At a glance A highly readable, laugh-out-loud story of the legendary Tour de France, the heroes who ride or have ridden it, and one ‘normal’ bloke’s attempt to take on the 3,360km route.
Tested by
Jonathan Manning, tester for The Bike List
Content
As the Tour de France approaches, book shelves will once again groan under the weight of earnest celebrations of this most punishing of sporting events. Heroes will be celebrated, villains villified, killer climbs investigated until the lactic acid flows from the page to your retinas, and the history of the world's most famous bike race will once again bask alongside some of the most compelling sporting photography you'll ever see - the agony and ecstasy etched on riders' faces, the dramatic Alpine landscapes and the eye-catchingly vivid Lycra blur of the peloton.
But what's it really like to ride the Tour? 'Really' as in normal mortal, rather than superhuman pro cyclist. Tim Moore set out to discover for himself how a 'self-confessed loafer' would contend with the cols and climbs and seemingly endless days in the saddle of the 3,360km year 2000 Tour route. His preparation was no more than a spinning class in a local health club, and even that embarrassed his fitness.
While Moore lost his dignity on more than one occasion, thankfully he never lost his sense of humour. French Revolutions is laugh out loud funny, a two-wheeled equivalent of Bill Bryson's brilliant Walk in the Woods with a decent smattering of Pete McCarthy's book, McCarthy's Bar thrown into the mix.
He's overtaken by teenage girls, makes himself ill by failing to clean his water bottles, cheats, meets landladies both of great kindness and concentration camp coldness, attempts to acquire performance enhancing drugs, and fails (just) to climb Mont Ventoux where legendary British cyclist Tom Simpson collapsed and died. "My legs buckled at joints I never knew existed and I folded myself creakily off my bike and on to my back," writes Moore.
And it's in this vein that French Revolutions becomes truly winning. It is at heart an appreciation from the sharp end of what the pro riders endure and suffer, of the tactics, history and heritage of the tour, and above all a journey of self-discovery where Moore's successes and failures genuinely begin to matter to us. And it's funny to the end.
Follow Tim and his family on The Cycling Diaries as they embark on a 230km coast to coast ride across Sardinia.
Vintage Books says:
Seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, and determined to tackle the most fearsome physical challenge outside classical mythology, Moore, the ultimate amateur, attempts to complete all 3,630km of the 2000 Tour in the weeks before the professionals set off.
Battling it out with the old men on butchers' bikes across the plains of Aquitaine and pursued by cattle over Europe's second highest road, Moore soon finds himself resorting to narcotic assistance, systematic overeating and waxed legs before summoning a support vehicle staffed by cruelly sceptical family and friends. Accounts of his suffering and chicanery, and those encountered in the race's epic history, are interwoven through a look at rural France busy tarting itself up for those 15 seconds of fame as the Tour careers through at 50kph. An heroic depiction of an inadequate man's attempt to achieve the unachievable, Moore's Tour is a tale of calorific excess, ludicrous clothing and intimate discomfort
EAN: 9780099433828
Published: 06 June 2002
Format: Paperback, ebook
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