The life and times of Carlton Kirby

Carlton Kirby is one of the most familiar voices in cycling. Ahead of this year’s Tour de France, the Eurosport commentator tells Fiona Adams how his career took him from Sheffield to Teddington via Norwich and the South Seas

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Sitting in the gardens of the Lensbury in Teddington on a sunny April day, listening to the story of Carlton Kirby’s life, it’s hard to imagine that in the cycling fraternity this soft-spoken, funny man is the human equivalent of Marmite. 

My husband has put me on to him. He has heard during one of Carlton’s broadcasts that he lives in Teddington and informs me that he is hilarious, but knowledgeable too. My husband, in his turn, was tipped off by his mate Dave, who is also of the opinion that Carlton is the best thing since carbon fibre. 

A quick google reveals him to be a regular on Eurosport covering the big tours like the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta in Spain. He has in excess of 40,000 Twitter followers and celebrates #crapgagfriday every week with his own jokes, while some of his commentary gems are recorded and shared for posterity by an independent account called @saidCarlton. 

Popularity, one might therefore assume, is Carlton Kirby’s middle name. But not so. 

“Oh no!” he laughs over a coke. “A lot of people can’t stand me! But you’re always going to get that. There were people who thought that Terry Wogan was Satan! The cycling community has always been split on me, but I think I’m winning over a lot of them – and I’m talking the real hard core. They don’t want any flimflam. What they want is power outputs and gear ratios, numbers, numbers, numbers… 

“To be honest though, most people who have a downer on me usually come round in the end.”

Whether the purists like it or not, Carlton is actually very good at ‘flimflam’. At school he was the class clown with a dry, cheeky humour and a ready riposte. When commentating he often sits beside former pro cyclist Sean Kelly, the Irishman a straight man to Kirby’s comic. 

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Sean Kelly and Carlton Kirby

“Often I spout what some people think is a load of nonsense, but others love it and on the Tour especially you have to be a sort of travelog. People don’t watch tennis, but they watch Wimbledon. They don’t watch snooker, but they watch the World final. In the same way, people who don’t watch cycling watch the Tour de France, and it’s my job to keep them sitting there, dunking biscuits in their tea and hurling insults at me. It’s all about entertainment!”

Kirby can tell tales about anything from roof tiles to sausage shops; from getting locked out of his Paris hotel room naked with a bunch of Japanese tourists, to being abused in Muslim Turkey for wearing a cycling jersey advertising Spam. He was once fired by Lord Heseltine with the words: ‘Men of renown never wear brown.’ 

The list and the laughs are long.

Carlton grew up in Hallam, South-West Sheffield, as one of three children in a creative household. His mum Audrey looked after the children while his dad, Bill, forsook hairdressing to become a well-known artist of industrial landscapes. Brother Paul is a renowned set designer in the movie business – James Bond and The Bourne Identity are amongst his successes – and sister Sally is a glass sculptor and art teacher, like his wife, Steph. 

Carlton himself – “I was nearly called Garin, as my dad was hugely impressed by the exploits of the Russians, and Yuri Gagarin” – is an alumnus of Sheffield’s Tapton School, where Def Leppard was the school band. 

“I hated them, as I was a punk and they were a bunch of long-haired idiots,” he recalls. “Now look at them!” 

Rather more to his taste was Lord Coe’s sister, Emma, with whom he once went out. 

“Good legs run in the family,” he says.

And it was also around Hallam that he first fell in love with cycling.

“I used to go on ‘one-way missions’, as my father called them. He would give me 10 pence to phone home and then he’d come and pick me up. I’d go out into Derbyshire and, if possible, have an adventure while I was there. It’s where my love of cycling really started. I had a paper round too, which was the worst gig on the planet. I only had to deliver seven papers, but they were all to hill farms! It used to take me about two and a half hours. I swear that I invented mountain biking!”

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At Lancaster University he studied marketing, with a view to going into advertising. Yet a childhood passion was never far from his mind: broadcasting. 

“When I was a kid, I really, really wanted to be on the radio. I remember going to Sheffield Central Library, working my way through all the US telephone directories and writing to the radio stations. One guy from Miami wrote back to me, which was really sweet. He said: ‘Look, in the US alone there are probably a thousand people presenting, just on radio. Why shouldn’t that be you?’ And I carried that with me.”

Fancy another bit of wheely good content? You can check out our piece detailing expert advice on how to train for long distance cycling by clicking here

He eventually got onto a broadcasting course at the London College of Printing, as it was then called, and from there enjoyed brief spells as a news and sports reporter at the BBC’s Look East in Norwich and Look North in Leeds. 

So far, so logical. Then he saw an advert in the BBC’s internal newspaper, Ariel, for a posting on Tuvalu in the South Seas. It was to run the national radio station, which had been funded as an aid project by Australia. He got the job and went off to the string of nine tiny islands as the head of broadcasting. 

“It was basically a volunteer’s job. There was no money in it,” he explains. “It was just a bizarre and fantastic way of doing something interesting in the field. I was supposed to be there for two years, but the project was all sorted after about six weeks. I had a colonial bungalow and a little Laser that I could sail across the lagoon to the radio station. All fabulous, you might think, but I was so bored. Paradise has its limits!

“I eventually paid a Swedish freighter to take me off in the middle of the night because somebody else had attempted to leave the island and they’d had their passport confiscated!”

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The Kirby Codec: Carlton’s compilation of each racing day’s results, profile, destination, distance, climbs, jersey and other stats. His latest one, from this year’s Giro d’Italia, is being made into a tea towel for Qhubeka, an African charity providing bikes for kids

Work at TV AM followed, along with meeting his wife Steph, a housemate of his sister’s at art school in Sunderland. They moved from Norwich with their two young children five years ago, selling their William and Mary house, a flat near the Sacré-Coeur in Paris and a small slice of a Norfolk river island to buy a terrace in Teddington. He laughs:

“It’s super expensive, but super too!”

He had already made the move to Eurosport and has loved every minute of reporting on his favourite sport, even if sometimes he gets a bit teary on air.

“Oh yes! I always get emotional,” he admits. “I get very bound up in the moment. It’s the joy of it; the human endeavour – I just love that. To me there’s nothing greater. And cycling is full of it. 

“For me it’s the best sport. When you see what these guys are putting themselves through, and the sheer determination that carries so many of them across the line, up the mountains, almost in slow motion. It’s something to behold – and I do choke. Sean [Kelly] won’t have any of it. ‘Pull your bloody self together, for God’s sake!’ he’ll say, switching the mic off and giving me a smack on the side of the head!”

Kirby is clearly a big fan of our great British riders, like Mark Cavendish – another who once threatened to slap him, but with whom he is now good friends – and the truly impressive Chris Froome, who could so easily win the Tour de France for the fourth time this year, but who rarely gets the public acclaim he deserves. Much to Carlton’s chagrin, Froome was denied recognition at last year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

“I think it was a disgrace that he wasn’t even on the list. He is fabulous. He can do things that other people will find physiologically impossible.”

Our time comes to an end. But I have discovered what my husband and his mates find so appealing about Carlton Kirby. He is knowledgeable, certainly, and full of fascinating and funny facts. Yet what clearly stands out is his obvious passion for the sport of cycling and for bringing it to a wider audience. That and telling tales about getting stuck in a wetsuit on a hot night…

As I say, the stories are endless.

• The Tour de France will be covered by Eurosport July 1-23

You can check out another piece from our Special Cycling Issue by clicking here

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