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Of course, the main focus is the Tour de France and its origins, personalities, history. The winner of the race in 1923 was Henri Pélissier. A rather brutal character, he was noteworthy for the strike he led with his brother and another rider in the 1924 race, dropping out on Stage 4 and giving an interview to journalist Albert Londres that became the infamous “Convicts of the Road” story about pro bike racers. Wearing the Yellow Jersey on this stage in 1923 was his teammate, Italian Ottavio Bottechia, who would go on to win the Tour in 1924 and 1925 before dying in mysterious circumstances. There are mini biographies of Tour riders, who would be made immortal for a few moments because of their Tour participation and then vanish from history. As interesting as the story of how Boulting pins down the precise year of the film, 1923 – weather reports and clothing confirmed it couldn’t have been 1924’s appalling heatwave – and starts to attach names to faces, is the insight he gives into the “heroic age” of cycling. The roots of the Tour were in a battle for supremacy between competing papers, and egos, as well as an urge to teach the French about their own nation – “France was still in the process of convincing its constituent parts… that it was indeed a whole and coherent entity”. Added to this was, by 1923, an air of defiance to the immediate post-War Tours, cycling through the devastated landscape in which the guns had finally fallen silent. Witty, discursive, and tons of fun, Ned Boulting has the Tour de France under his skin, and you will too by the time you've read this * Al Murray, comedian, author and presenter of history podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk * Cycling is full of half-remembered forgotten heroes. Take my good friend Teddy Hale, the Irishman who wasn’t. I and others have tried to research and write about his story, have buried ourselves in the archives and spoken to his descendants and still we know little about this Englishman who won the 1896 Madison Square Garden International Six Day Race while pretending to be an Irishman. It looks like he is a wearing a wedding band, so it must have been taken after February 1925 [when he married]. But he is wearing a Griffon jersey, a team he reportedly left at the end of 1924.”
Norris Edward "Ned" Boulting (born 11 July 1969) is a British sports journalist, television presenter and podcaster best known for his coverage of football, cycling and darts. Many of the details of that stage in 1923 are astonishing to the modern reader. For a start, it was 412km long when today 220km or so is commonplace. The cyclists raced on gravel roads with, of course, far more rudimentary bikes and refreshments.
Since April 2020 Boulting has co-presented the podcast Streets Ahead with Adam Tranter and Laura Laker. The podcast involves discussions of active travel infrastructure and often includes interviewing guests. Boulting produced and directed Dutch Master – A tribute to Dennis Bergkamp for Sky Sports in 1998, and Steven Gerrard – A Year in My Life for Sky 1 in 2006. [2] Jump forward to July 8 and across France Boulting finds news of a four-year-old boy killed in Argenteuil, a plane crashing and killing its pilot in Le Havre, and a woman committing suicide in Nantes. Beginning with a fragment of a century-old race, Ned has written a 'biography of the unknown rider'. And in honouring him he's told us more about bike racing, the Tour and about Europe in the years between the wars than we'd ever have learned from a book about a star * Michael Hutchinson, racing cyclist and writer * This is such a poignant book. Ned Boulting is conjuring ghosts. I don't know of many things more thrilling than this. A wonderfully imaginative and evocative work - Philippe Auclair.
Part memoir and part travelogue, this Roger Deakin award-winning book is also a paean to the magic and mystery of the coastline surrounding Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Menmuir uses all the poetic storytelling techniques honed in his Booker-longlisted career to imbue the wonderful The Draw of the Sea with a keen sense of place and purpose. Meeting beachcombers, gig rowers, surfers and freedivers while pondering his own family’s place in this wild landscape, he explores why we are driven to the water’s edge. Boulting made his darts commentary debut at the 2020 Masters after being a long term pundit for ITV Sport PDC events. [10] Most of Boulting’s padding comes from the On This Day in History files, the story of the 1923 Tour augmented by stories from the same time but elsewhere. The real issue here isn’t that Boulting isn’t aware that Thomann was an Alcyon subsidiary (never mind that it’s even on a rather well-known digital encyclopedia). It’s that, just because Boulting doesn’t understand it, the explanation is “lost to time, unreported and now unknowable.”On The Road Bike: The Search For A Nation’s Cycling Soul ( Yellow Jersey Press, 2013) ISBN 978-0224083362 [12] In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathé news film from a London auction house. All he knew was it was film from the Tour de France, a long time ago. Once restored it became clear it was a short sequence of shots from stage 4 of the 1923 Tour de France. No longer than 2.5 minutes long, it featured half a dozen sequences, including a lone rider crossing a bridge. The film’s condition meant two to three months of sourcing the right specialist help but a facility in east London proved up to the task. How Cav Won the Green Jersey: Short Dispatches from the 2011 Tour de France (Vintage Digital, 2012) There’s the Seznec affaire, in which someone gets murdered and that is somehow linked to the very day of the Pathé newsreel by virtue of some piece of paperwork or other being signed by someone on that day.
a b Marquand, Rupert (11 August 2013). "Winning over the cycling audience". Bedfordshire on Sunday. Ned's captivating book explores one man's obsession with this magnificent event and casts an intriguing light on a tiny fragment of a race long gone by ― Alexei Sayle.
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Despite concentrating on this single day of the stage, the book is much more than a simple cycling history, however, or just a memoir of his own research obsession.
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