Crib Sheet

Title: Blazing Saddles: the Cruel and Unusual History of the Tour de France
Author: Matt Rendell
Publisher: VeloPress; Quercus (UK)
Pages: 320
Order: HERE
What is it? A year-by-year history of the Tour's most colorful episodes and characters.
Strengths: Just so bloody entertaining.
Weaknesses: I guess if I'm going to give something five stars, I should leave this part blank. Can't think of anything.
Rating: ★★★★★ (5 of 5)

British author Matt Rendell likes a good challenge. His first foray into writing cycling books was a 2003 piece on Colombian Cycling Heroes. Next was a book about riding the 2003 Tour with Lance, which sounds boring until you realize (as I just did) that it's Victor Hugo Pena's experience, not yet another writer's. Last year came The Death of Marco Pantani, an astounding journalistic feat delving down into ultra-sensitive, foreign territory. It was here I noticed Rendell and made a mental note to look for his next work.

After traveling the sensitive worlds of Colombian society and the Pantani family's inner sanctum, Rendell has turned to yet another monumentally challenging task: finding something original and interesting to say about the history of the Tour de France. Search "Tour de France" at Amazon.com and you'll be deluged with books on Lance Armstrong, repackaged race reports from the sport's most prolific journalists, a few larger retrospectives on Tour history, from studies of the Tour's place in the world to, say, the history of British riders in France. On and on.

What Rendell came up with is a book that takes a brief look at each edition of the Tour and tries to ferret out a story or two that adds color to the sport. It's a reference guide, mostly: ostensibly there's no running narrative, apart from the strangeness of humanity and the fact that the Tour's original director Henri Desgrange was a dangerous lunatic. Call it 92 stories about the Tour de France, if you will.

For much of the book, the stories are pure fun... at least from enough distance. Desgrange's live tests on the riders -- new rules concocted on the fly, routes over grueling and untested roads, etc. -- probably didn't seem like fun to the participants, bent as they were on winning the race and the glory and bristling against Desgrange's attempts to put on a good show. An example: prior to 1921, riders couldn't replace broken parts; they had to fix them or just carry on as is. In 1921, Desgrange allowed the riders to replace broken parts, but only if they carried them to the finish for inspection.

Leon Scieur had to carry a buckled wheel strapped to his back for 300 kilometers. The cogs cut deeply into his skin, scarring him for life. But he won the Tour de France.

Stories like this, or the bitter personal rivalries, or stories like Bottecchia singing on his bike, or Bahamontes comically waiting on a mountaintop for people to catch up, are light amusement to a reader in 2008. But the dark shadow of drugs begins creeping into the picture in 1923 and slowly advances, before taking over the book in the 1990s. The last two entries, concerning the last two Tours, could not be less fun, and Rendell has little to add beyond what we all know. Again, there isn't an explicit running narrative per se, but the anecdotes themselves, taken together, tell plenty.

But there's much more in the Tour's underbelly than well-documented doping cases, and the book's essential value lies in bringing many of the lost stories back to life. My own highlights are the portraits of the great champions. There's the arrogant Anquetil:

'...One of his greatest successes lies in giving Louison Bobet a complex: Louison eats grilled food, Jacques preferes marinated oysters; Bobet drinks mineral water, Anquetil sends the champagne corks flying; Bobet sleeps ten hours, Anquetil spends half the night driving, then appears at the start of a criterium the following day, fresh as a cucumber.' Anquetil's own summary was more succinct: 'To prepare for a race, nothing beats a good pheasant, champagne and a woman.'

And of course the insatiable Merckx:

During the 1968 Tour of Italy, Eddy Merckx was sharing a room with the Italian rider Vittorio Adorni. Merckx was first overall, and Adorni was second. The third-placed rider, Felice Gimondi, was more than ten minutes behind them. Merckx opened his suitcase, pulled out a map, and showed it to Adorni: 'Look! Tomorrow, we attack here!' Astonished, Adorni stammered, 'Attack? Attack who?'

Anecdotes without a purpose are just that, but the Tour de France, in its 105 years, is full of anecdotal evidence of the majesty and madness of the event. Rendell's selection probably only scratches the surface in 320 pages; hell, you couldn't capture all of this subject in three thousand pages. But Blazing Saddles carefully picks out those stories which lend both color and insight into the world's greatest race and the utterly abnormal people destined to ride it. As we emerge collectively from the monotonous domination of Armstrong and Indurain and from the shame of the latest doping era, and as (hopefully) the Tour de France restores its honor and dignity, it's a relief to think Cycling can maybe be fun once again.

Crib Sheet

Title: Gracie Goat's Big Bike Race
Author: Erin Mirabella; Illustrator: Lisa Horstman
Publisher: VeloPress
Pages: 24
Order: HERE
What is it? A kids book! A story of overcoming fear, and about bike racing. Officially ages 5-8, though my 4y.o. son loves it.
Strengths: The fact that it exists.
Weaknesses: A tad too much info at times.
Rating: ★★★★ (4 of 5)

Ever wondered how to explain bike racing to your toddlers? Ever felt like making your kids watch the Tour de France with you for 21 consecutive mornings was maybe a little disorienting for them? Ever thought, if only there was a way to break it all down into something my kids can use?

Former US Olympic track cyclist and roadie Erin Mirabella apparently did, and decided to do something about it. Meet Gracie Goat and her friends Howard Horse, Shawn Sheep, Dougie Dog, Peter Pig and the rest of the squadra of novice bike racers. Howard, the local patron, wants to enter a team of his friends in a kids race, spurred on by his cousin, an established roadie who's coming to town for the event. While most of Howard's friends are thrilled, Gracie is oddly reluctant, for an unspoken, private reason: she hasn't yet learned how to ride a bike.

As you can tell from the cover, she figures it out, but not before working with her grandmother to face her fears and accept the difficulty of learning how to ride. The book's greatest value comes in the transitional section, where Gracie and Grandma Goat debate her fears, stated at first as her fear of one hazard or another, until Gracie admits she just doesn't know if she can do it. The lesson isn't that she learned how to ride; it's that she learned how to overcome lack of confidence.

This is a subtle distinction at first, but a profound one. We've owned the book for a few months, during which it has held a place in (my 4-y.o. son) DS Little Bear's regular rotation, and lately we have been mentioning it to him as he prepares to face his fear: swimming. Whether it makes a difference is to be seen, but it can't hurt to give him some perspective.

Of course, there's nothing new about kids' books containing valuable lessons, so what makes this one stand out is the connection to bike racing. Gracie goes from unable and afraid, to praciticing and falling off, to riding her bike for fun. This is a pretty universal progression, but according to the book it's only a short walk from there to participating in a race -- another great message! The familiarity of bike racing is one of the sport's greatest assets, and the book connects the dots simply enough.

There are other significant details: the race scene is an all-day series of races in the town square, with all the pageantry implied. The friends ride as a team, including a moment where Gracie literally plays watercarrier to their ace Howard... though the book wisely stops there with the complexity of team tactics. Gracie experiences the thrill of finishing and learning from her first race. There's even a brief discussion of pockets, and a postscript on proper hydration. [Worth noting: the key characters are female, and while it's a book for all kids, it might be even more valuable to young girls. Don't ask me though; my poor wife has a houseful of boys.]

You'd have to look pretty hard to find anything worth criticizing. I suppose there are a few too many characters, including two or three who are mentioned but don't figure into the story. DS Little Bear never seems to remember Dougie Dog, for example. Also, are we really supposed to believe that Grandma Goat would jump out of a plane, but is nonetheless afraid to get her ears pierced? Like I said, it's hard to come up with a worthwhile complaint.

Mirabella has just put out another book, Shawn Sheep the Soccer Star, which you can check out at her website. So whether there are future cycling adventures for Gracie and co. remains to be seen. But she's a legit cyclist though, so we bike-obsessed parents can hope. There are other lessons to glean from the sport, such as the element of teamwork and sacrifice, something of value to older kids. For now, my son seems content with a good bike race story, his Gracie Goat water bottle, and the possibility of facing down challenges.

[N.B., this book has been out for six months, and you may have read reviews elsewhere already. Fair enough, but Flanders-Roubaix Week is all about celebrating the great races, which this book does splendidly. Also I asked for a media copy to review in February, and, well, VeloPress did their part. So here goes.]

In sports we often cite "history" to describe anything older than ten minutes... silly, of course, but there you have it. Compared to, oh, Ultimate Fighting, Cycling makes a better case for having an actual history: it's old, it's not remote from humanity, it's been run primarily by newspapers and painstakingly recorded. But for events like Paris-Roubaix and some of its contemporaries, history isn't the right descriptor, it's geology.

Geology studies the physical landscape, created by piling layers of material on top of the last one, slowly grinding and compressing and eroding into something new. Cycling's relatively "ancient" events aren't altogether different: they too reflect layers of mundane matter that over time have evolved into something completely unique and, in the case of Paris-Roubaix, strangely beautiful.

If you could make a crosscut through the race, you'd see those layers which, mundane on their own, have converged and formed today's great Classic. There's the forlorn Nord-Pas de Calais region, scarred by repeated invasion and economic downturns once staples like textiles and coal collapsed; culturally blended with Flanders and even sporting the Leon de Flandres on the coat-of-arms. There are the roads, decrepit and difficult on the best of days. There is the history of Cycling's great champions, of course, as well as the older history of great riders from a more intrepid era. There's the tension with modernization, which once threatened to transform the race into a dull, flat sprinter's romp. All these layers are what make the race interesting, fearsome, and great.

Paris-Roubaix: A Journey Through Hell is easily the most comprehensive effort to perform that crosscut and allow English-speaking fans a chance to examine those layers. The book, cleverly progressing on dual tracks of history and the course of the event, intersperses short essays and scads of photos which walk you through the race's layers, and take you from the start line to the Roubaix Velodrome's concrete showers. This is how a race of such stature should be experienced.

More on the flip...

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Long ago, in a galaxy far away, people coped with urban congestion by turning to the bicycle as an integral part of life. They pedaled to work, they pedaled to parties and clubs and dates, they pedaled groceries around in refit cargo bikes. Cars were around but many people simply didn't prefer them. Instead, they valued the sensibilities of the bike as well as the experience of being outside and in contact with their physical and social environment. Around such attitudes grew a city where cycling mattered, and worked. The people called this place "Amsterdam."

Wait... that's not so far away, really, and come to think of it, this was just a couple years ago. Shocking?? That a place reasonably familiar to Americans can be living so differently?

Seems so in 2008, but the dream of an America where bikes reach their transportation and recreation potential isn't pure fiction, argues J. Harry Wray in Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life. Wray, a political science professor at DePaul University near Chicago, tours the physical, cultural and political landscape of America looking at the present and future position of the bicycle in it. As the teacher of a course entitled "Biking and Politics" it's a subject, or two subjects, he knows and tells very well.

Continued on the flip...

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Podium Cafe: Pedal Power starts with personal experience and builds steadily toward the mega-issue of global warming. By the time I finished I got the impression that the last point -- the ability of bicycles to at least partly address the most daunting global issue of our time -- was perhaps where the book was headed all along. Was global warming what drove you to want to write this book? Or did it originate more as an example of culture affecting politics? Or simply from your love of The Bike?

Harry Wray: I have grown increasingly concerned about global warming in the past few years, and I regularly look for ways to generate more discussion of that issue. In Pedal Power I try to show that the bike may be more relevant to that issue than many believe. But I would have written this book if climate change were not an issue, because the bike movement would still have been vibrant and interesting. A more broadly biking nation would help solve several problems, including global warming, while creating none.

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