kelly Story combines race footage from throughout Kelly's career with interviews with Kelly himself and others, reflecting on a long, varied, and successful career. For cycling fans, Kelly is certainly a great subject for a film. Despite the inherent interest of the subject, however, The Sean Kelly Story falters in its execution, largely due to the film's overall lack of a clear, well-thought-out organization. After a somewhat muddled introduction, it appears that we're going to follow the progress of Kelly's career, starting with his amateur days. As it turns out, however, there's no chronological order to the material. Kelly's races are discussed in groups: first his Classic wins (one-day races), then his efforts in the three-week "Grand Tours" (the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España), his World Championship efforts, and finally all his other races. Because he raced in different kinds of races throughout his career, this means that we skip back and forth in time as we move from one section to the next. To muddy the water further, we get occasional retrospective comments in the middle of things as well.

The result of all this jumping around is that we never get a really coherent picture of Kelly's career, other than the fact that he won an amazing number of important races. On several occasions, it's mentioned that such-and-such a victory was important because it came after a long "dry spell," or that it marked his comeback from an injury sustained in another race, but since the races are shuffled around the way they are, there's no context to appreciate the importance of any particular victory. At two hours and forty minutes, the film is also overly long; it would have been considerably better if it had been tightened up a bit.

While the film falters a bit in depicting Kelly's development as a rider, it does manage to convey a fair amount of Kelly's riding style and his competitive style in general. We get to see many of Kelly's sprint finishes, showing his tactics (which often included pushing and shoving his rivals, and resulted in disqualification more than once) as well as his pure speed. We also get a sense of his grim determination to win and his disappointment later in his career when some of the most prestigious victories (like being World Champion) slipped through his fingers, or when he was forced to abandon the Vuelta a España due to injury.

For bicycle racing fans, one of the most interesting features of The Sean Kelly Story is its extensive use of racing footage from the Classics and the Tours during Kelly's career. Obviously the clips all feature Kelly, but we also get to see many of the stars of the 1970s and 1980s whose famous rides haven't been brought to video or DVD (or at least not yet), like Bernard Hinault, Joop Zoetemelk, and even Stephen Roche in the height of his career. (Attentive viewers may even catch a glimpse of WCP's commentator Paul Sherwen in one of the race segments.) We also hear from many of the famous names in the pro peloton, sharing their thoughts on Kelly's career. It really brings home how long a career Kelly had as a professional cyclist (almost 20 years) when a rider like Tony Rominger comments that when he first started racing, Kelly was already riding and acting as a mentor to younger riders.

The DVD

Video

The Sean Kelly Story makes extensive use of clips from races of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, along with interviews from 1994 and earlier. The image quality overall is sub-par; the race footage in particular has a generally blurry and wan appearance, and colors often fluctuate. To a certain extent, the lackluster image quality can be attributed to the source material: twenty- or thirty-year-old television footage isn't going to look perfect no matter what the transfer does to it. However, the transfer contributes its own share of the problems.

The average bit rate for the film is very low, only 5.67 Mb/s. Making matters worse is the fact that the bit rate is almost uniform for the entire film, with the peak rate only 6.1 Mb/s; an undemanding "talking head" shot has the same bit rate as a complex, fast-moving shot of a sprint finish. The heavy compression of the film is evident in the presence of many artifacts throughout the image, such as horizontal lines as well as some distinct blockiness around edges. If The Sean Kelly Story had been given a transfer with a dynamic (and signficantly higher) bit rate, and possibly spread over two DVDs instead of just one, it could have looked much better than it does now, despite the source material.

The Sean Kelly Story is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

Audio

The 2.0 soundtrack clocks in at about average. The indoor interview segments with Kelly sound reasonably natural, but Phil Liggett's voiceover narrative during other parts of the film often sounds rather hollow, and we get occasional distortion in the voiceover. Many of the racing clips and earlier interview scenes also have a very muted sound.

Extras

There are no special features on this DVD.

Final thoughts

The Sean Kelly Story offers a detailed look at the career of one of professional bicycle racing's "hard men": Kelly has a truly impressive list of victories to his credit, including 22 Classic wins and a then-record number of green jerseys for "most consistent finisher" in the Tour de France. The film's main fault is that it's not organized particularly well, which makes it less accessible to viewers who aren't Sean Kelly fans to begin with. Overall I'm suggesting this DVD to most interested viewers as a rental, worth checking out for its glimpse into the career of one of cycling's almost legendary figures; for viewers who are very interested in Kelly to begin with, it's probably worth purchasing.