The cyclist who went out in the cold: Tim Moore

A veteran of several endurance cycling experiences, including French Revolutions, when he followed the course of the Tour de France, and Gironimo!, when he engaged with the route of the 1914 Giro d’Italia on a period bicycle, in The cyclist who went out in the cold, Moore takes on another seemingly ridiculous challenge, by riding the 8,500km Iron Curtain Trail on a communist East German shopping bike with only two gears, called a MIFA900. Moore is no amateur playing with risky possibilities. Even though his kit looks every inch unworthy of the job, the man who rides it knows how to survive long distances under trying conditions.

All that aside, what carries Moore’s narrative is his sense of humour (which is frequently over the top, and will be too much for many readers) and his ability to tease out fascinating bits of background history about the places he passes through. He is a consummate wordsmith, who conjures engaging narrative from long boring bits of travelling. Until you have spent 8-10 hours a day turning pedals, day after day for several weeks, you won’t understand how uneventful life can be on a bicycle. To convert all of that into an interesting flowing narrative takes a great deal of imagination and linguistic adroitness.

I frequently shy away from reading fully-texted narratives about long journeys on bicycles because, in the hands of many aspiring travel writers, the endurance nature of their travelling experience is translated directly into a feat of endurance for the reader. Very few writers can put together an engaging narrative and carry the reader for the full length of their journey. Tim Moore, however, successfully held my attention through the 8,500 gruelling kilometres, from Kirkenes in the north of Finland, to Tsarevo on the shores of the Black Sea.

With the sun on our right: Tim Moss

Unlike many memoirs of long journeys, Tim Moss’s narrative of cycling around the world with his wife, Laura, is a real page-turner. Long journeys, by their very nature, provide a lot of material of a repetitive kind, so finding your voice as an author and keeping the reader plugged in is a fine balancing act. The narrative needs momentum, it requires twists and turns, and variations of speed……just like a bicycle ride in fact, except that the really interesting things often happen off the bike, in the variety of vignettes that pepper the journey, giving us an insight into the lives and personalities of the travellers themselves, as well as a flavour of the terrain and people they encounter en route.

Being a long-distance cyclist myself, I know what it’s like to be 8-10 hours a day on the road. During those long lonely hours your mind is filled with inconsequentials like: ‘how far till the next stop, where’s the next foodstore, will this hill never end, should I sleep in this wood or look for the grounds of a temple?’. Your attention, in fact, is entirely focused on survival……which in itself doesn’t make a great story. It’s when you stop thinking about yourself and survival, and turn your attention outwards…..that’s where the real story is, and Tim has created a narrative that keeps you turning the pages.

A great read, for both cyclists and non-cyclists, and a great 5 minute trailer below.

200 years on two wheels

Re: Cyclists by Michael Hutchinson

Michael Hutchinson, a former pro-cyclist-turned-journalist, writes an excellent weekly column in The Comic………more accurately known as Cycling Weekly. His style is to combine well-informed commentary on aspects of the world of cycling, mixed with wry humour and critical insights into whatever is current or in fashion. I know some faithful followers of the magazine turn immediately to his column when they open their current edition.

Re: Cyclists, 200 years on two wheels is his take on (basically) the entire history of cycling, from the ‘draisine’ (hobby horse) invented by Baron von Drais in Germany in 1816 to what we know to today, the bicycle in all its configurations. No matter how sophisticated bicycles become, from the technical metal compounds that go into the frames, to the growing subtlety of the accessories that go on the frames, the design of the bicycle has not fundamentally changed over the years. Two hundred years on we are still taking advantage of that leap of imagination that went into building the early machines, and that will probably never change.

His perambulations take him through the history of Cycling Weekly, a magazine that began simply as Cycling in 1891, bang in the era of the penny farthing (perhaps the most dangerous of the velocipedes to ride), through its brief and disastrous flirt with mopeds, when it was renamed in 1957 as Cycling and Mopeds, to its current incarnation, inspired largely by the world of racing.

Although he dedicates the last chapter to the future of cycling (as most similar tomes do) he is challenged to predict any fundamental changes ahead, given that we have already come through 200 years of history and development without any real departures from the original designs.

A good book and worth reading.

 

Racing through the dark: David Millar

In recent times, we have got to know much more about ‘David Millar the man’ through his expert TV commentaries on the grand tours, and he certainly comes across as a fine analyst of the interior mechanisms of the peloton and the tactics of stage racing. But his racing career had been beset by the scandal of doping, and this autobiography is his attempt to come to terms with that, and to communicate his side of the whole sad story.

I am always conscious that an autobiographer has complete control of his/her own material, and is likely to give a monochrome version of the events, as they have seen them from their own perspective. Not a bad thing, perhaps, but subject to all kinds of limitations. Millar, however, was very quick to confess to his crimes when discovered (unlike many of his colleagues in the sport), took his punishments ‘on the chin’, and eventually emerged as the mature experienced rouleur that he was with a very different agenda: to be an ambassador to help clean up the sport.

It is notable throughout his book that he is slow to incriminate others (perhaps a failing on his part), but is blunt and straightforward about holding himself up for scrutiny, and as an example of what happens to those who cheat. He was very fortunate to be given a second chance, and to make a come-back. He never expected the kind of support that came from people as eminent a Jean Marie LeBlanc and Dave Brailsford. He had expected to be treated as the outcast that befitted his crimes, but within a couple of seasons, he had reinstated himself and, ironically, found himself racing much better when ‘clean’ than doped.

If you enjoy confessionary autobiographies, this is a worthy read.

A journey round the world: David Sore

David Sore came to my attention during a BBC documentary about the Raleigh Cycle company a few weeks ago. I grabbed my phone as I was watching, logged onto my local library service, and found he had written a book about his cycle journey around the world, on his modified Raleigh bicycle, in the 1960s. At the age of 25, he began a journey of nearly four years, riding 35,000 miles through 21 countries, and his volume A journey round the world: a cycling memoir is his record of that journey.

Though it is a very commendable self-published account of a memorable, life-changing experience, and could be an invaluable guide to anyone wanting to dip their toes in the world of long-distance touring, it does suffer from a few flaws. Published 40 years after the experience, it relies heavily on his diary notes and latter-day research, and fails to ‘bristle’ with the liveliness and enthusiasm of a recent experience, a point I noted elsewhere with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy about his walk to Istanbul in the 1930s.

This ‘chronological detachment’ probably also encouraged a style of narrative that dwells overmuch on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of his journey: food, drink, camping, the gearing on his bike, and the almost mechanical focus on a place-by-place description of everything he encountered. It would have been a much improved narrative had he explored his inner feelings and perceptions more, his reactions to places and, above all, to the people he met. We learn very little of the man himself, what makes him tick, and how people along the way altered his perception of the world.

It is, however, a worthy read, a story that has a beginning, middle and an end and, even through the narrow style of his writing, he does give a flavour of the rigours of the life of the long-distance cyclist.

Bradley Wiggins: My Time

Those who achieve celebrity status through sport have a narrow window of time to make the most of their opportunities in life. In the space of 10-15 years, they have to embark on a precarious road to perfection in their chosen sport, win the titles and trophies available to them, and then tell the world about their experiences through a series of ghost-written autobiographies. In the world of cycling, as in most other sports, there has been a veritable tsunami of publications over the last few years, amongst them a couple covering the fortunes of Bradley Wiggins. This volume, My Time, has a very narrow focus indeed. It is concerned mainly with the key year of his cycling career: 2012.

Although he had experienced success on the track in previous Olympics, his switch to road racing proved to be a challenging change of direction. But it all came together in 2012 when he won a series of early season races (Paris-Nice, Tour of Romandie, Dauphiné Liberé), followed by the first ever British win in the Tour de France, then concluded by a truly magnificent performance in the time trial of the London Olympics, where he won a gold medal. 2012 was his golden year, a year where everything went right, and at its conclusion, he was ready to move on……….back to the track for the Rio Olympics.

William Fotheringham, his co-writer, has done a good job of revealing both the talent and character of the man who is known affectionately by his fans as Wiggo.

Rob Hayles: Easy Rider

I’ve read enough early life autobiographies of elite cyclists to be able to predict the format and style of the writing. The success of these books in the marketplace depends on the ‘merchandising’ of a household name, the ‘big book’ format of the hardback edition, and the easy journalistic style of writing employed by the vast majority of ghost writers. To say these books are written by  the authors themselves is to overestimate their literary skills. Most such authors probably haven’t read a single book since they left school, let alone written one, so they sit with their chosen ghost writer for a few days being interviewed, and the transcript of the interview will be painstakingly fashioned into the final volume.

Having said that, this volume by Rob Hayles is a worthy read. Not the household name like his latter day successors in the cycling world, Hayles, nevertheless, featured strongly on the track in the years leading up to the mighty explosion of team GB onto the scene. His palmares include gold, silver and bronze medals in the Olympics, as well as successes in the World Championships, and he even partnered a youthful Brad Wiggins and Mark Cavendish in the early days of their respective careers.

Unlike most such autobiographies, this has been written at the end of his cycling career, so there is an air of historical narrative about the style, which lends a little more to its gravity and worthiness.

Janapar: love on a bike by Tom Allen

Tom Allen, at the age of 23, set off from his home in Middleton, Northamptonshire, to cycle round the world, in the company of a couple of like-minded friends. With no maps and no guidebooks, this was to be an adventure like no other he had ever experienced. Four years and three continents later, no longer in the company of his cycling companions, but now accompanied by an Armenian-speaking Iranian wife, he arrived back at his parental home in Middleton. So what really happened?

This is the story of both a book and film produced by Tom, the result of a journey that was only sketched out on paper before they set off, but was so subject to change as the days and weeks slipped by, that the original focus (that of cycling round the world) was completely lost. If you read travel diaries to be inspired to follow in the footsteps of others, or simply to be entertained in your armchair, this may not do the trick for you. Tom’s use of the English language is above the normal grade for this type of writing, and he digs deeply into his own inner soul to reveal his innermost feelings, but he loses that lightness of touch that will inspire the hesitant to follow in his footsteps. His prose digs and delves into the darker side of his experience, the loss of friendships as he breaks up with his cycling companions, followed by the tensions posed by his new relationship, whether he should come or go, whether she is able to break the ties of a conservative Iranian family.

By the end, as we read of the final hours riding towards Tom’s parental home in Middleton, along with Tenny, his new Iranian wife, we pick up a sense of optimism about the future, but he seems to acknowledge there will still be many hurdles to overcome.

On the road bike by Ned Boulting

After the first few chapters, I was about to relegate this tome from the ITV presenter, Ned Boulting, to the league of light and inconsequential literature, and I found my attention wandering and (even worse) I began to skip pages. Bad sign……

However, I persevered, found a couple of chapters that caught my attention (particularly the story of the two Tommy Godwins), and slowly began to see some of the merit in his media-style interviews with largely unknown (or forgotten) national cycling stars of yesteryear. He is a self-proclaimed ‘rookie’ in the world of cycling, even though he has been one of the presenters of the ITV4 Tour de France coverage for many years.

His perspective on the world of cycling is as the outsider looking inside. He knows just enough about the sport to get himself into trouble (as evidenced by the title of his first book How I won the yellow jumper, when he once naively referred to the yellow jersey of the TdeF as the ‘yellow jumper’).

The merit of this volume is that it takes us behind the scenes of British cycling, to meet the people of the past, those who made a difference in the world of cycling before the days of mass media coverage and silly incomes, and who were the fundamental influence on the lives of the Wiggos, Froomeys and Cavs of the modern era.

The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton

Like millions the world over, I had been taken in completely by the Lance Armstrong myth. I willed his discreditors to be proven wrong, and for the reputation of this deserving hero to be established forever in cycling’s hall of fame. After all, he had been dope-tested over 500 times in his career, and never ever been tested positive for banned substances…….or so we were led to believe.

The first few days of the 2015 Tour de France is an appropriate time to remember that all may not be well in what we think is the best of all possible worlds in cycling. If past performances are any guide, out of the 195 starters in the current race, 25-50% could still be cheating. The sophisticated ‘dope doctors’, like Fuentes and Ferrari of the past, are always one step ahead of their profession when it comes to detecting banned substances. The art of ‘micro-dosing’ is going to be a hard one to crack……..

Tyler Hamilton, long-time buddy and domestique for Lance Armstrong, had been at the thick end of doping for over 8 years, helping Armstrong in his bid to wind 7 consecutive Tours. He was guilty like the rest of them, but them he fell out with Armstrong (like some many others), and when the chips were down and the world was turning against Armstrong, Hamilton ended up ‘singing like a canary’, like most of the other members of US Postal.

This account, written by co-writer Daniel Coyle, is Hamilton’s version of events. It appears to be sincere, but then all autobiographies do. Much of what he describes is already in the public domain elsewhere, but what does make fascinating reading is the minute detail of the mechanisms of doping: the what, the how, the where, the who with, the how much and how often…….

The life of a doper was, indeed, very complicated. The trips in private planes, the covert hand-overs, the shabby rooms where transfusions took place…… Much of it is hardly creditable in the context of the world’s most famous cycling event. But it all happened. And Hamilton redeems himself a little by appearing to reveal all. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

Journey to the centre of the earth by Richard and Nicholas Crane.

If you are a fan of Coast on television, you will already be familiar with Nick Crane, one of the presenters. What you may not know is that he comes from a family where adrenalin-fueled competition and adventuring dominated the lives of the majority of siblings and cousins. From running the Himalayas to biking up Kilimanjaro, this bicycle journey was one of a long and exacting series of ultra challenges that would take them to the notional centre of the earth……defined by the Guinness Book of Records  as a point on dry land that, in all directions, is the furthest from the sea. And that spot was estimated to be somewhere in the Dzungarian Desert in the North of China, close to the Mongolian border…..but no one knew exactly where.

Their first task was to do the complicated mathematical and cartographic research to determine exactly where that spot was, and then to plan the 5000 km journey from the Ganges delta in Bangladesh, and cycle the distance over the Himalayas and across deserts, to complete the journey in only 50 days. Something that had never been done by anyone…..this was pioneering of an extreme kind.

If you are fascinated by stories of extreme adventuring, whether or not your interests lie in the field of cycling, this will be a compulsive read. It’s fascination lies as much in the physical and mental challenges of endurance riding, as in the the ever-changing dynamics of the relationship between the two cousins. It amounts to an in-depth study of two well matched athletes who push their bodies and minds to the limits of human endurance.

The man who cycled the world by Mark Beaumont

Mark Beaumont came to prominence when he set off to break the world record at circumnavigating the world on a bicycle, covering a minimum of 18,000 miles, going in one direction and cycling in both hemispheres (terms and conditions of the Guinness book of records). But it wasn’t just his record attempt that brought him to our attention. He planned the whole venture to be a mainly self-recorded journey, using all the portable modern technology available to him at the time, so that it could be converted into a documentary series for television.

In other words, he had the wisdom and foresight not only to go for the world record (which, in fact, he only held onto for a matter of weeks), but at the same time to almost virtually pioneer a method of self-recording the attempt, to a level of quality that would attract the attention of  the BBC, and thus launch his career as an adventurer, documentary-maker and author.

I am always very tentative when I pick up books that are first accounts of such ventures. Many are poorly written, offer a journal-like description of the journey (eg. we did this, then we did that…..) and frequently give the reader far too much detail of the mile-by-mile experience, bicycle specifications, kit lists, food eaten etc…….. These details may be important to the author, but the general reader quickly tires of the predictable formulaic style of writing.

Beaumont’s book, however, doesn’t fall into that trap. He tells us a lot about the “touchy-feely” aspects of the journey (the saddle sores, the knee problems, the headwinds…..but also many of the joys) but, more importantly, he relishes sharing the details of the people he met along the way, the cultural and linguistic challenges he encountered, the potential threats to his life both from people and the insect world (eg. tarantulas in Australia)…..and much more. His narrative could make much more of some of the tense moments of his journey, but he neatly avoids the danger of over-egging his experiences, where the reader may begin to suspect unnecessary embellishment for effect.

This is a very worthy travel volume from an adventure traveller who pushed himself to extraordinary limits to achieve his goal…..that of cycling around the world unsupported, in the hope of breaking the world record.

At Speed by Mark Cavendish

If you want to really know why Mark Cavendish crashed out of the Tour de France recently……..well, it was my fault, I guess. That very day, I began reading the second instalment of his memoirs entitled At Speed. It’s a bit like those time-honoured superstitions we have of the connectedness of the universe…..you do one thing, and something else automatically happens. Like washing your car or your house windows………it’s a sure-fire way of bringing on the rain.

I had planned the reading of this book to coincide with the ‘surety’ of Cav winning the first and third stages of the Tour here in the UK, both ideal stages for the sprinters and their teams. The only obstacle to that happening was going to be Marcel Kittel, who had stamped his authority on the Tour last year, in 2013 when, amongst other stages, he beat Cav on the iconic last stage on the Champs Elysée. No one had beaten Cav on this last stage in 4 years. How history was changed 12 months ago…….

This book was kindly loaned to me by a cycling friend. I had read the first instalment of his memoirs, Boy Racer, a few years ago, and now (as then) I had some reservations about dedicating valuable reading time to the memoirs of someone who (in autobiographical terms) is only recently ‘out of nappies’. Celebrity memoirs always appear to be just another attempt to create a further source of income for people who are already richly rewarded for their talents. They know that, at the height of their success and fame, there is a ready market out there that will rush to buy the latest volume of their musings.

My other great reservation hinges on the authorship of these volumes. They are invariably written by ghost writers (who don’t always receive the acknowledgement they deserve), using a register of language that is alien to the likes of Mark Cavendish. As Cav himself admits, his most frequently used adjective, both on and off the bike, is the f-word. So, how does he come up with expressions like ‘my raison d’étre as a cyclist’ and ‘doping was de rigeur‘……the language doesn’t seem to match the man.

Despite all this, the book is actually very well written and engaging, thanks to the talents of Daniel Friebe. It may not capture Cavendish’s voice exactly, but we do see the transition of the ‘boy racer’ into the ‘man racer’, someone who self-deprecatingly is coming to recognize his own weaknesses, and beginning to genuinely admire the strengths of his opponents, both on and off the bike. He is learning to bite his tongue, apologise when appropriate and, in general, pour oil on troubled waters as the need arises.

You might have been surprised, as I was, at the speed with which Cavendish admitted liability for the crash at the end of the first stage of the current Tour. That apology would never have come from the ‘boy racer’ just a few years earlier.

So, in three or four years from now, I am sure there will be another instalment, where we might see something of the ‘veteran Cav’ demonstrating to the world that he can become an ambassador for the sport, honing his talents as a pundit and, possibly, as a future team manager or coach.

Into the Remote Places by Ian Hibell

As an adventure cyclist myself, I love to read about the adventures of others, both for inspiration and for the caveats thrown up by some of the more outlandish and, in some cases, death-defying journeys people tackle. After reading Into the Remote Places by Ian Hibell, the journeys I have done to date pale into feeble insignificance compared with the following:

• his full-length trek (south to north) of the American continent, crossing the Darien Gap in the process. The Darien gap had never been crossed by anyone on two wheels before. Why? Because it is a swathe of undeveloped swampland in Panama, measuring 100 x 31 miles, that is impenetrable as an overland route. It is the only gap in the Pan American Highway running the length of the continent. Hibell crossed it (along with two New Zealanders) with their loaded bikes.
• he was the first to cycle from North Cape in Norway, to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. This included nearly losing his life in the desert, being pelted with bottles in Nigeria, and facing up to the dangers (both human and animal) of some of the most remote places in the world.
• he crossed South America from Peru to Brazil, risking his life by crossing the great Atrato Swamp, which is so impassable that not a single road has been built to cross from one side to the other. Animal tracks were the only guide.

This book is now out of print, and existing copies are now changing hands at more than 10 times its original cover price. If you can beg, borrow……or even buy a copy, it is well worth reading. Sadly, after decades of taking calculated risks on his expeditions, Ian met his end unexpectedly on August 23rd 2008, at the hands of a hit-and-run driver in Greece. The world lost a true adventurer.

Ian Hibell

DISCOVERY OF FRANCE by Graham Robb

What caught my attention about this book was not just the title and its subject matter but, perhaps more importantly, the attributes of the author, Graham Robb. He is not only an academic and writer, but he is also a cyclist! And not just an ordinary cyclist (ie. one who simply jumps on his bike and goes for a ride), he actually used his bike to cycle 14,000 miles around France, over a 4 year period, in pursuit of his research for this book. Unjustifiably, perhaps, I decided the book was worth reading……… and in the end, I was right!

In his introduction to The Discovery of France, Graham Robb makes an important confession. Despite almost a lifetime of academic interest in France and his writing of several serious tomes, he came to the conclusion that he didn’t really know France at all. What he knew of France, over the last couple of centuries, has been a vision of the country seen through the eyes of approximately 300 notable French people: writers, philosophers, artists, thinkers, playwrights, politicians and so on. In other words, a vision of France that had gone through several layers of filtration, had been re-interpreted and re-cast to provide an image that was seen fit to hand down to posterity.

So, like any broad-minded academic, he jumped on his bike and he went out to discover France for himself. Amongst the many fascinating discoveries, we learn that the use of the French language as a national language is a relatively recent thing. Even in the 19th century, communities living only a few kilometres from each other were likely to speak different languages. Which means that the vast majority of people living out in the countryside had no contact with, and were certainly not reflected by, the predominant channels of communication in Paris and the major cities. What Robb gives us is a picture of France through the eyes of the poor and dispossessed, the people who didn’t have a voice, but the very people who made up the majority of the French population.

Richard Guise: two gentle bike rides

Sometimes you need an undemanding read. Sometimes you need to get away from perusing the reverberations of world-shattering events, or the record-grabbing descriptions of people who do outlandish things to snatch a little bit of the limelight. When you have a love of cycling (as I do) that stretches you to ever longer distances (that’s me!) in progressively more distant places on the planet (I admit to that too), then to pick up a book written by someone who is a self-confessed occasional cyclist, who admits self-effacingly that he is over-weight, under-fit and not always fully prepared for his ventures,  I know this is not going to be a book of ‘derring-do’.

Richard Guise has obviously approached his retirement with a determination to achieve a few cycling projects, and his two books From the Mull to the Cape and Over the hill and round the bend are both gentle romps that take us up the west coast of Scotland to Cape Wrath, and around the coast of Wales. Though his cycling achievements were never intended to impress the cycling community, they could be an inspiration to many who are looking for a path to conversion, with a moderate sense of adventure.

However, I found myself skipping some pages and paragraphs populated with some repetitive  detail of his riding schedule, his flights of fancy and his light-hearted witticisms, but where he genuinely scored for me was his occasional attempts to explain some of the history, geography and geology of areas that he passed through. Riding a bicycle through a region does not give you the luxury of gaining intimate knowledge of people and places (I know that from personal experience), but his background gap-fillers prove to be a strength of his writing.

If you are an up-coming aspiring cycle tourist, both these books would be a good read, and will give you plenty of ideas for formulating your first forays.