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Title: On the Road Bike: The Search For a Nation’s Cycling Soul
Author: Ned Boulting
Narrator: Ned Boulting
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8:15:00
Language: English
Release date: 05-30-2013
Publisher: Penguin Books LTD
Genres: Sports & Recreation, Non-Fiction, Other, Social Science
Summary:
Ned Boulting has noticed something. It’s to do with bikes. They’re everywhere. And so are their riders. Some of these riders seem to be sporting sideburns and a few of them are winning things. Big things. Now Ned wants to know how on earth it came to this. And what, exactly is ‘this’.
In On the Road Bike, Ned Boulting asks how Britain became so obsessed with cycling. Ned’s search puts him in contact with some of the wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic people who have contributed to this nation’s two-wheeled history. It’s a journey that takes him from the velodrome at Herne Hill to the Tour of Britain at Stoke-on-Trent via Bradley Wiggins, Chris Boardman, David Millar (and David’s mum), Ken Livingstone, both Tommy Godwins, Gary Kemp (yes, him from Spandau Ballet) and many, many more. The result is an amusing and personal exploration of the austere, nutty soul of British cycling.
On the road bike, the search for a nation’s cycling soul, written and read by Ned Bolting. After the heat had blown in from the south, sweeping the race along with it. It had been cooked up over the Pyrenees, piling isabars high into the air, over the heads of the circling eagles, keeping watch on the riders toiling up the mountains. The hot air rushed on, spreading out across France, further north, through the Tarn Valley, skirting the Otvien, swallowing Chatau Rou and Chartra whole before its assault on Paris. Here it slowed its pace and held steady. Warmth engulfed the city, turning the stone of the old capital white. The golden tip of the towering obelisk in the plaster Concord burnt so keenly you could hardly look at it without squinting. Far below, in the oily feted dark of the subterranean car park, a thousand official Tour to France vehicles stood in long rows, their engines ticking as they cooled. The race had roared into Paris. It was done. At street level, the dust and grime baked despite the shade of 100 mathematically manicured plain trees whose precise rows marked the edges of the road. Jems on overtime, freighted in from outlying provinces stood cheerlessly guarding every side street. The people who had come to see the spectacle fanned themselves with whatever merchandising tat had been flung their way by the passing publicity caravan. They were held back from the road by not one but two sets of barriers. Over their heads huge French trickle of flags had been unfurled to catch an absent breeze but were a drift in the doldrums. The tour was going nowhere today. Paris, its painterly sky alive with the crisscrossing of helicopters, was falling deeply in love with itself. Just as its residents, bored by the annual invasion of this astonishing race, professor worldweary indifference, so the rest of us non-parisians are subject to our own Pavlovian responses to its beauty. What a city. This was the place, the Shonles, on the 22nd of July 2012, the Tour to France in its 99th incarnation. And in the middle of it, on a huge podium, stood a gangly bloke from Kilburn with an unlikely name, Bradley Wiggins. His hair had grown over the month he had been away, and brightened at the fringes in the sun. His sideburns, uncared for during three weeks on a bike, had thickened and spread. This was quaint enough, but he was also spectacularly thin. As a result, he looked like a character from a Victorian children’s cautionary story. There he stood saluting the crowd, a half smile decorating his cautious face. From this point, facing east, he would have seen at the end of the avenue the rot iron gates of the Jadan deiri, and behind that the Louvre. He would have gazed back at the temporary stands filled with the great and the good of the corporate world, sitting in cushioned rows in the tribune presidential, the Tribune Marin, and the Tribune Concord. and in front of him, held back by a rope that spread across the whole width of the boulevard, hundreds of lenses catching the late afternoon sun and winking at him. I was familiar with this pageant 10 times each year since 2003 when I first started to follow the tour. I had stood to the side of the podium, watching on as Armstrong, Landis, Sastra, Contidor, and Evans had all thrown their arms a loft in victory. Wiggins would have watched it too, sometimes in the flesh, a little further down that cobbled road, half dismounted from his bike, ignored by everyone. A finisher, not a winner. I had seen the moment repeated when from nowhere a microphone appears, thrust at the champion by one of the tour’s army of green shirted roadies. I’d seen each different winner write himself, pause, and level some carefully scripted words in the general direction of the tour to France. France itself, the world, and history. Madames am missure or ladies and gentlemen it is a great honor or I’m highly honored to be standing here mercy oh to France applause except on this day that’s not what happened firstly there was some confusion over the order of events instead of going straight to the speech the French nation were first treated to a surprisingly unpleasant rendition of God Save the Queen by a middle-aged lady clad in a sparkling red blouse and a floorlength Union Jack wrap upstroke skirt so puzzlingly awful that it left most of us frowning at our iPhones and conducting a Google images search on Leslie Garrett just to check this lady wasn’t an imposter. Then when she’d finally relented, Wiggins was handed his microphone even though he was already juggling a glass vase, a bouquet, and a cuddly toy like a serial winner of the generation game. He first had to deposit all of these items at his feet without them falling off the podium. Then he cleared his throat and smartly turned his back on France. Now he faced west, looking down the length of the avenue towards the Arctic triumph. Here the British had gathered in huge numbers. Man’s flags with their Masonic looking three-legged star. Sample complete. Ready to continue.