Book review: What a ride, by Rupert Guinness

I think the difficulty for Rupert Guinness (an incredibly talented wordsmith on this most gruelling of sports) is that in the past 25 years that he has covered Le Tour, thanks largely to his own impeccable efforts, Australian sporting fans have become all too familiar with it. No longer is this a totally foreign event raced by very few outside of continental Europe, it has become an Australian obsession each July. No longer are highlights packages wedged into unholy hours on television, but front and centre every night as Mum, Dad and the kids sit down for tea.

Courtesy: fishpond.com.au

This book by Guinness are his perspectives, memories and hindsight reflections from a year in year out love affair he has had with the event since the mid-1980s. Guinness over this time has elevated himself not just in the eyes of the Australian cycling fan fraternity but in the eyes of the tour as a whole.

The book is actually more a memoir of Guinness' time as a cycling journalist, centred around the one race every year that everyone really cares about. The sophistication of his writing methods, connection to those in and around the peloton, and his courage in tackling stories front-on grow with each passing years description of what he got up to during July.

Because of our increasing familiarity with the tour, and its marathon rather than sprint character, we have all been granted time and space to become couch bound experts on just what each rider is doing, planning to do, or should have done. The stories in the book therefore are all too familiar and repetitive, and shed no further insight on what occurred in the race.

There are a couple of redeeming features that make the work worthwhile for the more passionate cycling fan to have a copy of it on their bookshelf. Firstly, Guinness does not just focus on the Australian riders who have become our staple diet. O'Grady, McEwan, Evans, Stephens and Anderson all receive pages of description on their heroics, but lesser known guys happy to have just been in the event in the first place such as Scott Sunderland, Allan Peiper, and Matt White are extolled also and provide the reader with a more rounded education of how Australia has grown to be a major force in providing talent to the tour.

Secondly, that the Australian sports journalism landscape is dominated by craftsperson's who have cut their teeth writing on football (be it any code) the tendency for them to miss the point of cycling stories or just describe them poorly is common. Guinness comes from this background also (Rugby Union) however his immersion in the sport of cycling has him better placed to write comment on difficult issues such as doping, and his rhetoric is enjoyable and far more enlightened than others. Two stars.

Note: The book finishes at the conclusion of 2010s tour, therefore does not include description of Cadel Evans' General Classification win in 2011.

Pure Cycling: Irrational Love

There cannot be a professional sport with such a disassembled and bureaucratic structure as cycling is. A combination of national cycling associations, private race organisers, rider guilds as well as multi-sport organisations such as the International Olympic Committee and Commonwealth Games Federation all pool their collective desires together annually and an international racing calendar is drawn up. Above, at times within, often below this chaotic and ridiculous quantity of administrators, the International Cycling Union (UCI) as the nominal governing body of the sport tries to pull all of these desires together, and also conduct a cycling tour of their own.

It is therefore no real surprise that for a lay person with a passing interest in the sport would struggle to draw a consistent line through a season's schedule or the cyclist world rankings that are drawn from results within. A cyclist has had in the past the very real possibility of riding in a lower level semi-professional race along back lanes in northern Europe one day before being thrust into a high profile event the next and be expected to perform in both.

Such dramatic pressure on cyclists has reduced in the modern era. The peloton, readily abused by a series of sadistic administrators and team directors for 100 years, began to fight back in the late 1970s. A picture of a defiant Bernard Hinault refusing to begin a stage in the 1978 Tour de France, the race that year would later be his first of five wins, shows just what a struggle the cyclists believed the poor scheduling to be. Hinault of course was later to become, if he wasn't already, the 'Patron' of the peloton, therefore all the other cyclists that day refused along with 'The Badger'.

But today the collective power of the cyclists themselves is not an uprising any more against a sadistic oppressor, they themselves have become just another group of voices in a swirling vortex of disorganisation. The current, and some would say self-appointed, Patron of the peloton these days is Fabian Cancellara. Anyone witnessing his constant hijacking of last years Tour de France could only conclude that the thinly veiled selfish desires of him, and other riders seeking patronage, are just part of the bureaucratic problem in cycling and not a response.

There are great races every year that can only be won by persons seeking to put in a performance of a champion on that particular day, week, or longer period. In fact this is how cyclists these days approach performance as against the champions of the past. Where Eddie Merckx wanted to win all three grand tours in a year plus all the 'monument' classics, these days training and entry is tailored for cyclists that they will only be able to put in a champion performance in a specific race.

Of course the ridiculous unwieldy scheduling is just one of cycling's problems. Cycling's ongoing endemic scourge of doping is probably the worst. But I love it. It is an irrational sport, calling upon an irrational thing called love. We know the problems, the abuses, yet we return year after year, race after race, ready to forgive and be sucked back into its waiting arms. Maybe irrational love is why problems never gets fixed. Like Hugh Hefner refusing to grow up, cycling doesn't need to, it knows we will return.

by Ben Roberts. Pure Cycling will be his semi-regular look into life on two wheels.