Bookshelf

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 12

Bookshelf

With the obvious exception of west Europeans, cycling is not a sport to catch the reading imagination of the public. For one thing, in Britain, on the doorstep of the world’s most fanatical cycling followers, the sport of cycle racing is accorded publicity by the national press virtually only for the duration of the Milk Race. All this amounts to a considerable vote of sympathy for Geoffrey Nicholson, sports editor of the “Observer,” formerly a freelance journalist on many subjects — rugby one of them — and unquestionably the finest writer in the English language of the sport of cycling.

The result of his leisurely pursuit of the 1976 Tour de France — leisurely, because he was covering it for a Sunday newspaper, not a daily — is “The Great Bike Race” (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 192 pp including index, $11.15), a publication which may earn deserved recognition as certainly one of the finest of cycling journals, perhaps one of the best sports chronicles of all.

It is not a book just for a cycling buff, which description may be levelled at the reviewer. The end paper insists it can be read “as a sports book, a travel diary, or the portrait of a national obsession.” That it being too modest; Nicholson’s opus flits into all the litle

byways of the sport: the history of le Tour, the commanding, overwhelming presence of Eddy Merckx, even though he was absent from last year’s tour, drugs and the death of Tom Simpson; the development of the cycle. But Nicholson’s great accomplishment are to spell out in simple language, for the reader ignorant of the complexities of cycle racing, the reasons for cyclists doing what they do in road racing; and to make a day-by-day account of a single tour something much less than tedious. Diaries, even those found at the bottom of a drawer, can be boring things, and Nicholson is clearly aware of the dangers of recounting, page after page for three weeks, the progress of a cycling tour. He knows only too well — as does the reviewer, who twice covered the two-week Milk Race with the amiable Nicholson — that even these great sporting occasions have their flat patches.

That is where Nicholson flits away from the specific tour, but not away from the subject. No chapter, covering three or four stages, is followed immediately by another. Instead, he looks at the side-issues: sponsorship and inducements (to cyclists, and to tour organisers); the great Merckx; "illicit substances” (a euphemism for drugs, stimulants and the testing for same); “travelling salesmen” (the manner in

which tour riders sell their performances subsequently); and a delightful profile of Raymond Pulidor, the much-loved “Poupou” who had a running battle with the lessloved, much-admired Jacques Anquetil in the 19605. It is all compulsive reading — and there are, strangely, no photographs — to be consumed in as few sittings as possible, then to be put aside to be read and re-read, to be loaned out — on promise of return — and to be retained as a book of refer-

ence, for there is a handv list of past champions and records from the tour. One small point of interest to New Zealanders: the name Tabak appears once in the index, only the reference is a shade wrong. On page 147 (not 149. as listed) appears the information that, in company with other. Tino Tabak of the Flandria team (once of Canterbury) was disqualified for being pushed many times too often up a hill by eager spectators. —R.M.C.