Imprint: Yellow Jersey
Published: 07/06/2018
ISBN: 9780224100663
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 267g
RRP: £9.99
From the winner of the Telegraph Sports Book Awards Cycling Book of the Year 2018
The first Tour de France in 1903 was a colourful affair full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating. Its riders included characters like Maurice Garin, an Italian-born Frenchman, said to have been swapped for a round of cheese by his parents in order to smuggle him into France to clean chimneys as a teenager, Hippolyte Aucouturier with his trademark handlebar moustache, and amateurs like Jean Dargassies, a blacksmith who had never raced before.
Would this ramshackle pack of cyclists draw crowds to throng France's rutted roads and cheer the first Tour heroes? Surprisingly it did, and, all thanks to a marketing ruse dreamed up to revive struggling newspaper L'Auto, cycling would never be the same again. Peter Cossins takes us through the inaugural Tour de France, painting a nuanced portrait of France in the early 1900s, to see where the greatest sporting event of all began.
Imprint: Yellow Jersey
Published: 07/06/2018
ISBN: 9780224100663
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 267g
RRP: £9.99
Essential…The First Tour de France takes you back to the race itself. Cossins produces a deeply researched and detailed description of the race that toggles between background information on the race’s organization and the individual stages, with long stretches of real-time-style stage reporting one chapter at a time.The effect of this, especially the latter, is soaring
Enthralling… Full of outlandish characters and ripping yarns, it makes for a cracking good read