French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France [Paperback]

Comic writer Tim Moore trades his ailing Rolls Royce for a bicycle, a map and a water bottle in French Revolutions. This is a quest to pedal the route of the Tour de France, no mean feat for the fit, let alone a self-described suburban slouch. The resulting 2,256-haphazard-mile journey transforms Moore into an incredibly fit and passionately proud cyclist. Initially, Moore takes the "I will do it and it probably will kill me" approach. His normal perspective, as a stooge to life's misfortunes, plays well as he prepares to ride the route of the 2000 Tour de France. Moore is the everyman who pedalled in youth and now wouldn't ride a bike to the corner store. But unlike a traveller by car, train or plane, Moore has to navigate France under his own steam. Somewhere around the Ventoux, the world's windiest place, Moore starts to change. He becomes enraptured by the feat itself as mile by mile he realises he is no longer an accidental cyclist but a lean, mean cycling machine. Gradually, the narrative turns from travel to a personal quest. Along the route, Moore's details of the heroes of the Tour make an excellent primer on this gruelling race and helps the uninitiated understand the frenzy that grips France each July as the races meanders through incidental villages, over mountains and, finally, into Paris. It is worth reading for that alone. Having survived mountains of pain, a disgusting diet and motels of dubious value, a new, muscular Moore concludes that "I might never leave my mark on the Tour, but that didn't matter. It has left its mark on me". To follow Moore's path of perspiration is certainly not a vacation. Yet, this curmudgeonly clever and inspirational book makes one want to do just that. "Old Father Time was catching up with Old Father Tim. If I didn't do it this year, I wouldn't because maybe next year I couldn't," he says before starting out. And that, as Tim Moore so surely points out, is what pushes any true traveller out the door. --Kathleen Buckley

The book's comic effect should not be underestimated: it is embarrassingly laugh-out-loud.

...this makes for one of the funniest books about sport ever written... his self-justifications are comic works of art.

Moore skilfully interweaves laugh-out-loud set pieces with anecdotes from the Tour's history... a great summer read. Very, very funny.

This hilarious account is laden with anecdotes, all conveyed in joyous style...

Moore is a talented and funny writer who... gives us something to laugh at on almost every page.

A depiction of an inadequate man's attempt to achieve the unachievable and ride the route taken by the pros on the 2000 Tour de France, this is a tale of calorific excess, ludicrous clothing and intimate discomfort. Seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, and unusually determined to tackle the most fearsome physical challenge outside classical mythology, Moore, the ultimate amateur, attempts to complete all 3630 km of the 2000 tour in the weeks before the professionals set off.

Seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, and determined to tackle the most fearsome physical challenge outside classical mythology, Moore, the ultimate amateur, attempts to complete all 3,630km of the 2000 Tour in the weeks before the professionals set off. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

His sporting career cut short by rumour and innuendo, Tim Moore now writes for the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Financial Times and Esquire. He lives quietly with his wife and three children in West London, entertaining them with nightly recitations of the critical praise lavished on his first book, Frost on My Moustache.

One
‘Oh, it ’s you again.’
It ’s never wise to phone a Frenchwoman more than once in any
given fortnight, even if - or perhaps especially if - she happens to
work on a help desk. Asking the Tour de France press office for
details of the race route was clearly ranked on the scale of tele-
phonic enquiries somewhere between ‘Have you ever considered
the benefits of pet insurance?’ and ‘What colour knickers are you
wearing?’ No matter that the route had clearly been decided well
before the release of the basic outline in September, some six
months previously.
‘We do not announce zis informations,’ said the voice
defiantly,‘until fifteen May.’ The line went dead; you could just
imagine her flinging the phone down in petulant exasperation as
a sympathetic press-office colleague looked up from her Paris
Match and, slowly unwrapping another bon-bon, said,‘Don ’t tell
me - another journalist..’
Anyway,it was a date. The plan, as it stood, was to complete
the Tour route before the race itself set off on 1 July. Departing
on 15 May gave me six weeks in which to do so - double the time
allotted to the professionals; it also meant I would be 35 for three
whole days of the period. On the other hand, all I now had to plot
and prepare for my odyssey were a month and a postcard-sized
map of the country with a squiggly line linking the start and end
points of each stage, torn from the October issue of procycling.
Each Tour has a new route - travelled clockwise one year,
anticlockwise the next. The 2000 Tour was an anticlockwise one.
Starting in the centre-west of the country, the line meandered
briefly north into Brittany before turning back on itself, sweeping
down to the Pyrenees, then across Provence via Simpson ’s
Ventoux to the Alps. Here it flailed madly about for a disturbing
amount of time, working its way circuitously northwards: ‘The
entire length of the French Alps from the south, a route last
taken in 1949,with the Cols d ’Allos,Vars and Izoard,all over
2,000 metres high,’ panted procycling eagerly. Then it was two
days in Switzerland and Germany,crossing back over the Rhine
in Alsace and working westwards to the traditional Parisian
finish.
The accompanying map had the benefit of being small, but
most of the important figures in a box alongside did not.
5 July,stage five:Vannes - Vitre,198 km.
6 July,stage six:Vitre - Tours,197 km.
7 July,stage seven:Tours - Limoges,192 km.
Six hundred kilometres in three days, as near as ‘dammit ’ is to
swearing, though not quite as near as ‘fuck that ’.Can I have a rest
now?
8 July,stage eight:Limoges - Villeneuve-sur-Lot,200 km.
9 July,stage nine:Agen - Dax,182 km.
10 July,stage ten:Dax - Lourdes/Hautacam,205 km.
11 July,stage eleven:Bagneres-de-Bigorre - Revel,219 km.
Apparently I could not. In seven days, the riders would cover a
distance that in different and rather foolish circumstances would
see them pedalling up to the outskirts of Warsaw. Worse, I knew
from my television experiences that a lot of these kilometres
would be breezed through by riders idly chatting to team-mates
with their arms off the handlebars as they maintained speeds
which even the ugliest exertions would leave me some way short
of.
Not that there ’d be any of that when the mountains got going.
The route might change, but every Tour is won and lost in the
second week, when the Pyrenean and Alpine climbs meet an
angry sun halfway, the last stragglers wobbling over the line in
graphic distress after eight scorched and airless hours in the
saddle. Footballers whine if they ’re asked to play more than a
single ninety-minute game a week. Olympic athletes demand a
day of rest after running half a lap of the track. But when the
Tour de France hits the mountains, its competitors have to haul
themselves to the ragged edge of exhaustion from dawn to dusk,
day after day, inching agonisingly up the highest roads in Europe
and then careering lethally down them.
To this end, procycling had also helpfully included a ‘gradient
profile ’ of stage twelve, Carpentras - Le Mont Ventoux. As
learning curves go, they didn ’t come much steeper: an alarming
succession of peaks and troughs that looked like the printout of a
lie-detector test. Two impressive 3,000-foot cols caused jerky
fluctuations of the sort you ’d expect from Jeffrey Archer com-
paring O-level results with Pinocchio, then - whoosh!! - there
was Jonathan Aitken booking Baron von Munchausen into the
Ritz as up to Ventoux the line soared crazily off the scale.
All in all, there were 3,630 kilometres (which may be more
familiar to you as 2,256 miles)and sixteen mountains to be
conquered in three weeks. It was the equivalent of cycling from
London to Bristol every day, only with Swindon wreathed in cold
mist atop a towering peak so steep you ’d be kneeing yourself in
the face if you walked up it.
Slowly, certainly, the wrongheadedness of my initial pledge
was dawning on me. With two weeks to go and my train ticket to
Dover already rashly purchased, I knuckled down. I took out
temporary membership of a gym, bought Chris Boardman ’s
Complete Book of Cycling , and tried to fix the Peugeot ’s brakes.
I didn ’t take too much notice of the text side of Mr Boardman ’s
volume after reading of the importance of training on Christmas
Day to establish a psychological advantage over one ’s rivals, and
coming across phrases such as ‘The Tour came close to
destroying me because it slowly drained my spirit ...The Tour
is the limit. It is the Olympics, Wimbledon and the World Cup
all rolled into one. It is the highest level of sport ...That feeling
in the pit of your stomach that the next three weeks are going to
hurt.’ --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.