Win Les Woodland's Cycling Heroes!!!

The great Café Bookshelf book giveaway goes on. This year we've already given away copies of Cyclopedia, How I Won the Yellow Jumper, Slaying the Badger, Sky's the Limit, We Might As Well Win and Wide-Eyed and Legless. Now you get a chance to win Les Woodland's Cycling Heroes (note: you get to win the book, not the actual heroes - sorry, but the postage on sending Woodland's eighteen heroes to you would bankrupt us. And some of Woodland's heroes might object, even if we offered to send them FedEx).

Woodland's book was reviewed last week - read the review here - and there'll be an interview with the author sometime over the off season. The book is a collection of interviews with, or stories about, some of the men (and two of the women) who inspired Woodland back in the days before Phil Liggett, Channel 4 and the internet came along. Originally released in the early nineties Cycling Heroes has been updated for the new millennium with a few additional interviews that didn't make the cut first time around. Even if you caught it first time round, it's worth looking out for in its updated format.

Bill McGann (himself the subject of an interview that'll appear over the course of the off season) of McGann Publishing (the people behind The Story of the Giro d'Italia and other books) has kindly offered Podium Café readers the chance to win a copy of Woodland's book. Chapeau Chairman Bill.

So what do you got to do to get your hands on the book? Simple: comment below or send a tweet using the hash-tag #PdCCyclingHeroesComp (tweeting your entry helps us plug the site, so do tweet. With all the end-of-year award thingeys going on around the interweb, plugging the site helps). Simple as that really.

Ok, so there's a little bit more to it than that: Woodland's heroes are his, and selected in the early nineties. We'd like to know what heroes you would pick today. If you want to tell us why, all the better. They can be riders or team personnel. They can be race organisers or journalists. They can be from the current peloton or the past. They can be living or dead. They can be male or female. Who knows, we might even make a list at the end of this and see if we can't pull together a series of interviews with or stories about Podium Café's cycling heroes (if you'd like to volunteer to help doing this, contact Jen or Chris).

The rules: well, beyond commenting below (or tweeting using the hash-tag #PdCCyclingHeroesComp), there's nothing much to add. All the names go into Serendipity's hat. One gets pulled out. Winner gives us a postal addy. Carrier pigeon gets sent out with the book (and please, can we have the carrier pigeon back this time? They might be tasty with gravy and some nice pastry but the pigeon is not part of the competition prize).

You've got a couple of days to get your entries in, but don't hang about or this'll have slipped off the homepage and into oblivion in no time at all (you can always find this, along with the complete back catalogue of reviews and author interviews, in the Café Bookshelf section). The names will go in the hat sometime Saturday and the winner's name will be posted here. We'll also fire out a tweet saying who won (on @PodiumCafe, @_Gavia_ and / or @fmk_RoI). So check back to see if you got lucky.

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Remember: even if you don't win the book, you can always pick up the Kindle version for just 99 cents (or 86 pence) for a limited period. (No Kindle? Download Amazon's free Kindle emulator for your puter.) That's cheaper than an espresso or a bar of chocolate. And a book lasts longer. And has fewer calories.