Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Bolt Supremacy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://richardmoore.co/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Scottish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Moore_(journalist) * http://www.cyclingnews.com/author/richard-moore-1/ * https://www.velopress.com/authors/richard-moore/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nb2007027164
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nb2007027164
HEADING: Moore, Richard, 1973-
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100 1_ |a Moore, Richard, |d 1973-
667 __ |a Formerly on undifferentiated name record n77010583
670 __ |a In search of Robert Millar, 2007: |b t.p. (Richard Moore) BL AL sent 16 Oct. 2007
670 __ |a BL AL recd., 28 Nov. 2007 |b (Richard Moore, born 7 May 1973; no other published works)
PERSONAL
Born 1973, in Edinburgh, Scotland.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, sports journalist, podcaster, and former racing cyclist. Cycling Podcast, cohost. Represented Scotland as a cyclist in the 1998 Commonwealth Games.
AWARDS:British Sports Book Award for best biography, 2008, for In Search of Robert Millar.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including Roleur, Cyclingnews, Procycling, Esquire, Observer, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Herald, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times, Guardian, Independent, and Scotsman.
SIDELIGHTS
Richard Moore is a Scottish sports journalist and writer. He is well known as a cycling journalist and historian who has covered multiple Tour de France races. His work has appeared in major British newspapers, including the Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times, Guardian, and Scotsman. Moore also has a background as a competitive bike racer, having represented Great Britain and Scotland in major races, such as the 1998 Commonwealth Games where he rode for Scotland.
In Search of Robert Millar and Slaying the Badger
Moore’s first book was a biography, In Search of Robert Millar. It won the best biography category in the British Sports Book Awards in 2008 and tells the story of Millar, a key figure in British cycle racing during the 1960s. Millar stands as the “the best all-around British rider of the last quarter century, a splendid climber who was king of the mountains in the Tour de France, twice a second-place finisher in the Vuelta a Espana and a cranky, irritating person who hated to reveal how vulnerable he might be,” commented Samuel Abtaug, writing in the New York Times. After Millar retired and left the public spotlight, he became reclusive, avoiding attention. Moore manages to break that hermit-like existence, aided by interviews with multiple sources, to tell Millar’s story on terms that would be agreeable to the often prickly athlete.
Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, and the Greatest Tour de France covers the 1986 Tour de France race and the clashes between two of the race’s more prominent riders, LeMond and Hinault. The Badger of the title was Hinault, a four-time Tour de France winner going into the 1986 race. LeMond was a first-time Tour rider from California. Hinault had agreed to help LeMond following LeMond’s assistance with Hinault’s win the previous year. However, the pressures of the race, public perception, and personal intentions created a much more difficult situation for both riders. The race turned out to be “characterized by the apparent deceit, duplicity and double-crossing between its two major players,” and Millar covers the complexities that resulted, noted John Whitney, writing on the website Bike Radar. LeMond won the 1986 race, unseating Hinault, and Moore offers readers a “deep, searching exploration of what actually happened at the 1986 Tour, what happened in the years leading up to it, and who the major players were,” observed Chris Elder in a review on the website Bike Rumor. Cycling Shorts contributor Paul Harris concluded, “Moore’s elegant prose is so accessible that I’d have no problem thoroughly recommending this even to the non-cycling sports fan. This is a class piece of work.”
The Dirtiest Race in History and Étape
In The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis, and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final, Moore covers the events of the 1988 Olympics, particularly the 100-meter final. Johnson and Lewis were hard-edged rivals in the Olympics, known for disliking each other intently. Johnson won the race with a world-record speed of 9.76 seconds, noted a New Statesman reviewer, putting then-champion Lewis into second place. However, when traces of steroids were found in Johnson’s system, he was stripped of his gold-medal win. Moore suggests that Johnson’s disgrace was only part of a larger scenario in which six of the eight finalists were eventually linked to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Moore interviews many of the participants, including Johnson and Lewis, to construct his story, noting the frequent contradictions in the racers’ personalities and the numerous other participants who shaped both the contest and the controversy. Moore also recounts what happened to the main participants in the years following the race and what their experiences did to them as athletes and as people. Lewis, for example, became a noted athlete and celebrity, while Johnson was issued a lifetime ban from competition and was stripped of all medals and titles. “Written with a fine sense of balance, timing and tension, The Dirtiest Race follows these rivals along their intersecting trajectories,” commented London Guardian reviewer Alexander Macleod.
Étape: Twenty Great Stages from the Modern Tour de France presents the story of twenty of the most significant stages from the Tour de France. The idea for the book was to “create a virtual Tour de France by taking random stages from history. I only wanted to cover the modern period and stages I’d actually seen, on TV or in person,” Moore told interviewer Guy Wilson-Roberts on the website PEZ Cycling News. “The crucial ingredient, and the aspect that made it most interesting, is that each chapter is interview-based. I’ve gone back and interviewed at least one protagonist from each stage that’s featured,” Moore further stated. In these accounts, “Moore combines new interviews with stage accounts to paint a revealing picture of the beauty and madness that makes the Tour de France the world’s greatest race,” commented a writer on the Wannabe Racer website.
The Bolt Supremacy
In The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory, Moore explores the “the mystery of why the world’s fastest runners hail from one of the smallest Caribbean islands,” commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Without making any allegations, Moore looks carefully at whether highly successful Jamaican runners are made though genetics, environment, performance-enhancing drugs, or some combination of these or other factors. Moore specifically emphasizes the career of Usain Bolt, a Jamaican whose speed and agility, showcased by multiple Olympic gold medals, have earned him the title of the fastest man in the world. Moore explores how Bolt and his countrymen have developed into such incredible racers. He finds that there is a widespread culture of running in Jamaica, and that the sport is encouraged through specialized schools and training programs that nurture young runners. Sprinting is Jamaica’s “Premier League, NBA, and World Series rolled into one. It is a place where sprinters are lionized, politicians boast of their own youthful running prowess, and children of 10 can be household names due to their speed on the track,” noted London Independent writer Oliver Poole. As for the possibility of drug-enhanced performance among these athletes, Moore finds it unlikely that they would give in to that temptation, though his conclusions do not completely dispose of the possibility. However, Moore concludes that Bolt is, most probably, a “clean” competitor.
Booklist reviewer Mark Levine called The Bolt Supremacy “fascinating reading for track fans.” Moore “has conducted a fascinating investigation into the Jamaican sprinting factory that provides no definitive answers,” noted Herald Scotland writer Susan Egelstaff. “But if Moore’s goal was to provide a fuller picture from which we feel qualified to reach our own verdict, he has succeeded,” Egelstaff concluded.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Mark Levine, review of The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory, p. 49.
Financial Times, July 19, 2015, Matthew Engel, “Guilty until Proven Innocent in Athletics,” review of The Bolt Supremacy.
Guardian (London, England), August 3, 2012, Alexander Macleod, review of The Dirtiest Race in History.
Herald Scotland, July 9, 2015, Susan Egelstaff, “Book Has Inside Track on Jamaica’s Sprint Talent but No Answer to Big Question,” review of The Bolt Supremacy.
Independent (London, England), July 18, 2015, Oliver Poole, review of The Bolt Supremacy.
Lancashire Telegraph, July 27, 2015, review of The Bolt Supremacy.
New Statesman, July 30, 2012, review of The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final, p. 76.
New York Times, August 7, 2007, Samuel Abtaug, review of In Search of Robert Millar.
Publishers Weekly, April 10, 2017, review of The Bolt Supremacy, p. 65.
Sunday Morning Herald, July 18, 2012, Dan Silkstone, “Running on Enmity, review of The Dirtiest Race in History.
Telegraph (London, England), June 22, 2011, Brendan Gallagher, “Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond’s Classic 1986 Tour de France Duel Relived in Slaying the Badger,” review of Slaying the Badger.
ONLINE
Bike Radar, http://www.bikeradar.com/ (June 1, 2011), John Whitney, review of Slaying the Badger.
Bike Rumor, https://www.bikerumor.com/ (July 23, 2012), Chris Elder, review of Slaying the Badger.
Cycling Shorts, https://www.cyclingshorts.uk.com (August 13, 2012), Paul Harris, review of In Search of Robert Millar; (September 12, 2012), review of Slaying the Badger.
Drum-Up, http://www.owenphilipson.com/blog/ (August 2, 2012), review of In Search of Robert Millar.
Eat Yourself Brilliant, http://www.eatyourselfbrilliant.co.uk/ (December 15, 2014), Tilly Spurr, review of Heroes, Villains & Velodromes.
Inner Ring, http://www.inrng.com/ (June 21, 2014), review of Étape: Twenty Great Stages from the Modern Tour de France.
Nudge, https://www.nudge-book.com (October 11, 2016), Carolyn Fraser, review of The Bolt Supremacy.
PEZ Cycling News, http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/ (June 8, 2014), Guy Wilson-Roberts, “PEZ Interviews Richard Moore.”
Podium Cafe, https://www.podiumcafe.com (June 10, 2010), Chris Fontecchio, “Cafe Bookshelf: An Interview with Richard Moore”; (November 4, 2010), Feargal McKay, review of Heroes, Villains & Velodromes; (June 21, 2011), Feargal McKay, review of Slaying the Badger; (June 20, 2014), Feargal McKay, review of Étape; (July 6, 2015), Feargal McKay, “Interview: Richard Moore.”
Richard Moore Website, http://www.richardmoore.co (January 16, 2018).
Run Britain, https://www.runbritain.com/ (June 28, 2012), review of The Dirtiest Race In History.
Sporting Intelligence, http://www.sportingintelligence.com/ (August 21, 2015), John Roberts, “The Bolt Paradox: A Star Made Famous by a Sport Beset by Scandal,” review of The Bolt Supremacy.
Velo Press Website, http://www.velopress.com/ (January 16, 2018), biography of Richard Moore.
Wannabe Racer, http://www.thewannaberacer.com/ (January 15, 2016), review of Étape.
Richard Moore (journalist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other people with the same name, see Richard Moore.
Richard Moore
Born 1973
Edinburgh
Nationality Scottish
Occupation Journalist, author
Agent David Luxton
Website http://richardmoore.co
Richard Moore (born in 1973) is a Scottish journalist, author, and former racing cyclist. He represented Great Britain at the Tour of Langkawi and Scotland at the PruTour and the 1998 Commonwealth Games, where he competed in the road race and the time trial.[1]
He is one of the most established cycling journalists around today.[2] Moore has contributed to Rouleur Magazine,[3] Scotland on Sunday, The Herald, Sunday Herald, The Guardian, Sunday Times,[4] and The Scotsman.[5]
His first book was a biography of the cyclist Robert Millar; In Search of Robert Millar won the "Best Biography" category at the 2008 British Sports Book Awards.[6] His second book, Heroes, Villains & Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain's Track Cycling Revolution, was published in June 2008.
He is also the author of Slaying the Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France (Yellow Jersey, 2011) and Sky's the Limit: British Cycling's Quest to Conquer the Tour de France (HarperSport, 2011).
His next book,The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the Seoul Olympic 100m Final (Wisden Sports Writing), was published in June 2012 and long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
Moore's most recent book is Étape: The Untold Stories of the Tour de France's Defining Stages (HarperCollins, 2014).
He is co-host, with Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe, of the Telegraph Cycling Podcast (www.thecyclingpodcast.com).
Bibliography[edit]
In Search of Robert Millar, HarperCollins, September 2007, ISBN 978-0-00-723501-8
Heroes, Villains & Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain's Track Cycling Revolution, HarperCollins, June 2008, ISBN 978-0-00-726531-2
Sky's the Limit: British Cycling's Quest to Conquer the Tour de France, HarperCollins, June 2011, ISBN 978-0-00-734183-2
Slaying the Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France, Yellow Jersey, May 2011, ISBN 978-0-224-08290-7, ISBN 978-1-934030-87-5
Tour de France 100: A Photographic History of the World's Greatest Race, VeloPress, June 2013, ISBN 978-1-937715-06-9
Étape: 20 Great Stages from the Modern Tour de France, VeloPress, June 2014, ISBN 978-1-937715-30-4
The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the Seoul Olympic 100m Final, Wisden Sports Writing, June 2012, ISBN 978-1-4081-3595-2
ABOUT
Richard Moore (1)Richard Moore is a freelance journalist and author and former racing cyclist who represented Scotland at the 1998 Commonwealth Games.
His first book, In Search of Robert Millar (HarperSport), won Best Biography at the 2008 British Sports Book Awards. His second book, Heroes, Villains & Velodromes (HarperSport), was long-listed for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
He is also the author of Slaying the Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France (Yellow Jersey, May 2011), and the Sunday Times bestseller Sky’s the Limit: British Cycling’s Quest to Conquer the Tour de France (HarperSport, June 2011).
The Dirtiest Race in History (Wisden Sports Writing), published in June 2012, tells the story of the 100m final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
Étape, essays on 20 of the Tour de France’s greatest stages, was published by HarperCollins in June 2014.
The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory was published by Yellow Jersey in July 2015 and long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
He has written for Esquire, the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail,The Independent,The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday.
Richard Moore co-hosts The Cycling Podcast with fellow journalists Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe.
Winner of Best Podcast at the 2015 Cycling Media Awards, The Cycling Podcast has exclusive interviews with the biggest names in the sport and attracted an audience of 100,000 a day during the 2015 Tour de France. There is a free weekly show throughout the year, twice daily at the Tour de France, and a paid-for monthly episode for ‘Friends of the Podcast.’ The Cycling Podcast’s media partner is The Telegraph.
@cycling_podcast
AuthorBack to authors
Richard Moore
Author: Richard Moore
Richard Moore is a freelance journalist and author. His first book, In Search of Robert Millar (HarperSport), won Best Biography at the 2008 British Sports Book Awards. His second book, Heroes, Villains & Velodromes (HarperSport), was long-listed for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
He writes on sport, specialising in cycling, and is a regular contributor to Cyclingnews, the Guardian, skyports.com, the Scotsman and Procycling magazine.
He is also a former racing cyclist who represented Scotland at the 1998 Commonwealth Games and Great Britain at the 1998 Tour de Langkawi
His next book, Slaying the Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France, will be published by Yellow Jersey in May 2011.
Another book, Sky’s the Limit: British Cycling’s Quest to Conquer the Tour de France, will also be published by HarperSport in June 2011.
cyclingnews@cyclingnews.com
Richard Moore
Richard Moore is an award-winning British sports journalist and author.
Author Expertise
Topics: 1986 Tour de France, Bernard Hinault, cycling history, Greg LeMond, journalist, Tour de France
Richard Moore is an award-winning British sports journalist and author. His first book, In Search of Robert Millar, won Best Biography at the 2008 British Sports Book Award. His second book, Heroes, Villains and Velodromes, was long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. He writes on cycling and sport and is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Sky Sports, and the Scotsman. He is also a former racing cyclist who represented Scotland at the 1998 Commonwealth Games.
Interview: Richard Moore
6
Richard Moore pops into the Café to talk about Étape - which has just been released in paperback - and his forthcoming The Bolt Supremacy.
By Feargal McKay@fmk_RoI Jul 6, 2015, 11:59am EDT
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Podium Café: You came to the Tour de France in the 1980s - Channel 4, Robert Millar, Bernard Hinault and all that - and the idea for Étape was for you to talk about stages that are your personal favourites, so you confine yourself to the 1970s and onwards, modern cycling. They're stages you knew about, from watching them, from reading about them, even from reporting them. Is there one in there in among them all where what you thought you knew was turned on its head by what you found out when you started talking to people?
Richard Moore: Maybe to some extent José-Luis Viejo's from 1976, though only because his version differed so radically from the official accounts I'd read (and showed his win in a more positive light).
It was interesting to learn little details, like Jorg Jaksche's claim that Marco Pantani's win at Les Deux Alpes in 1998 might have had something to do with his traditional Italian race food, while Jan Ullrich was breaking his teeth on frozen Powerbars.
Also, from the same Tour, Bobby Julich's tale of the Tag-Heuer watch was one that I enjoyed.
PdC: One of the strengths of Étape is that you went and sought out people directly involved with the various stories you wanted to tell and interviewed them. But something that struck me while re-reading the book recently was that you must have watched a lot of video of the stages you wanted to cover when researching the stories you wanted to tell, not just read all the available written accounts of them.
RM: Yes, mainly on YouTube, so thanks to all those who have uploaded so much old footage. It has become an incredibly valuable resource.
Obviously watching it again helps to visualise it but you also spot things. Such as that stage to Les Deux Alpes: Julich told me that when Pantani jumped away on the Galibier he turned twice to look back at them. The first time to check where they were, the second to laugh at them. The camera didn't catch the expression on his face, it was on the wrong side, but watching the footage and pairing it with Julich's account really brought that moment to life. Which, given that it was Pantani, made it a little eery and unsettling.
It was also very poignant to watch him and the late José Maria Jimenez battling the elements and forming an alliance on the descent of the Galibier.
PdC: When I reviewed the book last year I suggested it was a mix-tape of greatest hits (Merckx, Hinault etc), album tracks (Chiapucci, Pelier etc) and b-sides (Nelissen, Viejo etc), some of which readers would be familiar with, some which they'll be hearing for the first time. Is there a particular story you wish you'd been able to cover, a bonus track you'd like some future edition of the book to include?
RM: Floyd Landis's ‘win' at Morzine in 2006 is an obvious one. There are loads, to be honest, including some very recent ones... the cobbled stage in 2014 would make a good chapter. But sometimes the longer you leave them, the better and more revealing they become because riders are no longer with the same teams, teammates or directors, and tend to speak more frankly. Cavendish, for example, discussing Aubenas in 2009, criticising Kim Kirchen for joining the break after Cavendish had said in the bus that morning that he was confident of winning. He wouldn't have said that at the time.
PdC: You model the book around an imaginary Tour of sorts, starting with a prologue time trial, ending on the Champs Élysées. You have climbers, sprinters, breakaway artists. You even have a rest day tale. But ... no team time trial. Are you among the many who wish this kind of stage would die and never reappear?
RM: Actually I like team time trials and did toy with including 2001, when Credit Agricole beat US Postal, though that story's been told a few times. It wasn't a conscious decision to exclude a TTT. I prefer them to individual time trials.
PdC: The 1976 Tour comes up a couple or three times in Étape. The two stories that you touch upon both involve favours being done to keep sponsors in the sport, other recent books have touched on how personal animosities between certain riders - or how team orders favouring one rider over another - impacted outcomes. Some of this was touched on by Geoffrey Nicholson in his classic The Great Bike Race: do you think it's time some enterprising UK publisher re-issued that book and modern fans got a chance to appreciate that 1976 is a bit of an over-looked classic in the Tour's history, for all that it tells us about the way cycling worked then, and still works now?
RM: It's absolutely time that book was re-published. William Fotheringham introduced me to it and I have one in my bag on the Tour now, though the pages are falling out. It's a brilliant book, ostensibly about a single edition of the race but really about the Tour itself.
PdC: You cover a lot of ground in Étape, in your introduction you talk about "extraordinary feats and diabolical deeds, heroism and deceit, farce and tragedy." I want to talk about the deceit. Not doping, let's park that one for know. But the deals, the favours for favours, the karma bank or whatever you want to call it. To me, this is one of the beauties of the sport, the part that actually almost justifies comparing cycling to chess on wheels. Do you think the modern peloton is as open about these deals as they were in the past - even Nicholson, writing in 1976, was aware of some of the deals done, and talked about them - or are fans today too judgemental to allow proper consideration of this side of the sport?
RM: It fascinates me, too, and it's covered a little in the chapter on the gruppetto: the deals and also the politics, which can shift all the time. In the book I tell about how, before a stage in the Pyrenees in 2010, Alessandro Petacchi visited Mark Cavendish in his team bus to plan how they, the sprinters, would ride the stage. Then Cavendish was dropped on the first climb and Petacchi promptly got his team to ride to try and eliminate him - they were rivals for the green jersey. Then there were the politics that affected a stage in 1992, when the animosity between Peter Post and Jan Raas meant their teams, Panasonic and Buckler, sabotaged each other and themselves. Deals are made and broken all the time. It's part of the game.
PdC: 1995. I remember that I had lost a lot of faith in the Tour in the 1990s - the Irish had stopped winning and the doping was getting a bit too obvious - but that 1995 Tour, I remember watching the day after Fabio Casartelli died and the way the peloton wheeled along at funereal pace and then, right before the finish, let the Motorola riders ride off the front, and I know everyone else was mourning a dead rider, but for me, that day proved that cycling still had something going for it, some code of honour or whatever, that it wasn't all a busted flush, there was still something worth believing in, even if it wasn't the actual racing. And then a few days later, when Lance Armstrong won into Limoges, pointing to the heavens, I was in tears again. So me, I appreciate you including that story in Étape. What's the general response been to you including Armstrong, more or less balanced than you expected?
RM: I haven't heard any negative comments about the fact that I include a couple of chapters that feature Armstrong, or that I interviewed him for this book. I set out my reasons for including him in the introduction, so maybe that helped put it in context. But to me it would have been absurd to exclude Armstrong and include certain others... or to pretend that he is not part of Tour history. He is.
PdC: As well as Étape coming out in paperback, you have a new book out this year, a follow up of sorts to The Dirtiest Race, this time looking at Usain Bolt and Jamaican athletes. Before getting you to tell a little about that book, what's your take on the state of athletics today, given the recent run of stories about doping: do you think the IAAF is up to the task of dealing with the actual problem or are they just dealing with the PR problem of these stories?
RM: I don't know enough about the IAAF but my impression, having spent a bit of time on the athletics circuit in 2013 and 2014, was that it felt a bit like cycling in about 2006 and 2007: as though a storm was coming. I think athletics has a tougher time policing itself without the team structure that cycling has, which I think has helped in trying to change the culture.
But even more concerning is Seb Coe, who is running for IAAF president. Coe doesn't inspire much confidence when he appears to be so dismissive of recent well-researched allegations and stories - all very reminiscent of certain former UCI presidents. The impression is that he's more interested in shooting the messenger than in finding out the truth.
PdC: The Bolt Supremacy then, your new book. It's about Usain Bolt and a whole lot more, yes?
RM: Yes, it's really about the place he's from, Jamaica, and the question: why are they so good?
It was kind of indirectly inspired by the 2012 Tour de France. Wiggins was asked daily whether he was doping, which was fair enough, but then it got a little ridiculous, as though journalists were playing to the social media galleries a bit. I went straight from the Tour to the Olympics, which was so sanitised in comparison, with Usain Bolt asked questions like: ‘Are you a legend now, Usain?' It was like going from one extreme to the other. I'm not a big fan of extremes. I think you rarely find the truth at the extremes.
But I became aware of a paradox, even a bit of hypocrisy on my part. Because I was very sceptical of Bolt and the Jamaicans despite knowing next to nothing about them. I was sceptical because I read Carl Lewis's comments and took them at face value; because I thought it very unlikely that this tiny Caribbean island could be so dominant; and because I looked at the dubious history of the 100 metres and concluded that Bolt was probably a doper.
But this was lazy, it wasn't based on any facts, and so it was potentially unfair. I don't think it's good enough just to make assumptions. So I decided to go there to at least try to find out what I could and learn a bit about the place and the people. The book is mainly the result of the six weeks I spent in Jamaica and the 60 interviews I did there.
PdC: Cycling-wise, what's next - I take it there'll be daily podcasts during the Tour, yes?
RM: Two podcasts a day at the Tour! KM 0 in the mornings, the regular show in the evenings. Tune in at thecyclingpodcast.com.
* * * * *
Richard Moore is the author of Heroes, Villains and Velodromes (HarperSport), In Search of Robert Millar (HarperSport), Sky's the Limit (HarperSport), Slaying the Badger (Yellow Jersey Press), The Dirtiest Race in History (Wisden), Mastermind (90 Minutes), Tour de France 100 (Bloomsbury/VeloPress), Étape (HarperCollins/VeloPress) and The Bolt Supremacy (Vintage).
He also ghost-wrote Chris Hoy - The Autobiography (HarperSport) and co-edited Bike! (Aurum).
Richard Moore
Richard Moore
Richard Moore
Richard Moore
You'll find him online at richardmoore.co and on Twitter @RichardMoore73
You'll find reviews of Heroes Villains and Velodromes, In Search of Robert Millar, Chris Hoy - The Autobiography, Sky's the Limit, Slaying the Badger, Mastermind, Tour de France 100, and Étape - along with earlier interviews - on the Café bookshelf.
Our thanks to Richard Moore for taking the time to participate in this interview.
PEZ Interviews Richard Moore June 8, 2014 by Guy Wilson-Roberts
The author of such famous cycling books as 'Slaying the Badger' and 'Tour de France 100', journalist Richard Moore has been busy on something new. We caught up with the UK-based author to talk about book projects old and new, and much more from this wealth of cycling knowledge.
PEZ last talked to Richard Moore back in 2012, during the Giro d’Italia incidentally, ostensibly about his fabulous book ‘Slaying the Badger’. That conversation also involved a foreshadowing of another book he was working on at the time, ‘Tour de France 100’, a coffee table style photographic history of the Tour (published in North America by VeloPress). This latest interview was primarily to discuss that very book (which looks resplendent on a coffee table, by the way) but quickly veered into talking about his latest project. A wide-ranging conversation took place with it somehow all tying together. Moore is passionate about cycling and its history, particularly writing about the racers themselves.
“It’s not like the other books I’ve done, it’s not a single narrative,” said Moore of his latest endeavor. “It’s 20 chapters, and they work on their own but they’re interlinked as well. A lot of people crop up in more than one chapter, like Bernard Hinault, who is also on the cover.”
bernard_hinault
“It’s called ‘Etape’ and the idea was to create a virtual Tour de France by taking random stages from history. I only wanted to cover the modern period and stages I’d actually seen, on TV or in person. It was worth making an exception for Eddy Merckx in 1971; but generally the stages are from the 80s, 90s and 2000s. I don’t really know how to describe them. They’re not the greatest stages – some of them are the greatest, but also the most interesting, the dirtiest, and the most terrible in terms of a crash. The crucial ingredient, and the aspect that made it most interesting, is that each chapter is interview-based. I’ve gone back and interviewed at least one protagonist from each stage that’s featured. I like to catch up with people years on, like in ‘Slaying the Badger’: you find you get a lot out of them. The list of interviewees for this book includes Merckx, LeMond, Chiappucci, Cavendish and Armstrong.
chiapucci
Chiappucci - a character both on and off the bike
“There are also some quirky ones, like Joel Pelier. His lone breakaway in 1989 was a lovely story. I remember watching it. It was a very boring stage and he took off into a headwind with about 180 kilometers to go. It started raining, and he held them off, and he got to the finish and his parents were there. It was very emotional. The story behind it was that his parents were committed to looking after his disabled brother, who needed 24 hour care, but he’d gone to some residential center for a few days, and his parents decided on the spur of the moment to drive across France to watch Joel. He hadn’t known they were going to be there. It’s a lovely story. And he’s now a sculptor. So that was a chapter that was very satisfying to do.
“You’ll probably remember Wilfried Nelissen’s crash in Armentieres in 1994 when he hit a policeman in the finishing straight. So I’ve told that story from Nelissen’s point of view, with Abdoujaparov and Cipollini mentioned there as well – even though Cipollini wasn’t actually riding – because it was a golden age of sprinting.
tdfcrash_nelissen
The infamous gendarme crash of '94
There’s some other quirky ones, like Jose Luis Viejo, a rider I knew nothing about; he holds the record for the biggest margin of victory: 22 minutes at the end of a stage in 1976.
“A dilemma I had – similar to in ‘Tour de France 100’ – was how to treat the Armstrong years. Do you pretend they didn’t happen? If you apply that logic do you pretend 1998 didn’t happen, and how do you write about Claudio Chiappucci winning at Sestriere in 1992, because there’s an awful lot of suspicion about that? And incidentally, that’s one of the stages I include [in ‘Etape’]. I decided that Armstrong is a figure you can’t ignore so I interviewed him and two of ‘his’ stages appear in the book, one in Limoges in 1995 after Fabio Casartelli’s death and the other one at Luz Ardiden in 2003 after he fell off. And I talked to Iban Mayo about that one as well.
armstrong-crash-ullrich
The famous Armstrong uphill crash was also featured in Tour de France 100
“I also include Marco Pantani’s win at Les Deux Alpes in 1998, for which I interviewed Bobby Julich. We know now what Julich and others were doing at that Tour, and I spoke to him about that. The other story is that it could have been a defining day in his career. Julich was convinced he was going to take the yellow jersey. But Pantani was extraordinary. And Ullrich suffered his collapse. It was incredibly dramatic. I watched the whole stage recently and it’s compelling, even though you know they were all doping. Doping is obviously a big part of the story; a big part of some of the stages I feature in the book. You can hardly ignore it.”
I suggest to Moore that refusing to try and sweep the doping years and Armstrong under the carpet, like the ASO has tried to do, is a mature approach to take and acknowledges that cycling can still be interesting when written about openly.
“Definitely. My first Tour was 2005 and, looking back, I was pretty naïve and initially shocked at the cynicism about Armstrong. Not for too long, though, and then the challenges of writing about the sport, and not being able to write all that you thought you knew, or at least suspected, became apparent. Now we’ve got a clearer picture, and you can write about it quite openly. You’re not writing in code. You’re not subliminally communicating your skepticism. Writing now about 1998, or the Armstrong years, is an entirely different proposition, and it’s quite liberating -- as is the fact that I can ask Julich about his doping in 1998, and ask Armstrong how and when he doped in 2003 (not that he necessarily answered; but he can’t deny it, either). We know so much, and we know even more after the French Senate released the names just after the Tour last year; we know more about which riders were doping and just how widespread it was, including Pantani and Ullrich who failed retrospective tests for EPO. You’re watching it through a different lens and writing about it in a different way. You’re not making any compromises. It’s just a fact that these are interesting tales.”
With all the research you did for ‘Tour de France 100’ did it change your perspective on the Tour at all?
“I realized how little it had changed over the years. It gave me far more of a sense as to how it joined up, how it was connected, and I think I was able to trace the line from Lapize to Pellisier to Bartali to Coppi to Bobet to Anquetil and really see these guys as carrying on a tradition. You can see how the sport evolved, and also how it’s the same as it was. I learned an awful lot. That book was primarily about the photographs, and the writing was an interesting exercise but there’s not anything new as I relied on second-hand sources. Any journalist, any writer, gets really excited about working with original material, so that’s what’s been really thrilling about this new book, doing the interviews – having the opportunity to put the questions to these protagonists so many years on.”
There has been a deluge of cycling books coming out of the UK in recent years so I ask Moore whether some sort of peak in reader interest might have been reached.
“We’ve said that for a couple of years and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all. It will at some point. But at the moment, there’s still a huge appetite and some are selling really well – last year Charly Wegelius’s book [Domestique – a fine read] did well. One statistic I heard was that cycling books were accounting for one-third of all sports books in the UK, which is amazing.”
I suggest that there is a clear contrast to the North American market, where cycling is popular but certainly cannot compete with reader interest with mainstream sports.
"'Slaying the Badger' did well in the US and is now being made into a film by ESPN to be shown during the Tour this year. ‘Etape’ is being published separately in the US, so it will be available there as well, which is good."
The Tour de France has an inflated and overblown mythology, and the racing can at times be formulaic, but as ‘Tour de France 100’ and other publications show, it is still utterly captivating. Is the Tour simply too large to take in and digest?
“It can be a bit formulaic, but the last few years Christian Prudomme has shaken things up a bit. You often don’t have a real appreciation for the race itself until much later. Still, I was tempted to include a stage from last year [in ‘Etape’], the crosswinds stage [stage 13 where Contador’s team exploited the crosswinds to put time into Froome and put Valverde out of contention], which was one of the best stages in years. In fact, last year we were really spoiled. That stage was brilliant. The second stage in the Pyrenees to Bagnères-de-Bigorre when Dan Martin won and Sky fell apart. That was great racing. The Alpe d’Huez stage was fantastic as well, with interesting things happening at the front, in the middle, at the back – it was great, all you could really hope for. We can be dismissive of it, and 3 weeks is a long time and you can become blasé about it, but when you look back, those were exceptional stages.”
Is the Tour in good shape?
“It’s more popular than ever, at least in some places. It will be massive this year in Yorkshire. It goes in cycles, and the Tour is big news here in the UK at present. The roadside crowds are huge – an awful lot of Norwegians last year, an awful lot of Australians, and their riders had a great Tour. The traditional countries are struggling but these new countries are lapping it up. So it’s in pretty good health.”
The change to a new season saw sponsors and teams departing. Cycling has always been fragile in a financial sense. There has been a lot of talk about revenue sharing, a better division of the pie. But maybe the pie is not that large to start with, so I asked Moore if there was a way out of this.
“It’s a strange, fickle sport. There aren’t that many traditional sponsors, like Sky or Movistar, and many teams are heavily reliant on an uber-fan, a wealthy benefactor, like Andy Rihs with BMC or Zdenek Bakala with OPQS. It’s not very healthy to be reliant on a few individuals. People have always said that cycling offers great value to sponsors. Then why are sponsors not queuing up? It’s a strange one. They’ve got to find ways to package it and selling it without losing that heritage, that thing that it has that makes it appealing to cycling fans. Maybe Cookson will be the man to do that. What he’s been good at in the past is appointing the right people. British cycling has seen that. So hopefully he’ll do the same at the UCI. The sport is not fulfilling its potential.”
Moore had a chapter in ‘The Cycling Anthology vol. 3’ that looked at the women’s Tour de France that ran parallel to the men’s race in 1984, won by the American Marianne Martin. I suggest that women’s cycling is still hampered by the old-school attitudes of machismo that surround men’s cycling.
“In that chapter in ‘The Cycling Anthology’ I try to go into the history of this, and how it’s all connected from the first Tour to now. Then, cycling was an expression of masculinity and women were banned from racing and discouraged from riding a bike, so they’re coming from a long way back. Now, there should be a healthier scene. But we love a lot of these races [the men’s races] because of the history and the heritage, and you can’t just magic that overnight. That has to be created over a long time. It can happen, like at the Olympics where there is now equal prestige for getting a medal between men and women. You hear some calls for a minimum wage for women’s cycling, but I think that’s a bit premature. You need a scene – teams, races and an established circuit before you say to sponsors that you need to pay them a certain amount of money.”
Does it need a top down approach: race organizers need to have parallel races, pro tour teams need to have a women’s team, for example?
“I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s a kind of positive discrimination that’s patronizing in a way. Women’s racing shouldn’t need to ride in the slipstream of men’s racing. Like the calls for a women’s Tour de France – why not establish the most prestigious women’s race in the world and build that up, develop its own culture, rather than piggybacking on the Tour. I don’t think the Tour has the space for the women’s race at the same time. They say that the media are already there. But the media are already stretched to breaking point trying to cover the men’s race. They really wouldn’t be able to cover the women’s race as well.
“So I just don’t see how it can be accommodated. Anyway, why should the women be the warm-up for the men? The women’s Tour of Britain is an exciting new event, why not be ambitious for that and make that the most prestigious women’s race in the world? Sponsors should want to run their teams because it makes sense for them to do so. I don’t think forcing teams to run women’s teams is really the way to develop women’s cycling.”
We conclude by briefly discussing the women’s race at the Worlds last year, and the Olympic road race, both exciting events. Then it is back full circle to the editing process for ‘Etape’, which is due for release in early June this year. The original brief was to talk about ‘Tour de France 100’ but it turned out to be a great opportunity to hear about some new stories as well as the old ones. There are plenty more great stories to be told about the Tour de France, and who better to tell them, really, than Richard Moore. Many thanks for the insights!
Richard's new book is now available at velopress.com, 'Etape - 20 Great Stages From The Modern Tour de France'
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Cafe Bookshelf: An Interview with Richard Moore
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By Chris Fontecchio Jun 10, 2010, 3:39pm EDT
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Richard Moore is the author of three books: In Search of Robert Millar (HarperCollins, 2007), reviewed above; Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain's Track Cycling Revolution (HarperCollins, 2008); and Bike Scotland Trails Guide (Pocket Mountains, 2007). When not writing books he contributes sports coverage to various newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, the Scotsman, The Times, and other places where they discuss cycling and Olympic sports in the U.K.
The Cyclist-Author
PdC: How did your racing career turn out? You talk a bit about your experience on the National circuit in the 1990s. How far did you get?
RM: Not that far, I began racing in 1988 when I was 15, that was my first serious season I guess. And I was racing nationally in Scotland and throughout the UK from when I was a junior. Then I went away to University and cycling took a bit of a back seat there -- I still raced but I was combining it with studies and socializing. When I graduated from University I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a job, and I decided to give cycling a good crack for a couple of years. So I hooked up with a guy who used to race, Roddy Riddle, he’s a bit of a local legend in Scotland. He coached me, and I had three years, 96-97-98 competing for me at a higher level. I was riding for Scotland in international races and what they called the Premier Calendar and I won one of those races in '97. I raced a couple of times for Great Britain as well in that period, I raced in the Isle of Man for Robert Millar in fact. I think I was one of those cyclists who got the most out of the form he had, you know, I knew since I’d gone to university I’d have to enter the real world eventually, but my goal was to ride for Scotland in the Commonwealth Games, to the UK and Canada it means quite a lot. So I went to the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and that was really the high point of my cycling career. IN 1999 I intended to keep cycling but the motivation wasn’t really there once I’d achieved my big goal, it kind of fizzled out at that point.
PdC: And how’d you make out at the Commonwealth Games?
RM: Not great, and that’s another important lesson is not to set yourself goals of just going someplace but rather setting goals for what you’re going to do once you’re there. One of my teammates was Chris Hoy, who’s gone on to do great things, you know, won Olympic Gold medals, I ghost-wrote his autobiography and we talked a lot about how our paths had diverged. For him the games were almost a stepping stone whereas for me they were the summit. For me, I lacked focus, I hadn’t planned for being there. I planned for getting there but not for being there. I also realized that mentally I found that I started to panic and couldn’t cope all that well with the pressure. I fell ill about three days before the road race, and I think it’s because I’d gotten too wound up about it. So I didn’t do well in the road race, I Punctured and couldn’t get back on. In the time trial I finished 22nd which was middle of the pack.
Early Connections
Richard_moore_mediumPdC: To what extent was Millar your inspiration to get into cycling?
RM: In the mid-80s, he was the only rider we had in the UK, Sean Yates was riding too but Millar was the only one who stood a chance of winning a stage or the overall. So I think people got behind him, and in many ways he was an awkward guy to get behind, but he was all we had really. But there was something about him that inspired people. There was a cunningness to him and an awkwardness to him as well -- he was a bit of a misfit and a loner, and people kind of romanticized that aspect of his character, I don’t know if he was aware of that. But there was something about him that was quite cool. I met him when I was 15 and those are very formative years and those are years when you can come under the spell of a singer or a sports star as role models, people you aspire to be like, and I think that was true of a lot of other people as well. Like I mention in the book there was a Robert Millar training camp held in 1988 and '89 in Scotland, I went to both of them, and there were maybe 300 cyclists there, and a lot of them it seemed to me were adopting the Robert Millar look, you know with the long hair and the Robert Millar expressions.
A Detective Story
PdC: My overall impression of the book is that it’s simultaneously the Robert Millar story and the story of your search for this person you had this connection to or fascination with all these years. Do you see the purpose of this book being these two parallel tracks? Is one more important than the other?
RM: Yeah I think there are parallel tracks, I didn’t they had to be like that because I didn’t have Millar’s cooperation. The book was borne out of conversation in the pub where I’d said I’d be interested in writing the Robert Millar story, about the fact that he disappeared, and I considered that to be a barrier in doing it. And this friend of mine suggested, what about in search of? and as soon as he said that, I thought that’s the way to do it because then it becomes my search for Robert Millar and not the definitive Robert Millar story. And I think that’s the way it had to be. It also had to be clear to the reader that there wasn’t anything authoritative about it.
I was quite inspired as well by another book that I read around the same time, not about another sportsman but by a writer called Jonathan Coe, a biography about B.S. Johnson, a kind of obscure writer that I knew nothing about. Again there was a personal connection -- the way Jonathan Coe approached it was he’d watched BS Johnson on a TV program when he was a kid and had been fascinated by him, partly because the program was filmed in he place where he used to go on his family holidays. And I just loved the way that Jonathan Coe described the journey that he went about to try and find out more about this writer. I also loved the way he structured the book, and even little details that he revealed about his search and that process, I really enjoyed that as a reader. So I thought I could approach this book in the same way.
It’s almost like a detective story, but I’m not a detective, so I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to put all the pieces together. But I thought that as a journalist and a writer I’m always interested in the process as well so I was keen to spell out the process. I hoped that would be interesting.
PdC: One part that really interested me was what it was like for you to try to piece together parts of the story about what’s going on inside Millar. You do some daring things in the book, like when you talked about the peage, you related that to Millar’s fear of going back to the factory life. What’s it like to try to pin down something that personal and internal to a guy who’s so distant?
RM: Well, it’s entirely speculation on my part, it’s like amateur psychology. That’s something I’m interested in any book that I read, I’m interested in the author’s attempt, whether it’s fiction or non fiction, to get inside the character’s head and work out what’s going on, knowing that you never can know what’s going on. There’s lots of room to speculate, certainly with Millar, because so much of it’s an information vacuum. That makes him intriguing and interesting, and it’s rewarding to indulge in that kind of speculation about him. You can only go with the information you have.
I went to see Greg LeMond recently and Kathy had read In Search of Robert Millar, and Kathy, she’d been quite affected by the story, because they obviously knew him quite well back then, and her reaction was, I wish I’d reached out to him more, you know, I wish I’d made more of an effort to really get to know him. And he’s actually such a quiet guy -- they didn’t ignore him but didn’t go to huge lengths to really engage him. Again, I’m just speculating, but my guess is that Millar wouldn’t have opened up and become a different sort of person if people had made that sort of effort. I could be wrong, as I said in the book I spoke to one or two people who had been close to him, a guy like Wayne Bennington who, their relationship went beyond teammates and training partners, I think they were more like proper friends, but I dunno, I think Millar was more like an older brother to him, I’m not sure what the relationship was. It’s fascinating to speculate because there are so many gaps there.
Dr. Millar and Mr. Hyde
PdC: You talked a lot about the two sides of Millar, including his need to enter a zone in the racing environment in order to hone his focus, whereas people outside the racing enviornment describe him in a different light. we hear a lot about extremely competitive athletes like Lance Armstrong or Michael Jordan, whom people describe as a great guy but around the competitions they’re kind of a nightmare. Is this one of the big stories to the Millar mystique?
RM: I think so. I think that’s one aspect of it which, I’ve started to understand more that there are certain athletes who need that, need to be able to focus in a way that most cyclists don’t. You know, the access to cyclists is very different from a lot of other sports. Even at the Tour, you know, a lot of them are giving interviews just seconds before the race starts. And there are some who are clearly uncomfortable about, you know, Cadel Evans, who doesn’t do well with that sort of thing. Cadel Evans isn’t a bad comparison to Robert Millar, you know, a lot of people describe him as a bit rude and surly and often unpleasant, and I suspect that away from cycling Cadel Evans is a quite interesting, and quite complex and deep person, but he’s not at all comfortable in that glare of the spotlight. Interestingly Robert Millar did a bike test in the late 90s or early 2000s for a magazine with Cadel Evans, and I think from memory that they got on quite well, which is a bit interesting.
PdC: Birds of a feather?
RM: Yeah, that’s something I had more of an appreciation for after speaking with friends of Millar and realizing that the Millar we saw at races or on video wasn’t necessarily the real Robert Millar. At that time there was less of an interest in these guys as people, they were just cyclists, and I think now the way that coverage has changed, there’s more of an effort to try and understand Cadel Evans than just say that he’s rude or unpleasant. A lot of the journalists at the time stopped speaking to Robert Millar because they found him rude, and that again creates that gap of information, because Millar, despite his great riding, probably doesn’t have that sort of coverage that matches his ability because of the way he treated journalists.
The Importance of Leadership
PdC: Not just journalists, it seems. You mention at one point in Peugeot his Director chided him for not displaying more leadership qualities, it seems like over and over his inability to control his personality keeps hurting him.
RM: Yeah, absolutely. Clearly physically he had the abiliity to win major races and his record in grand tours is amazing: second the the Tour of Spain twice, second in the Tour of Italy, fourth in the Tour de France. But I think to me that extra step to win you need a little bit extra, and he didn’t have that ultimately. He didn’t have the force of personality or something, there was something lacking there that prevented him from being a grand tour winner. If you were to ask people now who remains the only English-speaking winner of the polka dot jersey, I don’t think that many people would answer Robert Millar.
Heard Anything Lately?
PdC: After the sex change story, did Millar reach out to you? [Tabloids in Britain have twice published stories that Millar has undergone a sex change.]
RM: After the book came out, he did, yeah. What happened was, we had this correspondence at the end of the book, and he gave his blessing to using them in the book, and then it all went very quiet. THen the book came out and I emailed him and asked, could I send you a copy of the book, and there was no reply. It was only when this tabloid newspaper put out this story that I finally heard from him. He wasn’t very happy, understandably, and I have to say the correspondence since then hasn’t been on great terms. I’m very keen to try and repair the damage. The problem is he holds me responsible for that story, which is fair enough because I don’t think they would have done that story had the book not come out. But I wasn’t responsible for the content of the story.
RM: But he holds you responsible for the fact that they found him. He thinks you tipped them off.
PdC: Yeah. I didn’t actually know where he was. Or I did know where he was but I didn’t know that I knew where he was. [Moore was following up with Millar’s ex-girlfriend but wasn’t sure it was the correct person, though later he found out that it was.] I tried to respect his privacy, and it wasn’t my interest in the book to publicize where he was. I went into writing the book aware of the [sex change rumors] but conscious of the fact that it was up to him to tell people, I didn’t want to remove his right to reveal the truth about himself. [It’s clear from our conversation that Moore isn’t saying either way whether there is any truth to the sex change story as published; his reference to "the truth" is meant, agnostically, as whether he has or has not had a sex change.] I was confident and happy when I’d written the book that I had respected Millar’s privacy, and it’s a shame that this tabloid newspaper went and did what they did afterward.
Perhaps at some point Robert Millar will emerge and tell us the truth, one way or the other. My feeling is that he might.
PdC: That would be really interesting if some future event were to happen and fill in all the gaps in the story that you were investigating in the book.
RM: Well, I’d love to hear Millar’s story in his own words, maybe we’ll get that someday. It’d be very, very interesting, because there is somthing about a guy who, you know, people who knew him said Robert Millar loved being a star, and that’s incompatible with this guy who, hated the media and that side of the sport. But it’s very hard to take part in that level of the sport without having a tiny bit of that ego or showmanship. That’s what makes me wonder about that aspect of his character and whether it will reemerge at some point. That was a great quote from Jack Andre who said Millar was like a little cockerel, he loved to stand out but he hated people chasing him. I thought that was the best summing up of his character.
Who's the New Millar?
PdC: Is there anyone from today’s peloton who reminds you of his riding style?
RM: Well, it’s interesting how the sport’s changed, those kind of pure climbers who are great at climbing and poor at everything else, they don’t seem to exist as much. Andy Schleck is not dissimilar in a way, but Millar was just a pure climber. Certainly in the nineties, for reasons we all know, some of the bigger guys began to come to the fore and dominate stage races, and there wasn’t so much room for the specialist climbers. I guess Pantani was a specialist climber, not dissimilar. I’m trying to think of guys who had that explosiveness...
PdC: Sastre?
RM: Sastre is not dissimilar in a way, in that he’s somewhat complex, you know, he’s very much an individual. Watching [the Zoncolan stage of the Giro] when Liquigas were just piling on the pressure, he couldn’t keep up and dropped back, but at the end he’s right up near the front of the race, you know, he just rode his own race. And that’s what natural climbers do, they’re almost oblivious to everyone else, and that ties into their character as well, they’re all loners. I tried to work out in the book whether they’re climbers because they’re loners or they’re loners because they’re climbers. Millar trained himself to be a climber, doing long routes in the Alpes. It’s a bit like rock climbers, people who seek that sort of solitude. I’m definitely drawn to those types of people, I think they’re fascinating. I struggle to think of guys who are like them, but it’s like the best and most original pop stars, Millar was just unique and remains unique.
PdC: Do you think the King of the Mountains distinction was a bigger deal back in Millar’s day?
RM: I think it was. You know, it’s been devalued some. I don’t know if it’s teh way the competition is scored as well, where riders can sprint at the top of some climbs to decide points. But you look back at the Eighties and it’s people like Millar and Lucho Herrera, people who you can say were genuinely deserved winners of the King of the Mountains. I can’t even tell you who won it last year... Pellizotti, and Bernard Kohl the year before, guys who’ve contributed to tarnishing it. And you look at Richard Virenque, he won it more than anyone else, but I don’t think anyone would tell you he was the best climber. And I think that tells you that it’s in the mountains where the race has been flattened by doping. That’s where the race used to be the most electrifying, whereas now it’s been kind of neutralized.
PdC: Sastre was a guy who hovered around the edge of a grand tour victory, but he did have that one-off victory where it all came together. How close was Millar to that one signature win?
RM: Certainly he didn’t come close to winning the Tour. We hoped after 84 that he could win the Tour, but it couldn’t quite happen for him. The Tour of Spain in 1985 was obviously as close as he got, where he was undone by bad luck and conspiracy you could say by the Spanish teams. And lots of other things -- my mind went back to that watching the Giro stage to Aquila, you know, guys have limits, and it’s raining all day, it was chaotic, guys are wearing rain capes so you don’t always know who’s up the road and it takes longer for that information to get back. And in those days before radios, it took longer for Millar to find out that it was Delgado who was up the road. We forget how uncontrolled the racing was then, and all kinds of things would go on. It was a different era. But that was as close as Millar came, by all accounts he should have won that grand tour. You know, there was a mystery of a level crossing that went down and no train appeared. Sastre, when he won he had everything go right, but with Millar everything went wrong.
That year he was really the strongest guy, the next year when he was second again he really didn’t come close. In 87 when he was second in the Giro he was second to Roche, and Roche really had that wrapped up. He actually ended up riding for Roche in that race. And he did win the Dauphine, the Tour of Britain, he was right up there in big races, even the classics like Liege Bastogne Liege. He was a top rider, but he just lacked that little extra something in his character.
I’m working on this book about Bernard Hinault, a guy who could force races to bend to his will, and Millar didn’t have a fraction of that.
Next Up: HInault and LeMond
PdC: So your next book is about the 1986 Tour? When is that coming out?
RM: It’s going to come out next June for the 25th anniversary for the 1986 Tour. Couple things, some of the people who read the book about Millar said they’d love to read a book about Hinault, another fascinating character. But rather than just write a book about Hinault I thought could I structure this book around an event. And I like mystery, and I know there was a lot of mystery and intrigue in that Tour that we maybe didn’t know about at the time, so I wanted to write another sort of mystery story with these two characters, Hinault and LeMond, central to it. You could almost say it’s a biography of Hinault and a biography of LeMond, but it’s organized around the 1986 Tour, how they came together and their stories crossed in this race.
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The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint
Factory
Mark Levine
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
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Full Text:
The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory. By Richard Moore. May 2017.336p. illus. Pegasus,
$27.95 (9781681774077). 796.422097292.
Moore analyzes the startling and unquestioned excellence of Jamaica's sprint program and its exemplar,
Olympic champion Usain Bolt. His research and interviews with coaches, doctors, scholars, and athletes on
and off the island is impressive, and, in fact, his book is better on the culture of running in Jamaica than it is
on the personalities of the elite Jamaican sprinters, Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce, Johan Blake, and Bolt
himself. One does not cover track and field these days without investigating the question of performanceenhancing
drugs, and Moore does so thoroughly, in the end mostly exonerating the Jamaican runners,
though such claims are perhaps also inconclusive in today's world. He also addresses the controversial
biological questions raised by Jamaican predominance: Is there something in the genetics, the musculature,
or even the diet (yams--don't laugh!) that accounts for the Jamaicans' phenomenal success? Fascinating
reading for track fans.--Mark Levine
Levine, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Levine, Mark. "The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 49. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035017/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=92cbe241. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035017
12/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint
Factory
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p65.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory
Richard Moore. Pegasus, $21.95 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-6817-7407-7
Sports journalist Moore (Slaying the Badger) probes the mystery of why the world's fastest runners hail
from one of the smallest Caribbean islands, exploring whether it's the environment, genetics, or illegal
doping. The author, clearly a fan of Usain Bolt, examines the legendary Jamaican track star's life, from his
rural origins and strict training to his global dominance and eventual diagnosis of scoliosis. He also asks
some thorny questions about several failed drug tests of key athletes, the effectiveness of the Jamaica AntiDoping
Commission, and mysterious sport guru Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfaht. Eventually, a skeptical
Moore attributes the current run of Jamaican successes to the culture in the traditional Maroon stomping
grounds of Cockpit Country, the titanic coaching legacy of Herb McKenley, and the top-grade local athletic
schools, Calabar, Kingston College, and St. Jago. Fans of Moore's impressive work will be a bit
disappointed that this is not an earth-shattering volume--it's too full of inconclusive answers and
speculation--but it is entertaining. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 65. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319304/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f08dea6b. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319304
12/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson,
Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m
Final
New Statesman.
141.5116-5117 (July 30, 2012): p76.
COPYRIGHT 2012 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Richard Moore
Wisden Sports Writing, 320pp, [pounds sterling]18.99
On 24 September 1988, the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the 100m final at the Seoul Olympics in a
then world record time of 9.79 seconds, beating the reigning champion, Carl Lewis, into second place.
Three days later, Johnson was stripped of his gold medal after his urine sample was found to contain traces
of the anabolic steroid stanozolol. Richard Moore, a former racing cyclist, insists that the story of that race
is about much more than Johnson's disgrace--six of the eight finalists have been linked with the misuse of
drugs. The book contains interviews with many of the main actors in the drama, including Johnson and
Lewis, the rivalry between whom was the backdrop to the "dirtiest race in history".
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final." New
Statesman, 30 July 2012, p. 76. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A300444422/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ba9bc52.
Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A300444422
CultureBooksReviews
The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory, by Richard Moore - book review
Why the fastest men in the world may be impossible to catch
Oliver Poole @IndyVoices Saturday 18 July 2015 11:00 BST0 comments
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The Independent Culture
Usain Bolt may be the fastest man in the world but he's allegedly a nightmare neighbour
Pity Richard Moore, the sports writer whose new book sets out to answer the question of whether Jamaican sprinters are winning thanks to doping. For years he was a cycling obsessive, covering all the greatest races and riders. Then the sport he loved was tarnished, almost fatally, by the Lance Armstrong scandal. As he writes here, he could not wait to escape the “toxic atmosphere” of the Tour de France and the spectacle of poor Sir Bradley Wiggins being asked day after day if he was cheating.
Sprinting – with its joyous, charismatic Jamaicans eating up the track and the love of the crowd – must have seemed the perfect antidote. Watching the Olympics in London in 2012 he says there was “no cynicism, no angst”, just “innocence and joy”.
If only life were so simple. By the subsequent athletics world championships in Moscow many of Jamaica’s top names had failed drug tests and the former head of its anti-doping commission exposed how haphazard testing of the team had been before London. Can nothing in sport be innocent and joyous any more?
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This book is Moore’s attempt to find an answer. He interviews Jamaica’s top coaches, anti-doping officials, and many of its athletes, but not Usain Bolt (though he does spend time with his family).
What emerges is a portrait of a country consumed by the culture of sprinting. This is their Premier League, NBA, and World Series rolled into one. It is a place where sprinters are lionised, politicians boast of their own youthful running prowess, and children of 10 can be household names due to their speed on the track.
The complex mixture of ingredients that resulted in Jamaica’s dominance includes the British colonial legacy of island-wide running races, the presence of a handful of inspirational coaches, the genes, the poverty and, even, the love of yams, whose chemical structure is identical to human testosterone.
The Bolt Supremacy fails to establish the extent to which drugs are behind Jamaica’s success. The closest it gets is by demonstrating how the chaotic reality of the Jamaican state makes the idea of some East German-style, state-backed doping programme absurd.
The country’s first dope tester reveals one of his greatest challenges was that the male athletes were unwilling to let him view their penis when they gave a sample – which is required to ensure no trickery. They presumed, in Jamaica’s homophobic culture, that his insistence was evidence of his homosexuality.
The closest Moore gets to a conclusion is his emphasis that when asked about doping Bolt answers “I’m clean”, while Armstrong would always say: “I’ve never tested positive.”
What this book does do is capture the spirit of the sport in Jamaica, where crowds fill stadiums to watch schoolchildren run with passion that would put Wembley to shame. In that, at least, there is still an innocence and joy. Moore clearly revelled in this grass roots exuberance and it is hard, reading this book, not to do so too, despite all the questions that may remain around sprinting’s superstars.
Football Comment Tennis Golf Rugby Other Sports
9th July 2015
Book has inside track on Jamaica's sprint talent but no answer to big question
Susan Egelstaff
Sports columnist
TEAM EFFORT: Usain Bolt celebrates Jamaica's men's 4x100m relay final victory at Glasgow 2014.
TEAM EFFORT: Usain Bolt celebrates Jamaica's men's 4x100m relay final victory at Glasgow 2014.
IS doping widespread in Jamaica?
There are no indications that the iconic Usain Bolt's performances are enhanced by anything but his greatness. The meteoric rise of the country's sprinting contingent has, however, given rise to questions as to whether it would have been possible without artificial performance enhancement.
Bolt, as an individual, is not the most remarkable phenomenon to emerge from Jamaica. The real marvel is the sheer number of world-class sprinters the island has produced over the past decade. Bolt may be top of the pile but he is a well-supported leading actor.
At the 2008 Olympic Games, Jamaica won gold in five of the six sprinting events. At London 2012, they won four of the six golds, but also claimed 10 of the 18 medals. How is it possible for a country with a population of less than three million? This is the question Richard Moore has sought to answer in his new book, The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory.
Moore is a former Scottish international cyclist who has covered the Tour de France countless times. He is well-versed in reporting on doping scandals and dirty sports. He has seen numerous riders branded dopers solely by virtue of winning bike races and finding themselves surrounded by unsubstantiated rumours.
Moore admitted to being conflicted
over whether he believes the doping rumours about the Jamaicans, conceding his distance, in a physical and an emotional sense, made it easier to be cynical. So he decided to get closer. He visited Jamaica several times to try to find out just what makes this group of sprinters so great because irrespective of the answer to the doping question, there must be a number of reasons for this concentration of talent.
Moore found many reasons, and the first is Champs, the annual Jamaican multi-sport high school athletics meet. Think of a school sports day, times it by a trillion, throw in dozens of world-class kids and you will have a flavour of what the event is about. Every senior international Jamaican sprinter attributes at least some of his or her success to having taken in part in the most competitive school athletics meet in the world. It allows them to experience having to perform under pressure and in front of huge crowds, meaning a World or Olympic final is infinitely less intimidating.
There are also the coaches, Glen Mills and Stephen Francis. These two men have almost all of Jamaica's top sprinters in their training groups and although they have very different training methods, their results are equally impressive. There is also the fact most sprinters are from incredibly poor areas. Athletics is their way to a better life. It gives them an innate drive to succeed that cannot be manufactured.
Despite the cynicism, when Moore started researching his book there was no evidence of doping by the Jamaican sprinters, only the unsubstantiated rumours. But then, like a wrecking ball, the evidence arrived.
In 2013, six Jamaican athletes tested positive - including the former world record-holder Asafa Powell, the double Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown and the Olympic silver medallist Sherone Simpson - albeit their positive samples involved fairly low-level drugs such as diuretics and stimulants. But surely, some thought, this confirmed the suspicion doping was rife in Jamaica?
There are some who are convinced that systematic doping does happen. Victor Conte, who turned to researching and developing legal-to-use sports supplements after his release from jail for offences linked to the BALCO scandal, seems sure. So does the former Olympic champion Carl Lewis.
The drug-testing regime within Jamaica does little to quell the suspicions. The island's anti-doping authority, JADCO, has been much derided in recent years over the paltry number of dope tests it conducted.
Indeed, the organisation's former executive director, Renee Anne Shirley, particularly scathing in her criticism. She has been called a traitor for supposedly tainting the country's reputation. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has investigated JADCO and while things are improving, few are convinced that their procedures are watertight.
Moore has conducted a fascinating investigation into the Jamaican sprinting factory that provides no definitive answers. He has not identified any single factor that has turned Jamaica into a sprinting powerhouse. As for the doping question? Sport has entered an era where every great performance is treated with suspicion. But if Moore's goal was to provide a fuller picture from which we feel qualified to reach our own verdict, he has succeeded.
The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory, by Richard Moore, is released on July 23.
HOMECOLUMNISTSJOHN ROBERTSMELTING POT‘THE BOLT PARADOX: A STAR MADE FAMOUS BY A SPORT BESET BY SCANDAL’
Bolt
‘THE BOLT PARADOX: A STAR MADE FAMOUS BY A SPORT BESET BY SCANDAL’
AUGUST 21, 2015 BY ADMIN
John-Roberts1By John Roberts
21 August 2015 REVIEW
When Usain Bolt followed up his Olympic gold medals from Beijing and London by winning the world championships 100 metres title in Moscow in 2013, fireworks filled the air as he crossed the line, accompanied by a recording of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”, a song synonymous with Jamaica’s perceived laid back lifestyle:
Don’t worry ‘bout a thing,
‘Cause every little thing gonna be alright…
Alas, things appear to be far from all right in the world of athletics, with the recent bombshell, revealed by the Sunday Times, alleging that competitors with “abnormal” blood samples won 146 medals, including 55 golds, in long-distance events at Olympics and World Championships between 2001 and 2012.
BoltThis is the turbulent backdrop as athletes return to Beijing for the world championships, with particular interest in the face-off between Bolt, who has always tested clean, and his American rival Justin Gatlin, who was banned for four years in 2008 for doping, his second drugs offence. The men’s 100m will set the Bird’s Nest aflutter on Saturday and Sunday.
Already, Britain’s Allan Wells, 63, has defended himself against a “sickening slur” after a recent BBC investigation alleged that he was taking performance-enhancing drugs at the height of his athletics career. Wells was the last white athlete to win gold in the men’s 100 metres, at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Mo Farah, Britain’s double Olympic distance champion, has also suffered by implication following doping allegations against his coach Alberto Salazar; Bolt’s feats have been scrutinised with increasing scepticism in the wake of the positive testing of several Jamaican runners since 2012, even though the master sprinter himself has never failed a drugs test.
Nor are Farah or Bolt involved in the current blood sample scandal, which has led to suspicion that cheating in athletics is now on a par with the Tour de France. (Fifty of around 2,000 competitors in Beijing are convicted dopers, or 2.5 per cent. At the 2015 Tour de France, there were eight convicted dopers in the 198-man peleton, or 4 per cent).
During the recent Tour, Britain’s Chris Froome was beset by unsubstantiated suggestions by the French media that his performance en route to winning for a second time owed something to chemists. Bradley Wiggins had to contend with similar insinuations during his Tour triumph in 2012, though, unlike Froome, he was not spat at and nor did he have urine thrown at him.
Richard Moore, an award-winning author and freelance journalist who cycled for Scotland at the 1998 Commonwealth Games, decided he was in need of a breath of fresh air after the “toxic atmosphere” he experienced while covering the 2012 Tour de France, so he went straight to the London Olympics, where he marvelled at the towering Bolt’s 100 metres triumph in 9.63 seconds.Bolt supremacy
He also found the experience unsettling, reviving conflicting feelings – can we believe what we are seeing? – and raising the spectres of Ben Johnson and Lance Armstrong; all of which led to the writing of his latest book, The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory.
“The broader question that inspired this book was not: is Bolt clean? That is too loaded,” Moore writes. “Rather, I wanted to find out why he is so good.” Bolt considers he has already answered this himself, emphasising that he has always been outstanding, breaking sprint records throughout his progress since boyhood. “I’m just doing my part by running fast, letting the world know you can do it clean,” he says.
Moore’s comprehensive, compelling investigation took him deep into a culture where the ability to run fast is a national obsession, where 30,000 spectators roar on competitors at Champs, the high schools athletics finals, and where it is proposed to dope-test runners as young as ten, if only to “appease international critics”.
Little faith has been expressed in the country’s drug testing programme: some testers consider that they are treated akin to enemies of the state. Renee Anne Shirley, the former director of the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission, criticised the Commission. “I’ve been called a Judas, a traitor, that my passport should be taken away,” she says. One of the most prominent Jamaican testers, Dr Paul Wright, says he has received death threats and has also been called a pervert by male athletes because of his policy of insisting they urinate in front of him to minimise the possibility of cheating.
Moore’s extensive research includes studying the methods of Jamaica’s two leading coaches, Bolt’s mentor Glen Mills, and his rival Stephen Francis, who saw the potential in Asafa Powell. The book also examines various theories, such as that a staple diet of yams, sweet potatoes and green bananas, might give Jamaicans an edge, or that they have inherited a “sprint gene” that gives them fast-twitch muscle fibres. Or could the answer be that Jamaican sprinters simply have better technique, greater skill and possess a work ethic that transforms competitors into champions?
“Usain Bolt,” Moore writes, “occupies a curious and paradoxical position: a global star whose fame comes from a sport that is beset by scandal and faces a desperate struggle for sponsors, support and relevance … Apart from in one place: a Caribbean island with a population of less than three million.”
So will the main man be able to sustain his 100 metres supremacy through a third Olympics in Rio next year? Coach Glen Mills thinks not, and predicts success for another of his protégés: “There’s no way that any thirty-year-old will beat Yohan Blake in 2016.”
Blake, of course, in common with Asafa Powell, and Gatlin, has a positive test for a banned substance on his c.v.
.
The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory, by Richard Moore, is published by Yellow Jersey Press (£18.99 hardback).
.
JOHN ROBERTS wrote for the Daily Express, The Guardian, the Daily Mail and The Independent, where he was the tennis correspondent for 20 years. He collaborated with Bill Shankly on the Liverpool manager’s autobiography, ghosted Kevin Keegan’s first book, and has written books on George Best, Manchester United’s Busby Babes (The Team That Wouldn’t Die) and Everton (The Official Centenary History).
.
The Team That Wouldn’t Die is published in paperback by Aurum Press (£8.99)
More from John Roberts
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27th July 2015
BOOK REVIEW: The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory
BOOK REVIEW: The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory
BOOK REVIEW: The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory
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The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica’s Sprint Factory y Richard Moore Sportsbookofthemonth.com price: £15.90, saving £3.09 on rrp
Two of Richard Moore’s finest books, In Search of Robert Millar and The Dirtiest Race in History have each dealt competently – and comprehensively – with a problem that has plagued sport for more than a century: drug-taking and its beneficial, if short-term, impact upon athletic performance.
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Doping is an area in which Moore has form, a status which qualifies him to assert, correctly, in The Bolt Supremacy, that the greater the sports-loving public’s distance from an athlete, or a group of them, the easier it is to form an entrenched opinion regarding his, or their, propensity to cheat.
This observation, made early in Moore’s book, puts him on thin ice, a ploy which succeeds in retaining readers’ attention. Yet the author knows that to make any assertions relating to cheating without undertaking comprehensive research and cross-checking would be foolish in the extreme.
Writers must be careful before making accusations; they require mountains of irrevocable proof that their suspicions are, in fact, accurate, because once an accusation is made, it cannot be withdrawn.
Concerned about the acute degree of scepticism shown by nine-time Olympic gold medallist Carl Lewis towards the incredible performances of Jamaican sprinters, and of CBS columnist Dan Bernstein, who wrote, “Anyone wasting words extolling the greatness of Usain Bolt should know better,” Moore sensibly sets off to Jamaica to investigate for himself.
As if there are not enough barriers already, modern-day investigative writers have another enemy with which to contend: social media which, in Moore’s view (also correct), makes “no distinction between facts and conjecture, opinion and evidence.”
Moore presents the evidence of alleged wrong-doing objectively, supporting his conclusions with as much proof as he can, speaking with the former executive director of Jamaica’s Anti-Doping Commission ( who confirms that three high-profile sprinters tested positively for drugs), as well as a German doctor who frequently injects athletes with Actovegin, but maintains there is nothing wrong with it.
Ultimately, readers of a sceptical bent may conclude that even some of sport’s most revered performers have been unveiled as cheats; after all, someone had to start by questioning Lance Armstrong’s performances before his intricate web of deception unravelled.
Others will point to the IAAF’s anti-doping report which found that in 2012, the top three ranked countries in terms of tested athletes were Russia, Kenya and Jamaica, with Usain Bolt tested, on average, every two weeks.
THE BOLT SUPREMACY by Richard Moore
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Review published on October 11, 2016.
As a huge fan of track athletics I jumped at the chance to review The Bolt Supremacy. When the book arrived the blurb says “Of the ten fastest 100-metres times in history, eight belong to Jamaicans. How is it that a small Caribbean island has come to almost totally dominate the men’s and women’s sprint events?”
This is the question that Richard Moore attempts to answer in this very easy to read book.
With the Rio Olympics having just started and in the light of the Russian team’s doping scandal, this was a timely read.
The phenomenal success of Jamaican athletes led to rumours that they must enhance their performances using drugs and so Richard Moore sets out his store to investigate these rumours but also to consider the wider picture: Jamaican culture; do the athletes perform better if they stay in Jamaica for training as opposed to travelling abroad; the highly competitive school competition called Champs which is a particular Jamaican phenomenon.
My only quibble is that the title is slightly misleading as the book is about the rise and success of Jamaican athletes but the title suggests the whole book is about Usain Bolt, however I am aware for marketing purposes that having “Bolt” in the title will sell books, and it does not detract from the book at all.
Although this is non-fiction it is really easy to read. However, I do feel that you would need to have at least some interest in athletics to enjoy it as much as I did.
I have given this a lower score as a book group read but it would be a good choice if your book group has topical book choices such as Olympic or sporting themes.
Carolyn Fraser 4/3
THE BOLT SUPREMACY by Richard Moore
YELLOW JERSEY PRESS 9780224092319 pbk Jul 2016
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Guilty until proven innocent in athletics
Is the fastest man in history actually clean? And the answer is . . . well, probably, fingers crossed
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Matthew Engel
JULY 19, 2015 3
Let’s try a quick question. Name two current track and field stars (your own country’s athletes excluded). Congratulations if you can do it. You must be either pretty good at quizzes or an athletics nerd.
So for everyone else: name one. A bit easier? The world does not hear much about Usain Bolt between one Olympics and the next but we all know he’s around. And he is due to reappear next weekend, at the London Anniversary Games, which will be a tester for his recently suspect fitness ahead of the World Championships in Beijing next month.
Pretty much single-handed, Bolt will thus have to breathe life back into two great white-elephant Olympic stadiums in quick succession. Plus his own benighted sport. No pressure or anything.
Also this week comes a new book, The Bolt Supremacy by Richard Moore, one of sports writing’s most thorough diggers, in which he tries to answer the great question — regularly asked, often muttered, never definitively answered. Is the fastest man in history actually clean? And the answer is . . . well, probably, fingers crossed, Moore thinks so.
This is always dangerous territory for a writer. Making a false accusation of illegal drug use can end up with a nasty court case. Stating the opposite can lead to a less heroic fate: looking an idiot. Time and again, in a long list of sports, we have been through the process: the first suspicions, the vehement denials, the furious threats, followed by proof of guilt and the desperate pleas for understanding and forgiveness.
All Bolt’s great triumphs — his Olympic gold medals in Beijing and London, his still extant 100m world record of 9.58 seconds set in 2009 — were greeted with hosannas in the stadium and head-shakes among hardened observers, a reaction guided by decades of triumphs that were too good to be true. The effect on athletics has been catastrophic.
Many are also baffled by the way Jamaica (population 3m) consistently outsprints the US (population 320m). The case against Bolt was strengthened in 2013 by revelations about the hopelessness of the Jamaican drug-testing set-up. But, in a way, that is also part of the defence. Rigorous organisation is not known to be the country’s greatest attribute. Do we really believe this is the new East Germany, secretly dosing its most gifted youngsters with medicaments too sophisticated for the world to notice?
The case against Armstrong was built on solid evidence over many years. That doesn’t exist in the case of Bolt
Richard Moore
Nowhere on Earth is crazier about running, sprinting above all: the inter-schools championships — “the Champs” — constitute perhaps Jamaica’s biggest sports event. Its runners have certainly been implicated in doping cases — they could hardly avoid it: of the nine men who have run under 9.80, only three have never tested positive. But two of them are Jamaican (Bolt and Nesta Carter), and Moore points out that most of their compatriots who have been tainted by heavy-duty allegations were based elsewhere.
What emerges from Moore’s book are Bolt’s positive attributes: his own solid family background; the nurturing that came from Jamaica’s sprinting traditions and set-up; his physical attributes, above all his gigantic strides; and the determination well hidden beneath his flippant exterior. Athletics Weekly charted his progress from 16 onwards, which suggested steady improvement rather than the sudden leaps consistent with drug-taking. Bolt has been in the care of the German sports medicine guru, Dr Hans Müller-Wohlfahrt, who is known to use mysterious extracts of calf and goats blood on his patients, but these are not banned substances.
Moore, a former Commonwealth Games cyclist, is currently reporting on the Tour de France in an atmosphere still made toxic by Lance Armstrong and the race’s long drug-fuelled history. “The case against Armstrong was built on solid evidence over many years,” says Moore. “That doesn’t exist in the case of Bolt.” Or about Chris Froome, the 2013 and probable 2015 winner, who is spending what should be joyous days in the yellow jersey engulfed by suspicion and on Saturday, a cup of urine. Is Froome clean? “I’m as sure as I can be,” says Moore. “But that always comes with a caveat.”
It is also always true that predicting the worst is a far safer option than trying to spread a little optimism. The Daily Express kept proclaiming peace with Hitler in 1938 and 1939 and later became a laughing stock. Other journalists have prophesied countless disasters that never happened, and no one remembers that. But in sports as corrupted as athletics and cycling, Snow White, Pollyanna and Mother Teresa would all have to be suspects.
matthew.engel@ft.com
The Dirtiest Race in History by Richard Moore – review
Alexander Macleod on the troubled stars of the world's premier race
1988 Olympics 100m final
Ben Johnson wins the 100m final in Seoul, 1988, ahead of Carl Lewis and Linford Christie. Photograph: Simon Bruty/ALLSPORT
Alexander Macleod
Fri 3 Aug ‘12 03.00 EDT First published on Fri 3 Aug ‘12 03.00 EDT
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What is it about the 100m final? Why does it focus the world's attention so sharply? Track fans will tell you it is the essential expression of sport, the most elegant of all competitions, a place where the third world can take on the first world and win on merit alone. The hundred requires no equipment, no swimming pool, no carbon fibre bicycle, not even a ball or a net. It subtracts everything extraneous and leaves behind only the body and one task it must perform. Some say it functions as a metaphor for human endeavour itself. As the record time gets ever lower it seems like we must be progressing, but what other kind of truth might be hidden here in a test that, at least on the surface, appears so simple and so clear? How are we linked, the participants and the couch potatoes, the athletes and the spectators?
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These are the questions that circulate inside and around Richard Moore's The Dirtiest Race in History. He takes us back 24 years to a September afternoon in Seoul. Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson are linked in memories of an infamous contest and well-known to even the most committed non-sports fan. Lewis, the owner of nine Olympic gold medals – four golds won in four different Games – was named "Athlete of the 20th Century" by the IOC, the IAAF, and Sports Illustrated. At the other extreme, any 1988 photograph of Johnson – with his acne, his bloodshot eyes and hulking physique – can stand as an iconic representation of what a disgraced, steroid-engorged cheater is supposed to look like. By the end of his career, Johnson was banned from competition for the rest of his life and stripped of all his medals, titles and world records.
Written with a fine sense of balance, timing and tension, The Dirtiest Race follows these rivals along their intersecting trajectories. Lewis, the product of a stable, middle-class American family, is portrayed as an attention seeking diva, a man who always believed he was bigger than his sport. At the 1984 Games in LA, his manager even boasted that Lewis would be "as big as Michael Jackson". Though his once-in-a-generation talent is undeniable, he never really captured the American imagination, and as he moved on to his second act, he made a series of cringeworthy decisions to re-invent himself first as a singer and then an actor and then as a politician. In contrast, Johnson is the poor Jamaican immigrant to Canada, a man rapturously embraced, then harshly rejected by his adopted country. Though he possessed the greatest explosive start in the history of track and field, he also suffers from a debilitating speech impediment that triggers in times of stress. The two men couldn't be more different, the stutterer and the wannabe politician. Lewis's running is described as graceful and beautiful while Johnson's is powerful, almost violent. Moore tells us the Canadian boasted of his conquests as a womaniser, while the American dodged rumours of homosexuality. After Seoul, Lewis flourished and Johnson lost almost his entire fortune. When he returned home to Toronto, he found that contractors had already walked away from his half-completed mansion. His fast cars were repossessed, and he ended up living in his mother's basement for many years. Later, while Lewis was recording and acting, Johnson was participating in humiliating carnival-type races, in which he lined up against racehorses and stock cars.
Johnson's and Lewis's hatred for each other is stamped on nearly every page of this book, but the real strength of Moore's account is his depiction of the secondary characters, a cast of megalomaniacal managers and coaches who seem inspired by Victor Frankenstein to push the limits of science and the human body. There are plenty of shady doctors and duplicitous friends and disloyal team-mates. There are impotent drug testers, self-serving bureaucrats, egotistical sport executives and a parade of agents, journalists, lawyers and strange spiritual gurus. All of them are connected directly or indirectly to the events in South Korea; all were, in different ways, set to benefit from the Games. Moore is right: this was a dirty race and as the story unfolds, it gets harder to tell the heroes from the villains. We often find ourselves confronting confessed cheaters who seem refreshingly honest or champions who raise our suspicions.
Followers of Linford Christie or Mark McGwire or Marion Jones or Roger Clemens or Lance Armstrong will recognise this confusion. How should we react when a hero reveals, or refuses to reveal, that he or she is merely human? And what do we do with the dishonest victor who may or may not have used one powerful lie to raise billions for cancer research? When the Canadian judge, Charles Dubin, called his "Inquiry into the Use of Drugs and Banned Practices Intended to Increase Athletic Performance" he found that world-class competition appeared to take place in an "ethical vacuum". He warned: "We cannot allow sport, which we expect to build character, to become a means of destroying it."
While Johnson meets with Moore and shows him around Toronto, even taking him to a training session where he coaches young children, Lewis, perhaps sensing that no good can come of it, declines all invitations to participate in the project. Moore gets to meet him only once, in 2010, during a general press junket to open a new Nike store in London. It is perhaps the most revealing moment in the book, and Moore handles it masterfully. When Lewis is asked for a comment about Usain Bolt's record-breaking performances, he hesitates, as though, even now, he cannot bring himself to compliment another runner.
Bolt doesn't fit the mould of the scowling, macho sprinters of the 1980s and 90s. He is not Maurice Greene and he has no angry rival. This is the runner who started celebrating 20 metres before the finish in Beijing and still came flying across the line with his arms open wide and the cocky exuberance of kid who can't believe his luck. Though he is the best the world has ever seen, Bolt makes it look fun, with his laughter, his disco dancing, and his lightning pose. He is a marketer's dream. Nine and half seconds of Bolt's life may earn him more money than Lewis and Johnson made in their entire careers combined.
Yet everybody knows his night will come eventually, and perhaps no man on earth understands his situation better than Carl Lewis. At the Nike store, the champion of 1984, '88, '92 and '96 could not give in to the general euphoria. "It's just ... interesting," Lewis said. "I watch the results like everyone else and wait ... for time to tell."
• Alexander Macleod's Light Lifting is published by Jonathan Cape.
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Running on enmity
A tale of two champions, whose mutual loathing came to a head in an epic contest at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Review by Dan Silkstone
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The final of the Olympic men's 100-metre race is the rarest of moments and this is no hyperbole, for it is scarcely more than an iota of time. Sitting trackside, there is a feeling never really replicated anywhere else: it seems you are at the centre of the world, every eyeball on Earth fixed on the here and now, on this very place, for about 9½ seconds.
From those seconds legends will be born, villainies forged and rivalries bitterly seen off.
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Feat first … Carl Lewis (centre) and Linford Christie try to catch Ben Johnson at Seoul in 1988.
Feat first … Carl Lewis (centre) and Linford Christie try to catch Ben Johnson at Seoul in 1988. Photo: Getty Images
Those nine or so seconds in the 1988 Seoul Olympic men's 100-metre final form the subject matter for Richard Moore's The Dirtiest Race in History, a race in which the avowedly anti-drugs American Carl Lewis took on the world and - it seemed at the time - the world of chemistry. Rumours swirled about many in the sport, led (in a position to which he was becoming accustomed) by Canadian Ben Johnson.
Johnson was the newcomer, having unleashed a string of muscular, brutal victories in the preceding months - many of them over the previously dominant Lewis.
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The Olympics: The Dirtiest Race in History, edited by Richard Moore. Wisden, $29.99.
The Olympics: The Dirtiest Race in History, edited by Richard Moore. Wisden, $29.99.
The American, a global household name, had starred four years earlier in Los Angeles, earning four gold medals, comparisons to Jesse Owens and a portfolio of blue-chip endorsement deals. He had also become an increasingly strident critic of what was a growing but nascent problem - drugs in sport.
Herein begins a series of contradictions that Moore teases out and from which detailed, flawed and very human pictures emerge of both men: Lewis, the aloof celebrity athlete who for some reason never won over the press corp or his fellow runners; Johnson, the challenger about whom many in the sport professed extreme scepticism but cheered for, anyway, such was their distaste for Lewis.
The American was urbane, fashionably dressed, articulate but obsessively private. Johnson was portrayed as brutish, muscle-bound, disadvantaged and unintelligent. Under Moore's spotlight, both sketches are rendered unfair and inadequate.
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The two came to detest each other, and their rivalry was mammoth. The lead-up was long and draining but Seoul was the denouement, scandal the only winner.
Moore delves into and successfully re-creates a milieu in which doping was both open secret and infantile science, still emerging and yet trailed miserably by the even more infantile science of detection.
Rumours flew - some real, some ridiculous - and the very integrity and future of the Games themselves seemed in question.
It is also a world, expertly rendered in this fascinating tale, of mysterious middle men, unscrupulous doctors and maniacal coaches driving their prized athletes to the brink and beyond.
The blue-riband event in Seoul was one of sport's biggest scandals and Moore peels away its layers with forensic skill. Johnson breasted the tape, arm famously aloft. Then he tested positive for steroids.
Johnson was the newcomer, having unleashed a string of muscular, brutal victories in the preceding months.
The Canadian does not deny taking them, and yet claims he was set up by the Lewis camp.
Moore examines these claims and finds some striking, if not entirely convincing, evidence.
Either way, history also recalls that six of the eight finalists in that race eventually tested positive during their careers (including Lewis, who had done so at the Olympic trials months before and had the result covered up). Thus emerges the book's title, its sympathy for the devil (in the form of Canada's fallen star) and - most interestingly of all - its examination of the historical context and moral ambiguity of a time when men and women took hideous risks with their bodies in pursuit of sporting glory.
Early in this tale, we are told both the young Lewis and Johnson gravitated away from team sports towards running because athletics was devoid of the politics and relationships team sports required. It offered self-sufficiency and certainty - the best would always win. How sad, then, that both men ended up in a time when this became inverted.
Drugs meant the best might not be enough; drugs brought fear, and that fear led to temptation.
Moore depicts Seoul as the moment the Olympics passed a liminal point, tipping entirely into a carnival of big-time sponsorship, corporate entertainment and media spectacle and abandoning the fading vestiges of the amateur sporting contest it had once professed to be.
From this meticulously researched reconstruction it is a (Lewis-like) long jump to the strange confluence of publishing trends that has produced the anonymously penned The Secret Olympian. Presenting itself as a tell-all, authorless account of what really goes on behind the scenes at every Games, this book hints at tales of excess in the Olympic Village, of sex, drugs and gymnastic rolls.
This could have been a good idea, and must have sounded like one at the pitch meeting. Call it Fifty Shades of Gold or The Bronze Stripped Bare, perhaps? But as anyone who has ever covered elite sport - specifically, individual sports such as track and field and swimming - will attest, these people are, for the most part, boring.
They live monastic lives, rise early, train hard and eat sensibly; they forsake fun in pursuit of victory. Aside from those few minutes or moments when they compete for precious metal, their lives lie on the dullish side of prosaic.
The secret Olympian, basing his story on a mix of his own Athens experiences and interviews with athletes, explores the lead-up to an event, the countless hours of training, the psychology of fear and confidence, and the goings-on inside the village (they receive free energy drinks; there's a giant McDonald's; the athletes trade team uniform items; and there's a lot of sunbathing).
And so, what emerges is a strange book, informative without ever being captivating, well written, certainly - the secret Olympian clearly has a brain and an excellent Oxbridge education (limp internet speculation pins him as a rower, which seems a decent stab).
There's a whole section on sex in the village containing, basically, no sex in the village. There is reference to wild parties but description of ones that appear decidedly tame.
In the end this book sets out to unmask the Olympic experience for a general audience but probably achieves the opposite. Its chief appeal must surely be for aspiring athletes: the information it holds will be manna for them, hungry as they are for minute detail about how the sporting elite conduct their disciplined lives.
For the rest of us - however nicely told - it is decidedly less interesting than turning the telly on and just watching the Games. Even if you only do it for 9½ seconds.
THE OLYMPICS: THE DIRTIEST RACE IN HISTORY
Edited by Richard Moore
Wisden, 320pp, $29.99
THE SECRET OLYMPIAN
Anon
A&C Black, 224pp, $19.99
News June 2012
June 2012BackNext
BOOK REVIEW: THE DIRTIEST RACE IN HISTORY, by Richard Moore
28.06.12
Dirtiest Race in HistoryBOOK REVIEW:
THE DIRTIEST RACE IN HISTORY: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final
By Richard Moore
Wisden Sports Writing
7 June 2012
£18.99 Hardback/eBook
Richard Moore’s first book, ‘In Search of Robert Millar’, won the best biography category at the 2008 British Sports Book Awards.
His next three were all on the subject of cycling, so this first foray into athletics is intended to coincide with the men’s 100m final in London, always one of the most eagerly awaited Olympic events. Can it really be 24 years since Ben Johnson rocked the sporting world on its axis twice in the space of three days – first with a jet-propelled 9.79 sprint and then by testing positive for Stanozolol and being stripped of the title and medal?
Johnson himself has contributed freely to the writing of this excellent book and, while admitting the use of various drugs at different stages of his career, vehemently defends himself against the presence of Stanozolol in his system at the Games, with the finger being pointed at a Lewis acolyte who was passing Big Ben (eight) cans of beer in the doping-control room in those easier-access testing days. There’s still a film in all of this, you know.
Many of the characters at the heart of the drama have since died, including Johnson’s coach Charlie Francis, all the members of the doping panel and IAAF President Primo Nebiolo, but not the mystery man with the Budweisers. He has gone on to become an African-based diamond entrepreneur and offers no admission or denial of his role in the most famous dope test of all time.
The ‘Where Are They Now’ section of the book concludes that just two of the eight finalists from one of track and field’s darkest days went through their careers untainted by drugs: Calvin Smith (whose son, of the same name, was a semi-finalist at 400m in the recent US Olympic Trials) and Robson da Silva of Brazil.
There is also an interesting cameo from former UK 400m record holder David Jenkins who shocked British athletics when he was jailed for steroid trafficking on a very large scale in the 1980s.
The book follows the two main protagonists through the years leading up to the South Korean denouement, from the days when Carl Lewis was 8-0 ahead in races against Johnson. Along the way, we meet some of the people who were calling the shots, including Lewis’s central casting manager Joe Douglas and some of the people they upset, including the USA sprint relay head coach.
With the passing years, some elements of the story might be expected to become sepia-tinged and faded but this is a painstakingly-researched and vivid account. Johnson, we learn, was asleep in suite 2718 of the Hilton Hotel in Seoul, when Charlie Francis received the news of the positive test. He was left to sleep on and it was Francis who drove to the laboratory to meet the testers, seemingly neither ashamed nor alarmed at his part in the breaking of the biggest-ever Olympic scandal. In his eyes, it was an unfathomable fail in the chemistry experiment that he had been conducting on an athletics Frankenstein over a five year term.
There is no real redemption for either of the main players in the years that follow. Lewis continues to cast about for a role in sport and life. Johnson failed drugs test twice more and now coaches young athletes in Toronto. He takes pleasure in the news that his nemesis is struggling with arthritis. The enmity continues.
The 1988 Olympic 100 metres was not the finest hour for athletics but this is one of the sport’s finest books. Read it. You know the outcome but we all need to know why and how it happened and whether we should ever be prepared for such a shock again. A real page-turner.
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Étape, by Richard Moore
5
A tour through the Tour de France in a couple of dozen stages, led by Slaying the Badger author Richard Moore.
By Feargal McKay@fmk_RoI Jun 20, 2014, 8:27pm EDT
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Tour de France 2013 Doug Pensinger
Etape, by Richard MooreTitle: Étape - The Untold Story of the Tour de France's Defining Stages
Author: Richard Moore
Publisher: HarperSport (UK) / VeloPress (US)
Year: 2014
Pages: 344
Order: HarperCollins (UK) / VeloPress (US)
What it is: A tour through the Tour in a couple of dozen stages
Strengths: As usual with Moore, the real strength of the book is the many, many people he spoke to in order to tell these stories
Weaknesses: Honestly, I could maybe live happily without ever reading another account of the last stage of the 1989 Tour de France. But maybe that's just me
The Tour de France is complicated. In order to make it seem easy to the casual fans who come out like sunflowers every July we pretend that it is all about a race for the yellow jersey, that the drama is all about who will reach Paris quickest. We lie to them. Because we have to. The fact is, were we to try and tell the sport's once-a-year fans how truly complicated the Tour is, their brains would probably melt. And we'd feel bad about having to clean up the mess.
Unlike those casual fans, us diehards well know that there are many, many races within the Tour beyond the race for yellow, from those for stages and the ancillary classifications through petty little grudge matches between teams or riders and all the way down to the deeply personal desire of some riders to just get round the goddamned course. And, throughout the Tour, as our interest in the race for the maillot jaune waxes and wanes, we switch our focus to these other races.
For some riders, the Tour de France is all about one single stage. One day out of twenty-odd and that's it, job done. Such a rider was prologue specialist Chris Boardman: "At the 1994 Tour, everybody went for a three-week race," Boardman tells Richard Moore in the opening chapter of Étape. "I went for seven minutes." And in those seven minutes Boardman scored an impressive result: the Tour debutant took the maillot jaune on his very first outing in the race (consider that all the other Brits who'd taken stages and/or jerseys in the Tour had all served an apprenticeship before their moments of glory came around: Boardman was thrown in at the deep end and was swimming like a fish).
For other riders - for other teams - the Tour is about maintaining their position relative to one and other. And sometimes that can actually mean that losing is more important than winning. Back in the 1980s and into the 1990s two such teams were the squads bossed by Peter Post and Jan Raas. Post was sort of like the Patrick Lefevere of his day, his TI-Raleigh riders rocked the one day races. Maybe Lefevere's boys have been more dominant in the classics and semi-classics but they don't have one thing Post's boys had: a Tour de France title, in 1980, when Joop Zoetemelk won.
Peter Post then, he was a bit of a genius. With a flaw: not everyone liked him. And one person who didn't like him was Jan Raas, his top rider. And at the end of the 1983 season Raas upped sticks, took something like half of Post's team with him and set up shop as Kwantum (which, after regenerating through Superconfex, Buckler, WordPerfect, Novell, and Rabobank went Blanco before becoming today's Belkin). At which point the Tour - in particular - was served up with a brilliant rivalry, Post Vs Raas, a rivalry unlike most others, because each was willing to lose in order to stop the other winning.
You can go through many Tours through the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s where there are stories told about how Post and Raas toyed with one and other. For Étape Moore has found one of the best: the 1992 Tour, stage seventeen, where Frans Massen and Marc Sergeant got away in a break with Jean-Claude Colotti (riding for Roger Legeay's Z squad) and built up a quarter hour lead over the peloton behind. And then Post and Raas ordered their riders not to work in the break, for fear of helping the other to win.
Now you will often get riders marking each other out of the race back in the peloton - you probably know at least one story of Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi doing this - but off the front of the race? That's special. So special that the Tour's bosses had to give Post and Raas a stern talking to, for bringing the race into disrepute, after the stage (which Colotti won, with Massen and Sergeant duking it out for first and second loser status three and a half minutes behind him).
So the Tour, it's about winning, it's about not letting someone else win. It's also about surviving. And one of the annual unseen survival stories is that of the sprinters in the gruppetto in the mountains. Mark Cavendish's recent second volume of autobiographies - At Speed - is quite good on this subject and for Étape Moore adds more detail to one of Cavendish's stories of survival in the mountains, expanding the story by getting it not just from Cavendish's perspective but also from his Sancho Panza, Bernhard Eisel.
Another thing we don't always tell the newbies is that there's more happens on rest days than they realise. Every year there's contract negotiations, for the post-Tour critérium circuit and for what team riders will be with the following season. Every few years there's a doping bust. And sometimes there's some real farce. Which there was in 1991, when Motorola's Urs Zimmerman got thrown off the race for the crime of travelling from Saint-Herblain in the north-west of France to Pau in the south-west by car and not by the charter flight the Tour had laid on for the riders. Quite a few people know this story, or think they do, believing that Zimmerman travelled by car because he was scared of flying. That was the explanation put out by Jim Ochowicz at the time and almost universally accepted ever since. But, as Zimmerman tells Moore, Ochowicz was talking shite (my paraphrasing of his words).
And what we really don't want to have to tell the Freds is that a win is sometimes not quite what it seems. We know of the dirty deals done dirt cheap: of the nod and the wink and the money that changes hand or the lodgement made to or withdrawal from the karma bank. We know that riders gift stages out of honour: the champion elect lets another take the stage glory he having the bigger glory to bask in. And we know that, sometimes, there's peloton politics behind what happens on a stage. In passing, Moore mentions one such stage in the 1976 Tour, when Freddy Maertens - en route to equalling the record for the most stage wins in a single Tour - let Jacques Eclassan take a victory, as a favour to his Peugeot team, a simple act of friendship. And in detail Moore discusses another such stage, also in the 1976 Tour, when the whole peloton allowed Super Ser's José Luis Viejo take victory, because the sponsor was threatening to pull the team from the race as a result of their lack of results.
Etape, by Richard Moore
All this complexity and more is dealt with by Richard Moore in Étape¸ which offers a tour through the Tour de France through individual stages from 17 editions of the grande boucle ranging from 1971 through to 2012. It's almost like a Tour mix-tape, a collection of greatest hits (Merckx, Hinault, etc), album tracks (Chiappucci, Pelier, etc) and B-sides (Nelissen, Viejo, etc), some of which you are already familiar with, some of which you will be hearing for the first time.
Étape may seem like it's competing in a crowded marketplace but, really, the hundreds of Tour books out there can be broken down into different categories and in the day-in-the-life category - one stage of a Tour that captures something important - there are maybe only two other titles: last year's Le Tour 100, by Peter Cossins et al; and 2003's Golden Stages, edited by Richard Allchin and Adrian Bell. The key difference between Étape and those two books is that Moore, having selected the stages he wanted to write about, went back to the protagonists themselves and built the picture up based on interviews with people who were actually there (so, for instance, the Post/Raas rivalry story mentioned above contains interviews with Massen and Sergeant, as well as Hillaire van der Schuren, who was there that day, and Leo van Vliet, who knew Post and Raas).
As with Golden Stages, the story of one stage is rarely restricted to that single stage: it is often set in the context of other stages of that year's Tour, other editions of the Tour, or other races throughout the season and throughout the careers of the riders Moore is talking to and about. And, of course, Moore cheats: the stage Moore picks for Merckx is actually three, all from the 1971 Tour (Orcières-Merlette, Marseille and the Col de Menté), the author justifying bending his own rules (which are really only guidelines anyway) by (correctly) stating that "to speak of stage 11 or 12 of the 1971 Tour de France in isolation would be like talking about only one half of a great football match. To then ignore stage 14 would be like not mentioning extra time in a World Cup final."
By now you will probably know that (for the most part) I like Moore's books, rate highly In Search of Robert Millar, Sky's the Limit and Slaying the Badger. I like the way Moore tells his stories, building them up by talking to as many people as he can, and - through careful editing and selection of interviewees and quotes - building up a multi-voiced story. And while Étape appears to lack the single, driving narrative of his previous books, it is very much from the same mould, Moore letting people who were there tell the story (or appearing to let people who were there tell the story - he himself adds much to the tales told, adding detail his interviewees omit and, of course, controlling the overall direction of the story).
One of the difficulties Moore has had to confront in Étape is how to deal with the subject of doping. Take as a for instance one of the stages discussed in detail, Claudio Chiapucci winning in Sestriere in 1992. This was a stage which at the time recalled - and even today still recalls - for many the exploits of Fausto Coppi, who won in Sestriere forty years earlier, when the ski resort made its first appearance in the Tour and the campionissimo put in a performance that put his ascent of Alpe d'Huez (also making its début) two days earlier so far into the shade that people soon forgot about that mountain.
According to Chiappucci this "was an escape in the Tour where my rivals didn't give me any favours. I wasn't let loose like an unknown domestique. They knew who I was and that they couldn't give me space because it'd be difficult to catch me. They thought that I wouldn't be able to make it. They thought that I'd crack. But my legs and the fans were my salvation." But it was also an escape which, now, Jean-François Bernard says "symbolised the arrival of the heavy artillery." Stephen Roche, on the other hand, challenges the claim that Sestriere clearly marked the arrival of Gen-EPO, saying that "If you accuse Chiapucci, you doubt all the achievements of cyclists and athletes in general."
As with Pantani in the 1998 Tour, there are differences of opinion as to how - or even whether - we should acknowledge such exploits. And when it comes to Lance Armstrong there are differences of opinion as to how - or even whether - we should acknowledge his very existence. Moore will win as many friends as he does enemies for the manner in which he deals with Armstrong in Étape, where he gives the former seven-time Tour winner not one but two chapters, discussing stages from the 1995 and 2003 Tours, Armstrong winning into Limoges three days after his team-mate Fabio Casartelli died descending the Col de Portet d'Aspet, and Armstrong falling and rising again on the road to Luz Ardiden in 2003.
Personally I don't believe we can - or should - take an airbrush to Armstrong. We haven't done it to any of the riders who admitted to doping in the years before it was an offence. We haven't done it to riders like Bernard Thévenet - a two-time Tour winner - who admitted in the 1970s that he had doped. We haven't done it to Eddy Merckx who three times failed dope tests. Why should we single out Armstrong and others of the Gen-EPO years, especially when there are so many of that generation who we are pretty sure doped - especially the Tour winners - even if they have yet to publicly acknowledge what really went on in those years? The real question is how we tell the tale, how much we acknowledge the role played by doping. And - I think - in Étape Moore does a good job of that when it comes to Armstrong.
Etape, by Richard Moore
Étape, then, is - like the Tour de France itself - complicated and that complexity is actually the hidden central narrative of the book. And, because of the way Moore handles that complexity, even seasoned fans of the sport may find themselves reaching the end of Étape and thinking of the Tour in a different light. Finding fresh appreciation for just how complex the Tour really is.
Book Review: Etape
SATURDAY, 21 JUNE 2014
Etape by Richard Moore
The Tour de France brings three weeks of racing but also extensive media attention. But what if there were many untold stories? It’s not really a question, the focus on the day’s stage winner and the jersey wearers means a lot of blurred edges. Add in some hindsight, a variety of source material and you have the ingredients for Etape, the tale of 20 stages from the Tour de France.
A goal in a football match can be pored over; the build-up can be analysed; its context can be understood by watching the rest of the match with your own eyes. In a road race, despite the probing gaze of television cameras and photographers’ lenses, much remains seen and unknown, even to many of the participants. The mystery is a big part of the appeal. It also means that the reports are not always accurate, and that the full truth sometimes does not emerge until later. Years or even decades later. Or not at all.
That’s a quote from the book to explain plenty. Take the Tour de France and a mountain stage that’s being watched by the world. We’ll see the stage winner and the groupe maillot jaune but the cameras rarely dwell much further back. It’s possible to crack the top-10 of the Tour while barely being noticed. So what of all the other stories in the Tour de France? In 20 chapters Richard Moore revisits 20 Tour de France stages from the past to tell the story of what happened on that day. In fact he’s telling a story from the stage, perhaps a new version of events but still one version of events.
The choice of stages is subjective. There some obvious ones like Greg LeMond’s 1989 time trial win on the Champs Elysées to win the Tour by just eight seconds and some seem related to author Richard Moore’s other ventures, for example featuring characters from his books LeMond, Bernard Hinault or Andy Hampsten feature in Etape but also Slaying The Badger. Other stages have near-forgotten characters, like the tale of José Viejo, the man with the biggest ever margin of victory during a stage. If some are familiar it’s the way Moore finds new angles that make all of them a fresh read.
Each chapter isn’t a race report, this is not the tale of how the race was won. Yes events are explained and there are times when it’s as if Moore is transcribing a youtube moment but this is brief and for description. We get hindsight and a fresh account of events, a mix of sources primary and secondary explored, sifted, edited. For example if the 1984 Tour de France is remembered for the Fignon-Hinault rivalry, Moore gets the view from Luis Herrera, the Colombian climber who saw events up close. Yet it’s not just Herrera’s view but the tale of Colombia’s attachment to cycling, his success meant the Bogotá Stock Exchange was temporarily closed so everyone could follow the Tour. The last chapter about Greg LeMond’s 1989 stage win on the Champs Elysées to win the Tour is an oft-told tale but here it includes quotes from Laurent Fignon’s biography, recent thoughts by Greg LeMond as well as small details like LeMond making a late switch to ride the Tour de Trump in the US and getting passed in the time trial stage by Davis Phinney (father of Taylor) who is using tri bars. It’s not explored but what if LeMond hadn’t done this race or the starting order was different, would he have forsaken the tri bars for the 1989 Tour? You might have read plenty about 1989 but this chapter still finds new information.
Hindsight and the passage of time help. Bobby Julich is recounting the 1998 stage of the Tour de France to Les Deux Alpes won by Marco Pantani. Julich and others can be frank about their EPO use, something you’re not going to get in a post-stage press conference. Distance from the events also allows a wider context, the tale of Marc Sergeant and Frans Maassen refusing to work in a breakaway isn’t just an outrageous incident but one battle during the war between team managers Peter Post and Jan Raas.
Some stories are really about events beyond the race. An interview with Claudio Chiappucci to discuss his 1992 stage win in Sestriere tells you as much about the Italian today as it did then with an apartment decorated with Chiappucci icons, even embroidered cushions in his image – but you also get the confounding statement that Chiappucci was riding to a plan, he’d recced the stage and on the day paced himself with a heart rate monitor, it wasn’t quite the wild move many took it for. There’s a short chapter on Urs Zimmerman the Swiss rider and if his tale concerns the rest day it’s underpinned by his struggles about depression and anorexia. It’s all well-written but this chapter struck me as particularly well-crafted.
The book opens up fractal possibilities in writing. The book covers 20 stages between 1971 and 2012 but arguably each stage from each year has many stories to tell. Of course some are more interesting than others but 20 seems limited even if it’s plenty for a 340 page book. Take the penultimate chapter about David Millar’s stage win in Annonay/Davézieux in 2012, we have the story of Millar’s redemption but I bet Jean-Christophe Péraud who finished second has plenty to tell, whether his atypical career or just events on the day. Or what of the others in the break? Did something else happen on a day, a sponsorship deal or maybe a mechanic has an anecdote to share. Etape tells 20 stories but there must be hundreds more.
Summary
Another Tour de France book? Yes but Readable, enjoyable and the kind of book to dip in and out of during a summer holiday or during one of those dull sprinters stages, this is a timely reminder that the Tour de France is packed with too many stories to tell rather than a hastily compiled list of “best ever stages”. Hindsight and a variety of sources are applied to re-tell some stories that you might know and most you won’t. If you like your cycling history this is for you but even if you don’t this is just good story-telling rather than merely recounting previous events. But what of all the other stories?
Note: this copy was sent free for review. It is published by Harper Sport and available in print and an ebook.
A list of previews book reviews can be found at inrng.com/books
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ÉTAPE BOOK REVIEW
January 15, 2016 thewannaberacer
Étape
Étape: 20 Great Stages from the Modern Tour de France by Richard Moore
In Étape: 20 Great Stages from the Modern Tour de France, Richard Moore, author of Slaying the Badger and Tour de France 100, reveals the untold stories surrounding some of the most memorable stages in Tour de France history. Moore combines new interviews with stage accounts to paint a revealing picture of the beauty and madness that makes the Tour de France the world’s greatest race.ÉtapeThere are many reasons that can make a stage great or, probably more accurate, memorable. In Étape, Moore tells the stories of more than just the fantastic victories that fill our imaginations. He also highlights controversial stages, heroic deeds, and the human struggle that makes the Tour de France the spectacle it is.
Richard Moore goes beyond just retelling the events of the stage and what was shown on TV. Étape includes many new interviews with the riders and individuals involved in the stages to tell the stories that had previously gone untold. Étape provides a new insight into some of the greatest moments in Tour de France history.
By tracking down those involved in the stages, Moore includes a “where are they now” feature in Étape. Life after professional cycling can be very difficult for some with careers cut short and lives ended early. Moore does a great job of telling the “life after cycling” stories of those involved in the 20 great stages in Étape.ÉtapeHere are a couple of my favorite stories from Étape, without too many spoilers. Don’t want to give you any reason not to read this great book.
Moore asked Mark Cavendish what he thought was his toughest stage and Cav selected Stage 16 of the 2010 Tour de France. Its a fascinating story because its about Cav’s struggles in the groupetto in the high mountains, something you don’t see on TV.
The touching story of Joel Pelier, who, on Stage 6 in 1989, rode to the win in the second longest solo breakaway in Tour de France on the day his parents came to surprise him.
One of my favorite stages of all time is Stage 21 in 1989 when the Tour de France ended with a time trial into Paris. Greg LeMond over turned Laurent Fignon’s slim lead to win the closest Tour de France in history and set off an aerodynamics arms race.
To some, the inclusion of riders like Lance Armstrong may be controversial but I agree with Moore’s inclusion of those stages in Étape. Despite what the record books say and your personal opinion of Lance Armstrong, those stages happened and many rank among the most memorable in Tour de France history.
Overall, Étape: 20 Great Stages from the Modern Tour de France by Richard Moore is a fantastic read for any fan of the Tour de France. Combining new interviews with retelling of the stages, Richard Moore tells the stories that had previously gone untold providing a new insight into the drama that is the Tour de France.
Like reading? Check out some of my other book reviews: Reading the Race and Bike Mechanic.
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Book Review: "In Search of Robert Millar" and "From Lance to Landis"
By SAMUEL ABTAUG. 7, 2007
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In Search of Robert Millar
By Richard Moore
360 pages. £15.99. Harper Sport.
From Lance to Landis
By David Walsh
334 pages. $24.95. Ballantine Books.
Somewhere in the last dozen years, after Deng Xiaoping's proclamation that "to be rich is glorious" and Bill Clinton's use of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House to bunk campaign contributors, bicycle racing's creed of suffering and sacrifice took a big hit. Neither fit in the dot-com epoch. People stopped talking about the sport as a metaphor for life; lately, it's the other way around. Is the Tour de France undermined by illegal activity? Isn't life? Has celebrity replaced achievement? Read the People column.
David Walsh and Richard Moore, each in a different way, long for the old days, perhaps not better ones but definitely less ambiguous. For Moore, that means trying to understand the tortured psyche of a rider he has not seen in a decade and with whom he communicates, maybe, only in occasional and unauthenticated e-mails. For Walsh, that means an ostensible history of doping by American riders, but it is actually his third book attempting to defrock Lance Armstrong, soon to be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore. Don't call me Ishmael, but meet two Ahabs.
What the authors have in common is earnestness, solid reporting and lively writing. They care - they care terribly. They wish they could wrap up their bundles fastidiously, the ends tucked in just so, the ribbons gaily knotted. But each is left with a sprawl of guesswork and circumstantial evidence. In neither case is it tidy, although it is fascinating.
Moore, a Scottish journalist, attempts a biography of Robert Millar, the best all-around British rider of the last quarter century, a splendid climber who was king of the mountains in the Tour de France, twice a second-place finisher in the Vuelta a España and a cranky, irritating person who hated to reveal how vulnerable he might be.
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Often, Millar was astute and, occasionally, personable. There was somebody likable there in his birdlike body, if only a reporter could tap into it. Moore does, which is quite the feat since he has written his book with no help from the subject. Millar has vanished somewhere, been gone for years. He will be 49 on Sept. 13 and in his last race, in 1995, he won the British professional championship. At the start of the Tour de France in London in July, Millar was the one-day rage of the tabloid press, which reported that he had undergone a sex change operation. The next day, it was back to Princess Di.
Some of Moore's and Millar's e-mails, printed in the book, give an idea how difficult the author's task was. Moore to Millar: "It's funny - I think a lot of journalists would have the opinion that you didn't care what they thought, or wrote . . . but I guess, from what you say there, that the opposite is true. In other words, some might have formed the impression that you were very thick-skinned when, in reality, you might have been more sensitive to criticism, etc. than many imagined"
Millar's reply: "Lots of journalists probably write stuff just to get a reaction. . . . Most journalists aren't as good at dealing with having their work examined or commented upon as they would have you believe either."
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In his pursuit of the phantom, Moore has traveled in Britain, France, Belgium and Italy, which, for Walsh, qualifies as a weekend excursion. He's gone to New Zealand and all over the United States as well, harpoon at the ready, pursuing his own white whale.
Walsh, an Irishman who is chief sportswriter with The Sunday Times of London and has been three times U.K. Sportswriter of the Year, has this thing about Armstrong: He thinks he cheated, took illegal performance-enhancing drugs before and while he was winning the Tour de France seven consecutive times.
That was the thesis of his earlier books, "L.A. Confidentiel" and "L.A. Officiel," in French only, which has now been fleshed out with accounts of other American riders suspected of doping - Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis, mainly - and bolstered with new testimony in a Texas court case and some incendiary hearsay and gossip.
It's compelling reading and it comes to naught. Somebody lied, or at least was dreadfully confused, in the court case. The hearsay and gossip are just that, inadmissible as evidence. There is no, as they say, smoking gun.
Believe it, don't believe it - Armstrong, champion, cancer survivor and cancer battler, is an American icon. In France, they're convinced that he's guilty of doping. In both countries, in the annals of bicycle racing, he's mere history, his case almost quaint amid all the ongoing drug scandals.
It's time to move on. Walsh's next book, people say, will be a history of rugby. Enough Melville and "There she blows!"
A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2007, in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Book Review: In search of Robert Millar by Richard Moore
by Bikeboyslim | Aug 13, 2012 | 0 comments
In search of Robert Millar
Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist
by Richard Moore
What a book! Thought provoking or what?! To date this must be the most enjoyable book about a past cyclist that I have ever had the privilege to read. It was such a great relief to read In search of Robert Millar after having to plough my way through Sex, Lies and Handlebar tape (the story of Jacque Anquetil) which had taken the thick end of two weeks to read, where as In search of Robert Millar was devoured in a matter of days!
To put my desire to read this book into perspective I must stress that Robert was in a key group of Tour de France riders whom I viewed as my sporting heroes in the 1980’s and as a young rider I looked up to, not so much as people whom I wanted to emulate but rather riders with a wide range of skill sets I wanted to learn from. The list included Paul Sherwin, Sean Kelly, Martin Early, Robert Millar, Greg Lemond, Sean Yates and Malcolm Elliot. As a young rider and even now I would certainly never have been able to place myself in this group and most certainly never in the same build as Robert. If he was a thoroughbred race horse I was the working shire-horse! But what stood out to me was his ability to suffer and suffer again knowing that those he was racing against where suffering even more then him. His ability to change speed up hill and put his opponents into major difficulty was legendary no it was the stuff that young boys dreams are made of.
I guess like many I had heard the rumours that Robert was now Roberto Millar and had dropped off the radar, occasionally passing comment on various bike forums, but I never wanted to believe what I had heard without proof. In essence this is what drew me to read In search of Robert Millar, would I be disappointed?
The quick answer to this question is a resounding NO. Far from being disappointed it was great, through the eyes of Richard Moore, to get a sneak insight into the life and times of one very special rider.
Richard’s book really does give the reader good understanding of what drives Robert and the things that make him tick. So many people interviewed for the book highlight that Robert was a very special, talented rider, with a good insight into the development of a race and wining strategy. Richard also shows how far ahead of his time Robert was with training methods and nutrition. Information Robert read was applied and tested in the real world of racing, things that did not work for him were then discarded. Robert was very focused on what worked and refused to pay lip service or waste any time on fads or pointless lab research that would not be applicable to his world.
The most telling tale of lab work verse real life was Robert’s first contact with a young Sports Science researcher called Peter Keen (later Performance Director for British Cycling). At a cycling conference Peter was pushing the use of Maxim as a major enhancement to performance for riders (hmm cross reference my review of Nuun and the recent BBC documentary). Robert needless to say dismissed the lab research as the product had never been tested in the field and just like Graeme Obree his opinion is that water works best.
Robert’s and Peter’s paths crossed again later in the book when Robert had been employed by the British Cycling to aid the development of the Road Racing squad. Needless to say as Peter appears to be a numbers man and Robert appears to be an experience man with no formal qualifications in sports science, surprise surprise Peter chose to not renew Roberts contract. I shall refrain from expressing my opinion about this but really encourage you to read the book and make up your own mind about the benefits of a sports science degree or the knowledge and understanding gained from the University of Real Life.
For me the most exciting part of the book must be the Epilogue, where Richard shares his e-mail communications with Robert Millar about the writing of the book. What a fascinating exchange.
Robert Millar for my money a cycling legend with so much that we can learn from. I can not recommend highly enough that you sit down and get hold of a copy of In search of Robert Millar I am sure you will not be disappointed.
Title:
In search of Robert Millar
Author: Richard Moore
Published by HarperSport (HarperCollins)
Available in Paperback, iBook & Kindle
Price:
RRP £8.99 (Paperback), RRP £8.99 (eBook), RRP £18.99 (Hardback)
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Book Review: In Search of Robert Millar
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Most cycling fans will probably have read Richard Moore’s In Search of Robert Millar, but having read it I might as well offer my take on it. Coming to it as someone who has recently got into road cycling, a recap of Scotland (and Britain’s) greatest ever road cyclist was a treat for me, but the book is much more than a charting of his career.
The story is framed around the author’s search for Robert Millar, after he retreated from public life in retirement. This gives the book a personal perspective, even something of the historical detective work to it. Moore carried out meticulous research, travelling all over the UK and France to talk to people connected to Millar. After the first few chapters, it falls a little more into the standard biography format, recounting the facts of his career, but the ‘personal journey’ aspect of the search does continue, with Moore’s own responses, and the emotional reactions the riders and coaches he visited, colouring the narrative.
The book is occasionally imbued with a sense of tension, a sort of moral insecurity — Richard Moore is aware Robert Millar wanted to avoid the limelight in retirement, and is anxious not to run roughshod over this wish, whilst remaining keen to produce a book that was essential to the cycling canon. Millar was a complex character- at times painfully shy, while at others mysteriously solitary and detatched, or cuttingly dismissive of a foolish journalist. You can see how it would be awkward to write a book about him if he himself didn’t endorse it.
Book ReviewL In Search of Robert Millar
Robert Millar, scanned by Steve Selwood from an original slide, used with permission.
Moore’s search eventually led to a series of emails that provide an insightful epilogue, that allow the book to close on Robert Millar’s terms (as Moore puts it). The electronic medium is actually one that allows Millar to communicate with cycling fans on an ongoing basis- witness the famous ‘Robert Millar thread’ on Bikeradar.
That the book led the ever-tactful Daily Mail to track down Robert Millar and publish the intrusive ‘sex change story’ must have been a huge disappointment to Moore, who felt he had tackled Millar’s wish for privacy with respect, even while exploring his character in the depth that was required. Even more painful must have been that Millar blamed Moore for the renewed interest in his whereabouts.
I can relate to this in a much more minor context. Since starting this blog, I have published one or two things that have asked to be taken down. My new-found enthusiasm for cycling has led me to put my foot in it on occasion and it is a delicate balance when today’s web services allow you to publish at a moment’s notice without recourse to editors or any due process. No relation to Moore’s creative process, of course, but a small connection for me.
This entry was posted in Culture and tagged books, Richard Moore, Robert Millar on February 8, 2010.
Slaying The Badger, by Richard Moore
15
By Feargal McKay@fmk_RoI Jun 21, 2011, 6:10am EDT
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Slaying-the-badger_mediumTitle: Slaying The Badger: LeMond, Hinault And The Greatest Ever Tour De France
Author: Richard Moore
Publisher: Yellow Jersey Press
Pages: 296
Year: 2011
Order: Random House
What it is: What it says on the tin: the story of the 1986 Tour de France and the Civil War between La Vie Claire's Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond
Strengths: As with Moore's previous two books, this one is underpinned by some fantastic interviews. Hinault and LeMond are obviously the two stars, but they're almost put in the shade by three very special interviewees: Paul Köchli, Andy Hampsten and Cyrille Guimard.
Weaknesses: If you already have a firm view of the 1986 Tour - pro-Hinault or pro-LeMond - you'll very probably find that shaken a bit by the time you get to the end of the book.
Pick a Tour, any Tour, one that you could go back in time to and relive live, as it happened, and watch the whole thing from up close. Which one would you pick? For those of us of a certain generation, this is an easy question: it has to be 1986, Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond, what was supposed to be the dauphin's coronation ride around France but turned out instead to be one of the most beautiful Civil Wars this sport has seen. It's a race that has everything. Even, I think, a happy ending.
That happy ending thing. I should put my cards on the table. I can remember watching the 1986 Tour, Channel 4's coverage of it. Bernard Hinault was the rider to root for. The man was charismatic. He was hard as nails. The story of his fall into a ravine in the 1977 Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré as he swooped down off the Col de Porte was a legend. Not for the fall, anyone can fall off on a descent (well, I know I can), but for le Blaireau being helped back up onto the road by his directeur sportif, Cyrille Guimard, and then climbing onto a new bike and riding on to win the stage, and the race overall.
Or there was the story of his 1980 victory in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, ridden in the snow, a race so brutal that a hundred of the hundred seventy-four starters had quit before they got to the feedzone at Vielsalm and by the time they got back to Liège only twenty riders were still on their bikes. And Hinault hadn't just won that race, survived to the end and then out-sprinted the next best rider. Oh no, he'd won in style, by going on the attack, eighty klicks out from home. On his own. The man was old school.
And then there was Saint-Étienne in the 1985 Tour de France. Three hundred metres to go and Hinault decks it. And just sits there on the road, blood pouring down his face and staining his yellow jersey, before he finally gets up and rolls across the finish line. A broken nose. And the Pyrénées still to come. That's it, we imagined, that has to be it, he's going home. The next day, there he was, bruised - his two black eyes finally made him look like a badger - and ready to ride. A broken nose? Pah, nothing.
So yeah, I was crazy about le Blaireau. Hell, Hinault even rated above Sean Kelly. But here's the twist: in that 1986 Tour, I actually wanted Greg LeMond to win. It wasn't that I liked LeMond - quite the opposite, actually - but Hinault had made him a promise, given his word. And, in those days, I believed that cycling held true to the chivalric ethic. A man's word was his bond. For Hinault to go back on his word and win for himself ... oh say it isn't so, Joe.
That said, I wasn't averse to watching Hinault fucking with LeMond's head, watching Hinault make LeMond earn that victory. No one has the right to have the Tour de France served up to them on a platter. And LeMond seemed to think the race was his before it had even started. Hinault jerking him around, that only made up for the lack of a challenge from anyone else in the peloton. The Badger was just playing with him, stirring it up. That's what I believed was going on anyway. What I wanted to believe was going on. Convinced myself was going on.
And then Richard Moore came along and trod on my dreams.
* * * * *
The story of Slaying the Badger is the story of the 1986 Tour de France, but it is also the story of the two men at the heart of that race, Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault, of who they were, where they'd come from and how the politics that shaped what happened on the roads of France in 1986 came into being. And much of what happened in the 1986 Tour is rooted in what happened in the 1985 Tour.
So the story of Slaying The Badger is two Tours and two men. Except there's more to it than that. Because that 1986 Tour represented the changing of the old order, not just the passing of the crown from Hinault to LeMond, but also changes in the wider world of cycling. Changes best exemplified by two men: Cyrille Guimard and Bernard Tapie.
Guimard was the old world of cycling. A former pro himself, he became a directeur sportif and guided Lucien Van Impe, Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon to, between them, seven victories in the Tour, in just nine years. Tapie on the other hand was a hard-nosed businessman who saw an opportunity to get into cycling, make a splash, and then get out again. Guimard and Tapie, theirs was, in part, a battle for the soul of cycling, the fight between cycling as a sport and cycling as a business.
The old order was also changing with the role of the Foreign Legion. LeMond was just one among many. And more than the individuals, 1986 saw the arrival of an American team at the Tour: Jim Ochowicz's 7-Eleven squad. This part of the change, the opening of cycling's borders, had been on going for most of a decade by then, and you could pick any year from that decade to mark a major milestone. But '86, the first non-European winning a Grand Tour, is probably the key milestone of that era.
Those then are the stories which form the background to Slaying The Badger. How do you tell them? Well, in both In Search Of Robert Millar and Heroes, Villains and Velodromes, Richard Moore built his story by getting others to tell it for him. He uses the same trick here, assembling a stellar cast of interviewees, about twenty in all. (There's only one key interviewee missing, Bernard Tapie, and that's not that big a surprise. Instead, Moore tells his story through solid secondary sources.) The stars are, inevitably, Hinault and LeMond themselves, both with their own memories of what did and did not happen. But they're almost outshone by three of the supporting cast.
First, there's Cyrille Guimard, the man who guided their careers toward greatness and who was, quite possibly, the greatest directeur sportif ever. Then there's Paul Köchli, La Vie Claire's directeur sportif, a man who was fervently anti-doping and believed that it shouldn't matter who won a race, so long as he was wearing a La Vie Claire jersey. And finally there's Andy Hampsten, a first-hand witness to what happened on the roads of France that year. For those three interviews alone, Slaying The Badger is worth reading. For more about about them, see the interview with Richard Moore.
* * * * *
So what is the story of the 1986 Tour de France? At its heart it's actually quite a simple story. Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault had been team-mates at Renault. Hinault was the first to leave, joining the newly formed La Vie Claire for the 1984 season. This was to be Hinault's comeback from a second bout of tendonitis. And when he blew up in the 1984 Tour, most assumed the comeback was done for.
Which may explain why Greg LeMond was happy to sign for La Vie Claire for the 1985 season: it would get him out of Renault, where he was in danger of being lost in the shadow of Laurent Fignon - who had thrashed Hinault at the '84 Tour - and he could shine at La Vie Claire, where Hinault seemed to be on the slide.
Except that le Blaireau was only down, and far from out. Guided by Paul Köchli, he bounced back. At the 1985 Giro d'Italia, Hinault showed that the Badger was back in town. At which point the realisation dawned on LeMond: he'd be helping Hinault to his fifth Tour victory.
In the first part of the 1985 Tour, it didn't look like Hinault needed anyone's help to win. The race was looking processional. No one was even close to Hinault. No one. And then came Saint-Étienne. The Alps behind them, the Pyrénées to come. Coming into the finish, Steve Bauer's back wheel went from under him, Phil Anderson went into Bauer, and Hinault went over the top of Anderson. Despite the broken nose and black eyes, Hinault still started the next day. But this was a different Hinault, a less imperious Hinault, an Hinault who was clearly mortal.
And then came the Col d'Aspin, the Col du Tourmalet and Luz Ardiden. Cyrille Guimard sent the Renault riders to the front. He may have had no skin in the game, but he still had a score to settle with Hinault. And settle it he almost did. On the Tourmalet, Hinault was riding backwards. And then Stephen Roche - then sitting pretty in third, behind LeMond, behind Hinault - took advantage of the mayhem Guimard's boys were causing: he went for one. Only to find Greg LeMond on his wheel.
The second La Vie Claire car came up to LeMond, the assistant directeur sportif, Maurice Le Guilloux, at the wheel. At this point LeMond was just covering Roche's attack, riding in his slipstream, not coming through to help at the front. But he wanted to help drive the break. He asked Le Guilloux for permission. Le Guilloux got on the radio to Köchli, who was back with Hinault, and Köchli said that LeMond could only ride if he attacked Roche. Köchli had no real problem with LeMond putting time into Hinault, taking over the race lead - he believed the team was more important than the rider, remember - but he wasn't going to help Roche move up a position and still be a threat to LeMond. If LeMond was going to attack, it would have to be a winning attack, one that left the team holding at least as strong a hand as it held at the start of the day.
LeMond had (still has, actually) two problems with what Köchli told him: one, by blasting it out over the radio, even Roche heard what Köchli's instructions were; and two, LeMond understood that Hinault was still within a minute of him, when in reality he was a lot further back. If he'd been let off the leash, LeMond could easily have put minutes into Hinault, enough to win the Tour with.
Others - especially Köchli - take a different view: LeMond had been given the chance. He had been told that if he wanted to ride, he was to do it without Roche. And he didn't take that chance. But, you say, of course he didn't, Roche heard the order. But remember something about Roche: on a climb he had, in his own phrase, the acceleration of a diesel train. Dropping him on a climb just took some swift accelerations of pace.
The next day, the final day of climbing, the race summiting the Aubisque twice, morning and afternoon, LeMond played the loyal domestique, offering no challenge to his yellow jerseyed leader. And thus it was that Bernard Hinault rode his way to a fifth Tour de France victory and joined Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx in the record books. And with everyone knowing that 1986 would be Hinault's final season - he'd promised years earlier that he'd hang up his wheels on his thirty-second birthday, November 14, 1986, and Hinault was a man of his word - it seemed unlikely he'd be the first man to win six Tours. Especially unlikely when, before the 1985 race ended, he gave this quote to Miroir du Cyclisme: "Next year, I'll stir things up to help Greg win, and I'll have fun doing it. That's a promise."
How true was Hinault to his word in 1986? Was he just stirring it up or did he actually try to give the French what they wanted from him, a sixth Tour victory? Well that's the story Richard Moore tells in Slaying The Badger. And some stories you really do have to read for yourselves.
* * * * *
You'll find an interview with Richard Moore on the Cafe Bookshelf.
Slaying the Badger, by Richard Moore review
LeMond, Hinault and the greatest ever Tour de France
BikeRadar score
4/5
Slaying the Badger by Richard Moore
Slaying the Badger, by Richard Moore (John Whitney/BikeRadar)
BikeRadar verdict
"Intriguing insight into one of professional cycling's great rivalries"
Those of you yearning for the more innocent, bygone era of professional cycling may be surprised by the story at the heart of Richard Moore’s new book, Slaying the Badger.
The book chronicles events leading up to, and including, the 1986 Tour de France, a race characterised by the apparent deceit, duplicity and double-crossing between its two major players, Bernard ‘The Badger’ Hinault and Greg LeMond.
Frenchman Hinault, in his final year as a professional, was under pressure from a public and media desperate for him to overhaul the five Tour wins of Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil. LeMond, a 25-year-old from the then cycling backwater of North America, was gunning for his first. Hinault had vowed to support his La Vie Claire teammate, following LeMond’s help the previous year in securing the Badger a fifth Tour crown. But would this promise, given seemingly in the heat of the moment following the 1985 race, be kept?
The answer, according to Moore, isn’t straightforward and makes for an engrossing story, even to those well familiar with the denouement of the ’86 Tour. It's no spoiler to say the Badger was eventually slain – the title itself tells you this. But as is the case throughout sport, the result is very much secondary to the journey that gets us there.
Present day interviews with both men form the book's core. Moore travels to Hinault’s farmhouse in Brittany and to LeMond’s home in rural Minnesota for their take on events 25 years later. Wildly different characters, it’s easy to see where conflict would have arisen. Hinault, single-minded and uncompromising, was just 23 and in his first Tour when he orchestrated a go-slow during a stage to Valence d’Agen. Considered la Patron, he is shown to have wielded huge influence over the peloton throughout his career. LeMond, charismatic but lacking in tactical nous, is portrayed as an outsider in what was the distinctly European world of professional cycling.
Anyone worried this may be a blow by blow account of a single race needn’t worry. The book is split into two parts; Part One, Depart, spans 165 pages and serves as a biography of both men up to the start of the ’86 Tour. Moore speaks at length to other key figures of this period, including Cyrille Guimard, Hinault’s Directeur Sportif during the first phase of his career up until 1983, and Paul Kochli who, as DS of La Vie Claire, called the shots for both riders.
Other members of the team, including LeMond’s compatriot Andy Hempsten, offer valuable insight into the inner workings of this central relationship from an insider’s perspective. Part 2, Arrive, examines the race in detail and the gradual disintegration of the working and personal relationship between Hinault and LeMond, as well as the question of whether the Frenchman, in his own backyard and against all his instincts, could follow through on his promise to help LeMond win his first Tour.
Where Slaying the Badger succeeds is in making such a well known story so readable. By starting from the beginning of each man’s career and building up slowly, Moore gradually reveals character traits that explain their behaviour in the run-up to the final showdown on Alpe d’Huez. It was Hinault, the all-powerful leader, seemingly able to make the peloton dance to his tune, against LeMond, the apparently fragile outsider, paranoid at the perceived forces conspiring against him (Moore reveals LeMond, towards the end of the Tour, resorted to cooking his own food and taking other riders’ food bags for fear of sabotage).
We found it difficult to side with either man, which is another success of Moore's storytelling. It might seem natural to root for the underdog LeMond, who went through three weeks of torment, but Hinault’s iron will and force of personality is difficult to ignore. His audacious, and ultimately doomed, solo attack on the stage to Superbagneres, apparently against both team orders and his ‘promise’ to help LeMond, is hard to condemn in this era of conservative riding by General Classification contenders.
Hinault’s commitment to helping his teammate may be unclear, but Slaying the Badger proves one thing: if the 1986 Tour de France is the greatest ever, then it was its greatest rivalry that made it that way.
Book Review: Slaying The Badger By Richard Moore
By ChrisElder - July 23, 201211 3
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slaying the badger richard moore tour de france 1986
One of the more interesting stories in the Tour de France 2012 was the threat of a couple of young apprentice riders overtaking their mentors in the standings. Most notable was the strength of Team Sky rider Chris Froome, evident on at least a couple of the steep mountain stages as he actually pulled away from pre-race team leader Bradley Wiggins with relative ease. Similarly, last year’s GC winner Cadel Evans had to release his young Team BMC apprentice Teejay Vangarderen to defend his Best Young Rider jersey when it was evident Evans was too ill to compete for the yellow jersey against Wiggins. Much beer and ink has been spilled over the question of whether Teejay should have been set loose earlier and maybe earned a podium position, and especially if Team Sky should have backed the stronger Froome instead of sticking with Wiggins. Coming years will tell if Teejay and Froome were having the rides of their lives or if they are indeed the riders of the future.
As the 1985 Tour de France ended, similar questions were being thrown about by cycling fans about young American Greg Lemond and veteran French winner Bernard Hinault of the team La Vie Claire. Lemond had been signed as a future star and potential winner of the Tour, while Hinault was nearing the end of his illustrious career. But in 1985 it was evident at times that while Hinault was the assigned team leader that all the others were expected to support, Lemond was riding stronger in the mountains, at times having to be held back by the team to preserve Hinault’s top GC standing. Could Lemond have won in ’85 if he’d been set loose? We’ll never know. What we do know is that Hinault promised at the end of the ’85 Tour that he would work the next year to support Lemond as team leader. Or did he?
Click through and see how journalist Richard Moore exposes this powerful story…
bernard hinault instructs greg lemond slaying the badger richard mooreThe cycling team La Vie Claire had been formed under millionaire owner Bernhard Tapie as Bernhard Hinault’s support team, in essence. Hinault had been a previous winner of the Tour, but his mercurial personality (his nickname, which lends itself to the title, is The Badger, and animal famed for its ferocious attacks) tended to alienate team directors, and really the only way to avoid conflict was to form a team around him that could be molded to his needs. Such slavish dedication is rare in competitive athletes at the elite level, so naturally this didn’t go completely to plan. Greg Lemond was brought in for the 1985 season to learn under and support Hinault while being groomed for future team leadership himself. But Hinault’s denial of Lemond’s obvious strength in the 1985 Tour didn’t set well with the upsurging Lemond. Whereas Hinault was the consummate continental traditionalist, Lemond, as one of the first really successful American riders in Europe, tended to do things his own way, embracing new techniques and equipment (he was among the first adopters of “clipless” pedals and aero handlebars for time trial stages, for example). Homesick Lemond even had his wife Kathy fly over to accompany him to some races, and fed on his favorite Mexican food at times between race stages (which didn’t go so well for him, and those who had to follow him in the peloton, one of many juicy stories Moore recounts in this book). Outside of cycling organizers wishing to tap into a new North American cycling market, few in European cycling welcomed this American and his new, even offensive, ways.
greg lemond and andy hampsten slaying the badger richard mooreSo what did Hinault promise to do for Lemond in the 1986 Tour? It seemed pretty clear from his statements that he was going to do all he could to support Lemond winning the yellow jersey, but as time went on he qualified his original statement, alternately offering himself in service and then casting doubt on how loyal he’d actually be. The team was ripe for division, with American Andy Hampsten, along with Canadian Steve Bauer, aligned naturally with Lemond. A couple of riders were Swiss (as was team director Paul Kochli), and, true to their nationality, remained relatively neutral throughout the Tour, at times seeming to support the remaining riders, who were French like Hinault, and at other times backing Lemond at critical moments. Added to the mix was Hinault’s rivalry with Laurent Fignon, who raced for Cyrille Guimard, team director at Hinault’s previous team, and you get a powerful, suspenseful mixture of tensions and motivations for all the major players.
lemond pushes hinault tour de france 1986 richard moore slaying the badgerRichard Moore, a former racing cyclist, has written a deep, searching exploration of what actually happened at the 1986 Tour, what happened in the years leading up to it, and who the major players were in what turned out to be arguably “the greatest Tour de France,” the subtitle of this book. Moore interviews both Hinault and Lemond at length for this book, along with many of the other people who were directly or indirectly involved in this story. Moore’s goal is to get to the bottom of the story, separating truths from untruths. Everybody seems to remember things differently, and people’s stories sometimes change and contradict early statements. In Moore’s able hands, what emerges is a complex, multifaceted web of a story, told eloquently (as only Brits, inventors of this language we share, can). The story is rich and takes more than passing concentration, but the payoff is a terrific story, well told. Race fans will love getting all the detail of race action, backed with strategy and analysis, framed in a complete back story. Perhaps some day the story of the 2012 Tour will be told just as well!
Published by Velo Press, Slaying the Badger: Greg Lemond, Bernard Hinault, and the Greatest Tour de France is available at Amazon for Kindle for $9.99.
Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond's classic 1986 Tour de France duel relived in Slaying the Badger
The Tour de France is almost upon us and the perfect excuse to stock up on a few cycling books to keep you company on the sofa during those long afternoons when occasionally the action dulls a little and there is time for reflection and research ahead of the ritual burn-up in the final half hour.
Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond's classic 1986 Tour de France duel relived in Slaying the Badger
Epic battle: Greg LeMond (left) and Bernard Hinault's duel in the 1986 Tour is the stuff of legend
Brendan Gallagher By Brendan Gallagher5:00PM BST 22 Jun 2011
In which case, as a matter of some urgency, arm yourself first with Slaying the Badger by Richard Moore and immerse yourself in the epic story of the 1986 Tour and the two greatest riders of their era - Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond who for two years found themselves riding on the same team, a sure-fire recipe for intrigue and drama.
The Franco-American duo definitely take centre stage but the first surprise is that a third figure damn nearly steals the show, and the book, from them. That man is Paul Kochli the enigmatic Swiss directeur sportif at their La Vie Claire team, the godfather of sports scientists everywhere and a man, even then, dedicated to proving that riders could win the ultimate prize clean.
Over the years I have of course heard talk of Kochli, the reclusive 'professor' of the sport, but by tracking him down and outlining his methods and philosophy Moore does modern day cycling a great service.
Kochli was right 'out there' 25 years ago and listening to his almost guru-like voice now is still revelatory. A major, much neglected, thinker and innovator and an individual I am left wanting to know much more about.
The second big surprise, though, is Hinault. Instinctively he has always been a big favourite of mine, warts and all. The cussed and commanding Breton capable of extraordinary deeds on a bike with his occasional bouts of ruthless megalomania softened by equally random - but less heralded - bouts of generosity and romanticism towards the sport. As a journalist it must have been a joy to write about Hinault in the 1980s. I've bumped into him a couple of times and physically he reminds of Gareth Edwards, another phenomenally gifted and powerful Celt, capable of almost anything, in athletic terms, when the situation demanded. As with Edwards there remains a tangible forcefield of energy and charisma around Hinault to this day.
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That was my impression before reading the book and my opinion remains unchanged as I reluctantly closed the last of the 283 pages. Not that Moore doesn't dig around looking for the "real" Hinault - he does manfully in the same way that he famously went In Search of Robert Millar a few years ago - but on this occasion it would appear there is no alter ego to discover. What you see with Hinault is what you get, now and in previous years. The Breton is his own invention, a unique one off. He emerges exactly as I thought he would. I feel like I have known him for years.
And yet running contrary to that was the third surprise the book coughed up, namely that I found myself not quite as sympathetic to LeMond as I imagined I would be. What is there not to like about the fresh faced "new world" Californian who daringly parachuted into the old massively disingenuous and frequently drug-tainted world of European and especially Tour de France racing?
Probably not a lot but my bullshit radar started bleeping at full volume when we come to Stage 14 of the 1985 Tour de France when Hinault, absolutely at his imperious best, started the day a full five minutes ahead in general classification and was, barring an act of god, clearly heading for his fifth Tour victory. In the final 300 metres that day he crashed badly. Smashing his nose into pieces, cutting his head and generally banging himself up horribly. Hinault has always blamed Phil Anderson, LeMond's good friend and training partner, but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that. A case of the wounded Badger, Hinault's nickname, lashing out, unfairly as it happens.
On top of his debilitating injuries Hinault had also picked up a bad case of bronchitis but being a warrior by nature determined immediately that he would battle on to Paris come hell or high water and win his fifth title.
At this point in the narrative it is absolutely clear-cut in my mind. Hinault is the esteemed team leader, a four time Tour winner at that stage and he had been in the leader's yellow jersey for the preceding six days in 1985. From that moment onwards everybody in La Vie Claire is obligated - morally and possibly even contractually - to ride for their leader. Furthermore this is a team leader who almost uniquely within the peloton frequently worked like a dog and buried himself for a lesser colleague when he had no particular personal interest in a race. The book is full of such anecdotes.
Nor did Hinault ever abuse the situation when he was the protected rider - because of his stunning natural talent he got by with the minimum of subservient team assistance, he only called it in as a last resort. A constant theme within the book is what an incredibly whole hearted team player Hinault was and how he looked after his colleagues.
So in Hinault's greatest hour of need it doesn't sit well with me that LeMond constantly bemoaned his bad luck at not being able to attack his leader and ride for the win, of being pegged back by team orders and duties. Excuse me? that's what he was getting paid a small fortune for surely? Hinault had spent a lifetime earning that respect and was the man who, lest we forget, had been over five minutes ahead of LeMond in the general classification and absolutely battered the American by two minutes and 34 seconds during the testing 75km time trial on stage nine, a pretty conclusive mano-a-mano test. Yet we soon had LeMond complaining that he could have beaten Hinault given a free run. Of course he could, Hinault should probably have been in hospital.
LeMond was missing the point entirely and not understanding the wider picture. In many ways his story reminds of the crack squad of American rowers at Oxford University in 1986 and 1987 and caused such turmoil with their 'New World' ways - basically because they didn't buy into the traditions and understand fully how the system worked. Especially when they didn't win.
LeMond wasn't doing Hinault a favour at all in helping him to Paris, he was simply doing his duty and what was expected of him. If he so badly wanted to be the team leader and ride flat-out for general classification against Hinault he should have chosen another team the previous winter and not seduced by the million pound contract offered by Bernard Tapie.
Yet somehow, despite everything, LeMond - much feted by the English speaking press it has to be said - emerged as the 'hero' of 1985 and Hinault, possibly feeling the need to respond to that public perception, made his famous promise to help the American next year.
The context of Hinault's quote is discussed at some length and can be seen as ambiguous but if I have read the Badger's mindset correctly deep down he will have acknowledged no debt to LeMond whatsoever. The racing situation in 1985 demanded only one course of action, that La Vie Claire gets Hinault to Paris in yellow. End of. The glory should still have been his and his team's with the money, as ever, being split nine ways. And yet somehow LeMond emerged as both the hero and the wronged party. Privately Hinault would have absolutely loathed LeMond's "New World" interpretation of how the race could have panned out. This was the Tour de France damn it, not some criterium in Colorado!
So come 1986 we had a wonderful dynamic unfolding. LeMond, an incredible talent, was a year older and better and very hungry for his breakthrough win. Hinault meanwhile, had confirmed that he would be retiring at the age of 32 at the end of the season. Publicly that quixotic commitment hung in the air - that he should repay LeMond - but in Hinault's mind there is no debt to settle. Mercurial at the best of times, he proceeded to ride like a cyclist with acute polar disorder, a maverick joker one day, a dedicated LeMond cohort the next. You can sense his agony of indecision and LeMond's growing alarm that demob happy Hinault was actively working against him.
Paranoia set in - Hinault knew everybody in the peloton and had scores of favours to cash in if he so wished. At least that's how LeMond viewed it. In stark contrast, the American felt he could only rely on a few North American and English speaking riders.
Even though we know the eventual outcome, the race and the book builds towards a gripping page turning climax which you don't want to end.
Read it and make you own minds up about the dramatis personae - you will go on your own gut instincts on this one - and then keep your fingers crossed the 2011 Tour serves up half the intrigue and controversy.
Slaying the Badger, by Richard Moore. Yellow Jersey Press £12.99.
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Book Review – Slaying The Badger
by Paul Harris | Sep 12, 2012 | 0 comments
Slaying The Badger
LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France
by Richard Moore
I love sport – I love the grand tournament, the big match, the great race. What makes sport great for me is how it exposes personality – not just the obvious, like the braggadocio of a Muhammad Ali, the tortured genius of a Paul Gascoigne, the flamboyant elegance of a Valentino Rossi, but also those less touched by that kind of otherworldly ability and charisma, the Joe Fraziers, the Colin Hendrys, the Sete Gibernaus. And when the competition is at its peak, when everything is on the line, when the body, spirit and mind are stretched to the absolute limit, striving to overcome their peers, that’s when the personality is laid bare, that’s when sport is at its very best. There’s no hiding place on the pinnacle of the mountain.
Slaying The Badger tells such a story, of the 1986 Tour de France, a titanic battle between the two best riders in the race, team mates Bernard Hinault, the spiritual leader of the peloton in all his five-times victor pomp, and the young pretender, Greg Lemond, the blond-haired blue-eyed Californian golden boy. I’m sure a lot of readers are aware of how the race went down but if, like me, you go into the book knowing very little of the story of the ‘86 tour, I won’t spoil it for you by telling you what happens – what I WILL say is it was a great, classic race with a twist, and the triumph of Moore’s book is that it doesn’t get hung up on the step by step minutiae of the race, which frankly can be pretty dull (try rereading the text coverage of a stage – it’s not easy to make it a lively read). Instead, a sizeable percentage of the book is given over to Moore’s comprehensive modern-day interviews, not only with Hinault and Lemond, but also with some of their managers, coaching staff and team mates.
It’s Moore’s ability to portrait these characters in words – the pugnacious Hinault, the frankly scatty but puppyish Lemond – and weave them in around the other characters and events before, during and after the race that made this book stand out for me. The result is a gripping snapshot of this great race, a superbly detailed snapshot without getting bogged down in the nitty details – it’s not a pacy thriller that will leave you gasping at every turn, but it spins along at a thoughtful clip and informs as well as entertains. As a book for the cycling fanatic, whether you know the story of the race or not, it’s essential reading, but Moore’s elegant prose is so accessible that I’d have no problem thoroughly recommending this even to the non-cycling sports fan. This is a class piece of work.
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Closing date: 24/10/2012.
Title:
Slaying The Badger – LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France
Author:
Richard Moore
Published by:
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Available in Paperback, iBook & Kindle
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Heroes, Villains & Velodromes, by Richard Moore
6
Having looked at Chris Hoy's autobiography, how about we look at the other version of the story Hoy's ghost-writer Richard Moore crafted, Heroes, Villains & Velodromes. Another book I'm not sure I know how to write about. The first half of it I loved, the second half of it just got on my tits. Do I sing the praises of the first half or just pick away at what's wrong with the second half? Oh decisions, decisions, decisions.
By Feargal McKay@fmk_RoI Nov 4, 2010, 8:57am EDT
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Heroes, Villains & VelodromesTitle: Heroes, Villains & Velodromes - Chris Hoy and Britain's Track Cycling Revolution
Author: Richard Moore
Publisher: HarperSport
Year: 2008
Pages: 328
Order: HERE
What it is: Partly a biography of Chris Hoy, partly a history of Team GB's track programme and partly a year in the life of the two as they prepare for the Beijing Olympics.
Strengths: Moore conducted numerous interviews with the key players, meaning the book offers a variety of voices and viewpoints. The benefit of this is particularly obvious when you compare Moore's version of Hoy's story with the one presented in the official autobiography (ghosted by Moore).
Weaknesses: Critical insight into the British Cycling set-up seems to stop with the departure of Peter Keen. On the other side of the story, Moore gets a tad too close to his subject - Hoy - and starts spouting some serious bullshit. And he really doesn't need to do down road cycling and Mark Cavendish in order to make Hoy and the British Cycling track programme look good.
Once upon a time, British cyclists ruled the world. Not just on the track. They were kings of the road too. Seriously. I'm not making this shit up. Ok, so it was away back in the time of Victoria, but the point is it happened. Brits like James Moore, Arthur Linton, Jimmy Michael, they were heroes in their day. Hell, the Brits were so good they even had one of the sport's first real villains, Choppy Warburton, the Michele Ferrari of his day. Britons were also innovators. Six Day racing may have risen to fame in Madison Square Gardens and the vélodromes of Paris but its foundation myth has it that it was born in the London borough of Islington, in the Agricultural Hall. Go UK!
But then ... well it all just stopped. Britain fell in love with the motorcar and the football. Cycling fell out of favour. Heroes came and went, but they were mavericks, succeeding despite the lack of support from the system. Then, in the nineties, the system changed. And in the past dozen years Britain has gone from being a make-weight to one of the top dogs in international cycling. Well, on the track at least. How that change came about is part of the story of Heroes, Villains & Velodromes, with the story of British Cycling's recent successes being seen through the prism of Chris Hoy's four Olympic gold medals.
Moore, the author of the rather good In Search Of Robert Millar, ought make for a good choice of storyteller here. A cyclist himself, he knows the system from the inside, and knows Hoy personally from their days representing Scotland at the Commonwealth Games: "Chris and I were team-mates once. We were in the same Scotland team at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lampur in 1998, but in many ways we belonged to different eras. For him, the Commonwealth Games were the start - they provided a springboard. For me, they were the end, the Commonwealth Games being as high as the bar of my ambition - I use the word advisedly - was set."
And certainly for the first half of the book Moore fulfils the role perfectly. He talks to the people who know Hoy - his parents, team-mates, former coaches and the like, and from them builds up a picture of the man, and (partly) of Scottish and British cycling in the nineties. To put together the post-Lottery history of British Cycling he talks to Peter Keen and others. The story is told economically, efficiently. The book breezes along and you think you're onto a real winner.
But somewhere around halfway through the book, Moore hits a speed wobble. (Then again, it could be me. But it's happened more or less in the same place each time I've read the book. So I'm blaming the author.) I think it's that Moore gets closer to Hoy - too close - and the early, almost matter-of-fact distance gives over to some out and out cheerleading.
It begins with the axing of the kilo from the Olympic schedule, when Moore stops reporting what actually happened and starts arguing for what he wished had happened. Moore suggests that, rather than surrendering any track disciplines to make room for BMX, the UCI should have axed the road time trial. Because, Moore says, Tyler Hamilton tested positive at the Athens Olympics (Moore doesn't seem to know the difference between an AAF and a positive. Or maybe he just doesn't care). It's funny - Moore would say ironic - that this kilo rant comes after talking to Steve Peters, whose whole argument is about separating emotional responses from logical ones. Here Moore's all emotion and no logic.
Moore's whole save the kilo spiel is based on the fact that it was Hoy's event. Well, Hoy's for the previous four or five years anyway, the Scot having only taken it up after the Sydney Olympics. But the arguments that Moore makes in favour of the kilo - he falls just a little short of calling it cycling's blue riband event - simply don't hold any water. Consider Hoy's attempt to raise £100,000 corporate sponsorship to fund his attempt on the altitude kilo world record (to me, a niche within a niche within a niche, to Moore "the ultimate world record"). Despite Hoy's profile and despite spending nearly a year writing begging letters to corporate marketing departments, the total raised barely covered the £40,000 the record attempt cost. And that was after the BBC had got involved with the project.
Then comes the serious pom-pom waving, which involves Moore suggesting of Hoy's altitude flying five-hundred metre record that "it is difficult to imagine it ever being beaten." Ask me, either Moore was suffering from altitude sickness when he wrote that or he's totally lacking in imagination. Or how about, after Hoy's altitude record attempts, talking of a speech Hoy gave "which must go down as one of his finest achievements - it was heartfelt and generous." Moore seems to disappear further and further up his own fundament the longer this section of the book goes on, even telling us that "few people do small talk" better than Chris Hoy.
Just as quick as it started, the wobble is briefly brought under control and Moore interviews Shane Sutton, who, next to Peter Keen, is probably the stand-out interviewee in the book. I like Sutton. He's ... fuck it, he's Australian, and all that that entails. Brash. Uninhibited. Willing to call it like it is. He's one of the few guys who could say of Hoy that he has "that C-U-N-T element" and you know he means it as a compliment. The Hoy Sutton describes has edges, a rough surface. He's not the bland, perfect human he's presented as in the autobiography. He's not the charisma-free zone, the pedestal-mounted plaster saint depicted elsewhere. And that elsewhere includes elsewhere in Heroes, Villains & Velodromes. Sutton's Hoy is selfish, manipulative, a bit of a cunt. But nice with it.
Annoying as Moore's objectivity-free hero worshipping of Hoy can be - he's most annoying at the book's end when his adoration of Hoy necessitates a cheap dig at Mark Cavendish - what really pisses me off about Heroes, Villains & Velodromes is Moore's take on the topic of doping.
Let's start with something simple, a comment from Dave Brailsford that I find quite telling: "Some people are very quiet on doping, but I've always been open about it. I introduced blood testing a long time ago, and I said to the riders, ‘We're going to take your blood and if there's anything suspicious I‘m not going to send you to the police, or the anti-doping guys. We're gong to do it in-house, and if I see anything dodgy, I'm just going to phone you up and say, "Look, we know what you're doing. You can tell me about it if you want. But you ain't riding, that's for sure."' And there have been three or four riders, Great Britain riders, who didn't get selected, where I‘ve had to say: ‘No, you're not riding, because we know what you're doing.' And they just said: ‘Oh, alright then.'"
Now, to me, what's most important about that comment is that Brailsford doesn't seem to give a fiddlers about getting rid of doping. He just wants to avoid possible scandal. He's happy to cover up for dopers, leave them to continue doing what they're doing - so long as he's washed his hands of them - and not help the authorities kick them out of the sport.
For Moore though, what's important is pointing out that those riders Brailsford allowed to continue doping, just not in Team GB colours, were road riders with continental professional teams. Remember the important lesson kiddies: track cycling clean, road cycling dirty. Keep saying that to yourself and who knows, you might even convince yourself it's true. Moore seems to have.
But just remember this: Moore himself quotes Hoy saying "There are about two or three [dopers] left in the world of sprinting." (And this comment is coming from a man who, elsewhere, pleads ignorance as to what others may or may not be putting into their bodies.) Moore also has Keen saying that "definitely, without a doubt" Hoy has beaten athletes on drugs. And Moore himself, for all he tries to suggest that the only doping problem in cycling is happening in men's road racing, can't avoid referring to some of the dopers who've ridden on the track. Some of whom even got to wear GB colours.
Take the case of Gary Edwards who, in 1998, tested positive for testosterone at the national track championships, where he won silver in the team sprint. After his ban - one year - Edwards again tested positive, for nandrolone. This time he got a two year ban. But before that was landed on him, Edwards won two gold medals at the World Masters Championships (he had continued racing, having not been handed a provisional suspension), only to test positive yet again, this time for Stanazolol, which finally prompted a lifetime ban under the three-strikes-and-you-really-should-just-fuck-off rule.
(Trackies, based on the examples Moore offers, seem to have recidivist tendencies. Another case Moore mentions is the American Stephen Alfred, who rode for Trinidad at the 1998 Commonwealth Games. There he got busted for nandrosterone and got banned. In May 2006 he tested positive for testosterone and in November the same year for human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG). For whatever reason, those last two offences were treated as one and Alfred landed an eight year ban. Alfred stayed in the registered testing pool, rather than retiring. But when the testers came a calling in 2007, asking for an out of competition sample, Alfred refused to entertain their request. A refusal being the same as a positive, Alfred was hit with a lifetime ban.)
As serious as Edwards' case was to British Cycling - it has always argued that even one doping case could endanger all of the federation's Lottery funding - there was an even more serious case, that of Neil Campbell. Campbell was selected to ride the team sprint at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 but five weeks before the games left the squad, having tested positive for HCG at a World Cup race in July and again at the British championships a couple of weeks later. Because he was British the immediate assumption was that he was suffering from testicular cancer (HCG being an early indicator of that disease). So when he went home he was treated as a plucky Brit with true grit who would, like Lance Armstrong before him, battle his testicular cancer, defeat it and return reborn. Except of course that when he got home and the cancer doctors pricked and prodded him, they declared him fit and healthy. Which only left one conclusion: Campbell had doped. But by then the media had forgotten all about him and no doping scandal ensued.
What's interesting about the Campbell case is how it highlights the difference between a doping incident and a doping scandal. Doping incidents - if you can bury them - are no problem. Doping scandals on the other hand are a problem. You have little or no control over them. Thus it was that, for Brailsford, the Rob Hayles episode - which technically wasn't even doping - was "one of the worst days I've had in this job."
What was important about the Hayles episode was that it happened to a British rider at a major event being held in Britain (in most of the ‘did he / didn't he' speculation surrounding Hayles, few people seemed to care a whit about Pim Ligthart, who also tripped the fifty percent haematocrit rule that day). But that's the point about doping scandals. They're not rational. How rational Brailsford's response was - "For twenty-four hours I was going to quit." - is for you to decide. But I find it weird that he'd consider quitting over a non-doping story while the three or four doping cases he's swept under the carpet don't seem to have cost him a moment's thought. They, to me, are far more serious that the media-management the Hayles incident required.
I guess that much of the problem with Moore's take on doping is that he's just - naturally, and you might even say admirably - biased toward his own side of the sport, the track. And, to be fair to him, Moore is right when he says that "the reputation of the sport of cycling has had terrible damage inflicted upon it by the endemic drug culture of road cycling." But saying that road cycling is inflicting all the damage misses the point somewhat. What actually inflicts the damage is doping at the Tour de France. You can have arrests and drug busts at races like the Tour de l'Avenir and the world won't bat an eye-lid. You can have track cyclists dumped out of the Olympics and no one will even notice. But the Tour, for most people, is cycling. What happens there happens in the full view of the media.
The real point, for me, is that the drug culture is endemic across the whole sport. It's an historical fact of this sport's history. It's not just a problem for road cycling. Pick a British track star of the past and you can find a doping story about him. Reg Harris (who Moore hyperbolically says "is arguably the most famous cyclist Britain has ever produced.") and Tony Doyle, probably the two most famous British trackies before Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree came along, both had reputations for dabbling in the dark arts. Even today Moore can't hide the fact that trackies dope too.
What's saddest about this aspect of the book is that Moore doesn't need to do down road cycling in order to make the track look good. It's hard to argue against the achievements of British Cycling and Chris Hoy over the past dozen or so years. It is an impressive story, and you don't have to be a trackie at heart to acknowledge that fact. Perhaps had Moore had more belief in the true worth of that story he wouldn't have needed to take so many snide swipes at road cycling. And perhaps then one of the major flaws within Heroes, Villains & Velodromes wouldn't have manifested itself.
As it is then, Heroes, Villains & Velodromes is a flawed book. Remove Moore's road-envy and Hoy hero-worshipping and you have the potential for a fantastic story, as glimpsed in the book's first half. Leave them in though and you get yet another missed opportunity.
* * * * *
You'll find an interview with Richard Moore on the Cafe Bookshelf.
Book Review : Heroes, Villains & Velodromes by Richard Moore
Home Library Book Reviews Book Review : Heroes, Villains & Velodromes by Richard Moore
Book Review : Heroes, Villains & Velodromes by Richard Moore
Book Review : Heroes, Villains & Velodromes by Richard Moore
Dec 15, 2014 | Posted by Tilly Spurr | Book Reviews, Competitive Sport, Getting Started, Gym, Library, Misc, Motivation | 0 comments
Chris Hoy winning a life time achievement award at last nights BBC Sports Personality Awards, reminded me how much I had enjoyed Richard Moore’s book – Heroes, Villains and Velodromes. First published in 2008 and primarily focusing on Chris Hoy, it gives an unprecedented insight in to the secret worlds of track cycling at a time when everything was changing.
Written in three parts, the first part looks at Chris Hoy’s childhood, his early racing in BMX and teenaged track races at the frequently flooded velodrome in Edinburgh. Part two follows Chris Hoy’s season but also documents the massive changes in approach at British Cycling during the 1990’s and early 2000s. Changes that allowed British track cycling to totally dominate on the world stage. Part three looks at the build up to the Beijing Olympics but also looks into some of the bigger problems associated with elite sport, particularly doping and betting.
I really enjoyed this book, for its insight into what it takes to be an elite athlete, its description of some of the fabulous characters involved sport and for its ‘fly on the wall’ look at the advent of sport science in the UK. It beautifully descriptive and full of great information as well as the odd tip.
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TAGS: BehaviourChangeCyclingMotivationNutritionOlympicsPerformancePlanningSleepSportSum Of Minimal GainsTraining
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About Tilly Spurr
Tilly is a nutritional scientist and performance coach who works with clients, who are looking for an extra edge or increased vitality to succeed. After 12 years working in the financial sector, Tilly has spent the last fifteen years studying medical and performance nutrition with a special interest in cognition, childhood development and adolescence. As a mentor and coach she works in schools and companies consulting on how to build resistance and manage stress with diet. Translating the latest research she aims to give an insight into the simple, achievable, scientifically based changes that can transform clients’ lives.