Inside the Peloton: Riding, Winning and Losing the Tour de France Book

Picking up where Tour De France: The History, The Legend, The Riders left off, Graeme Fife's Inside the Peloton pedals over similar territory. This time out, rather than dedicating chapters to the most punishing of the famed energy-sapping climbs of the Tour, Fife looks at some of the great characters whose feats have made the race one of the great endeavours of the sporting world. From Eddy Merckx, undoubtedly the greatest of them all, to Charlie Holland, an early English pre-war pioneer, each rider covered brings with him stories of the tours in which he raced and the contemporaries with and against whom he rode. Fife illustrates well that, of course, it's not just the winners that add to the legend of the Tour. It's also some of the lesser lights, the "domestiques", riding to work for their team leaders. Chapters on Paul Sherwen and Sean Yates, two Britons in their time considered highly amongst the worker bees of the peloton, highlight the selflessness of the role. The hierarchy inside professional road racing on the continent has largely been near feudal; only the last decade has seen changes to that. In the chapters on the British heroes, the sheer arrogant and unnecessary insularity of British cycling is made clear by Fife; it's no surprise we're still waiting for the first Englishman to win the Tour de France, at a time when an American (Lance Armstrong) has just won his third in a row. Without such success professional cycling will retain its low profile in the British sporting consciousness. Meanwhile, authors like Fife continue to provide the English language with a disproportionate amount of highly readable literature on the sport. --Trevor CroweRead More