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Along the way, Boulting encountered suspicion, incredulity, teeth (canine, bared not bloodied), contracted covid and fought off frustration and the disappointment blues. I have no idea how Boulting managed to get this so wrong, missed Gallica’s captions and somehow dated the pictures to 1925. It's not just about cycling, you don't need to have any knowledge of Le Tour de France to enjoy this book. Often seen wheezing his way through north London, he's also a big football, rugby and NFL fan with cycling offering much needed respite from being let down.
You can’t rely on Henry Decoin telling you that Beeckman was a “timid man, modest, who never says anything except with his legs” because Decoin is playing with stereotypes to sell a particular image of the Tour. To manage an existing Cyclist magazine subscription, please visit Manage your account or visit our subscription FAQ page. Critérium des Aiglons, August 12, 1923, Georges Cuvelier (Lapize), Nicolas Frantz (Thomann), and Théo Beeckman (Griffon).A fascinating deep-dive into down a rabbit hole that does a good job of taking you on a journey to Tours around the World War I era. Most of Boulting’s padding comes from the On This Day in History files, the story of the 1923 Tour augmented by stories from the same time but elsewhere. Beekman is the lone rider who crosses a bridge (which had its own history, covered by Boulting, of course) on the film and he won stages but the overall winner was Henri Pélissier.
An education in the effects of War (post and looming,) in a particular society (time and place) and how life reboots and copes. For all the slight contrivances, Bradley builds a poignant, quiet and affecting novel full of love as well as loss. It’s only 2 and a half minutes long, but it contains enough material for to fill not just one book, but many. On the same day, there’s the bombing of the Duisburg-Hochfeld bridge spanning the Rhine, in which several people were killed.Added to this was, by 1923, an air of defiance to the immediate post-War Tours, cycling through the devastated landscape in which the guns had finally fallen silent. The roots of the Tour were in a battle for supremacy between competing papers, and egos, as well as an urge to teach the French about their own nation – “France was still in the process of convincing its constituent parts… that it was indeed a whole and coherent entity”.
Bradley struck gold with his debut, The Cat and the City; stories of loneliness in Tokyo connected by a strange, recurring cat. Another fun fact for you: the third finger, left hand thing, while it’s great to know when you’re looking for someone to hit on in a bar, it’s a cultural thing, not legal. Most of it is really a self-indulgent lockdown diary, Boulting telling us how horrible the whole thing was, as if he was the only one to endure it. Photograph: Ed Marshall/Alamy View image in fullscreen Mysterious beauty: the daymark on St Martin's, Isles of Scilly, whose coastline is explored in The Draw of the Sea.I’d even switched my brain off when it came to the various factual infelicities that invariably appear in books like this. Quirky, perhaps a little esoteric but enchanting and (to me at least) fascinating account of a tiny and previously forgotten snippet of the 1923 Tour de France, but expanded to take in a much wider context. Ned Boulting is a life long cycling enthusiast, who in 2020 acquired a piece of Pathe film from the 1923 Tour de France. He coalesces this disparate content into a lovely meditation on the passing of time and the echoes of history.
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