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If you’ve ever had the good fortune to turn to an obscure sports channel during a July of any year, you will no doubt have witnessed the Tour de France. The world’s greatest bike race is a three-week cavalcade of blaring horns, sweaty lycra and high celebratory camp – but as a monument to human suffering and caprice, it’s also the closest sport comes to the stuff of great literature.
My heroes have never been the great tragic heroes of literature: the Anna Kareninas, the Judes the Obscure. Instead I have invested my life’s love in the professional cyclist: in Thomas Voeckler, the French darling with an extraordinary capacity for pain; in Cadel Evans, the irascible Aussie with a penchant for attacking photographers and races with equal vigour; in Alberto Contador, the Spaniard with an angel’s climbing style and a devil’s grasp of morality. I have loved and hated cyclists, often at the same time. Like the characters of great novels, they suffer- inhumanly, illogically, beyond the bounds of literal understanding – and yet their sheer effrontery finds its equal in literature’s great villains like Uriah Heep and Kenneth Widmerpool.
Watch a mountain stage of the Tour and you will witness the Romantic sublime made into the reality of flesh and gears: tiny man and his worn, sunbaked legs struggling against the mighty peaks of the Alps or Pyrenees, cresting them with impossible verve and then dropping down the other side into the void at blistering speed. There’s an iconic image of the irrepressibly doomed Italian cyclist Marco Pantani winning at the ski resort of Les Deux Alpes during the 1998 Tour, hands and eyes raised in supplication to who knows who, and framed by the rain and lights of the team cars. It’s an eloquent portrait – fearless, even: Pantani as Achilles or Odysseus, at the mercy of an unknown force. Valiant, until you realise that, like a great modern literary figure, Pantani’s person combined the light and dark, the tragic and heroic: a psychologically complex character for the psychologically complex world of modern sport. He cheated, you see, ignominiously, as he soared up hills under the influence of his own illegally thickened blood. And he died, you see, tragically, from a cocaine overdose in a Rimini hotel room. Marco Pantani suffered for his sport and died because of it: a literal death, quite unlike the hundreds a cyclist goes through each time he scales a mountain, as he peers deep into the chasm of pain before withdrawing, just in time, like a man scorched by fire yet drawn to its heat all the same.
If cyclists are the stuff of fiction made real, then what can the cycling novel hope to achieve? Lance Armstrong, the most famous sporting larcenist of them all, is the subject of the journalist David Walsh’s Seven Deadly Sins (2012), an account of thirteen years spent doggedly pursuing a Texan upstart who rose from his sickbed to win the world’s hardest endurance event. If you weren’t au fait with the Armstrong story, you might be forgiven for searching for the book in the thriller section of the store, next to those guiltily enticing covers plastered over Tube station walls. Cycling’s recent – nay, entire – history is one mired in corruption and skulduggery: perfect material for a literary tome. Take Breaking the Chain (1999), the story of Willy Voet, masseur during the 1990s for the Swiss Festina cycling team. Voet writes about his arrest by French customs officials, who caught him trying to smuggle hundreds of vials of, among other illicit products, human growth hormone across to Dublin for the start of the 1998 Tour de France. Coincidentally or not, 1998 also saw the release of James Waddington’s Bad to the Bone, which recounts the exploits and subsequent murders of three champion cyclists – in addition to detailing their abuse of performance-enhancing drugs. Waddington’s work belongs to the world of fiction whilst Voet’s is an honest memoir – but such is professional cycling’s astonishing ability to resist parody, it’s hard to tell the difference.
This obsession with drug-taking is a shame – because there are other aspects of cycling that the novelist can exploit much more fruitfully in the name of art. Cycling’s premium on suffering gives the sport a fascinating psychological underbelly, explored to great effect in two seminal novels of the twentieth century. The first is The Rider (1978) by Dutch novelist Tim Krabbé – perhaps the greatest novel about cycling yet written. In one particularly memorable scene, the nameless Rider’s efforts on the bike cause him to hallucinate that he’s racing cycling legend Eddy Merckx – not on tarmac, but over a layer of fried potatoes. These passages raise what is, on first sight, a spare little book up out of the utilitarian and into the fantastical: out of cycling and into metaphor. The second is The Third Policeman (1967), the anarchic classic by Flann O’Brien. There, a trip to the local constabulary turns into a scene of high farce as the narrator – who has apparently murdered a man with an iron bicycle pump – finds it “impossible to make the Sergeant take cognisance of anything in the world except bicycles”. In the works of O’Brien – but in The Third Policeman especially – bicycles are not just props in the landscape; they are talismans with a mystical hold on their riders.
Those who succeed in creating fiction from cycling do so by turning the usual role of the novelist on its head: through turning down the volume of what is at its quietest a blaring, technicolour world. Cycling has triumph and tragedy covered as comprehensively as literature itself – but many of its richer imaginative gifts are still waiting to be found. To tackle a sport that out-fictions fiction, only the most sensitive of writers need apply.
About Teddy Cutler
Teddy is a sportswriter exploring where the worlds of literature and sport intersect. His writing highlights sport as metaphor: as an expression of cultures, and, on a human level, as a technicolour image of our own lives. He supports Aston Villa Football Club, which has taught him that sport's losers invariably have more interesting stories to tell.
