Books and reading about cycling

A few years ago, I read Michael Barry's book "Inside the Postal Bus" and really enjoyed it. IMO, Barry is an excellent writer - instead of just writing about race or training details, or a few humourous anecdotes, he manages to capture the spirit of a race or of cycling in general with his diary entries and columns for his own site and others (Pedal, Velonews, even the New York Times)- he is even poetic at times. And better yet, he's a Canadian - I'm still disappointed he didn't make it to the Tour de France this year (he's still recovering his form after a serious bout of pneumonia last year, so hopefully next year he'll finally get to the Tour), but I'll be cheering for him in the Olympics next month!

Back in May during the Giro, the book "The Giro d'Italia: Coppi versus Bartali at the 1949 Tour of Italy" was highly recommended at Podium Cafe. I found that our library had one copy in the system, so I put a hold on it and picked it up in early June. The author, Buzzati, was an Italian writer who worked as a journalist on the 1949 Giro, writing daily columns about the race at a time when fans either watched along the side of the road, listened on radio, or read the next day's paper for updates on the race. Again, I found the writing to be quite poetic and captured the spirit inherent in the race ... not just basic details, but stories about a lesser racer who goes on a breakaway so that his mamma will be proud when she watches in the finishing stadium, or about those who come in so far after the maximum time that all the trappings of the race have already been taken down, or about the scenes of post-WW2 Italy they were racing through, or about the epic battle won in the end by Coppi. Again, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to other cycling fans.

The spectators...do they not perceive in the extraordinary abilities of the two men ... the presence of something mysterious, sacred, a kind of grace, the sign of a supernatural authority? And this may explain the immense attraction of sport. This would justify what otherwise would seem absurd: to wit, that reasonable, well-educated people can lose their heads and get upset and scream over a football player or a cyclist. But there are those who will say: But isn't it frightening that the modern world gives vent to its secret charge of mysticism in the terraces of a stadium? Isn't it humiliating? It is difficult to answer, to be sure. It may be, however, that sports fanaticism, with all its extravagance, is a lot less vulgar than it seems at first glance. (p 60)

Does something as crazy and preposterous as the Giro d'Italia by bicycle serve a purpose, then? Of course it does: it's one of the last meccas of the imagination, a stronghold of romanticism, beseiged by the gloomy forces of progress, and it refuses to surrender. (p 185)

The following seems fitting on this second rest day of the 2008 Tour de France, with 2 mountainous days in the Alps to come starting tomorrow (and with Oscar Pereiro's crash over a guardrail down to the road below fresh in their minds still):

Tonight, those peaks, arrogant and threatening, loom over the sleeping racers: visions of horrendous precipices, roads that make the blood run cold, without guardrails, and carved out of solid rock; and a monster follows them as they struggle up the slopes above the abyss, and salvation is up at the top, where there is a passage between the cliffs, where one never arrives. (p 105)

And then there's the Tour. I've just started reading "The Tour de France: A Cultural History" by Christopher S. Thompson, which so far seems quite interesting - since being at the Tour last year I've been somewhat fascinated by how much of a cultural event the Tour is rather than just a sporting one. Particularly when there are positive doping tests coming out and unknowing North American journalists seem to think that the Tour should just be shut down - that's never going to happen because it isn't just about the race, it's so much more than that. Which is essentially what I wrote last year in this article once I came back from France. I'll post more about this book once I've read more than the first chapter ;-).