Book of the Week

Tour de France: The History, the Legend, the Riders

By Graeme Fife Mainstream Publishing pounds 14.99, hardback

IN THIS book's final paragraph, as the author wrestles with the mythic nature of the world's toughest sporting event, he quotes Napoleon: "When I hear of a nation that can exist without bread, I will believe that the French can exist without glory."

It comes down to that simple idea: the Tour de France is for making heroes - which is why last year was so traumatic. With his ambitious, sometimes over-wrought prose, Fife attempts to do justice to its epic scale.

This is not a conventional, chronological history - that would clearly be too literal-minded for a writer who includes a cycle of plays about King Arthur on his CV. Instead, the book is divided into chapters centred on the main climbs.

But although each is supposed to be thematic - Chapter 1 is "L'Alpe d'Huez: Fear, Moral Strength and Eddy Merckx", for example, while others include, "Col de Vars: Drugs in the Sport" and "Mont Ventoux: The British Riders" - each is actually a springboard for chunks of randomly scattered history, interspersed with Fife's evocative account of his own journey over the legendary peaks.

It is all too chaotic to be completely satisfying, which is a pity as it is stuffed full of good material, from the early years, when rivals would saw through each other's frames, and Henri Desgrange, the Tour's autocratic founder, said: "The ideal Tour would be one in which only one rider would complete the ordeal", through to last year's horror show, when we came close to nobody completing it.

Fife is good on the hardship that makes the Tour an examination of the human spirit. He describes climbing the Ventoux (where Tommy Simpson died) in the teeth of the Mistral: "The bike leaps and bucks like a loose toe of canvas in a storm. Yes, time dies in my shoes. It isn't that I'm out of strength; I have never had sufficient strength to cope with that wind's force."

My favourite line hints at this book's many pleasures. Merckx was known as "The Cannibal", but this line was written about his great rival, Raymond Poulidor, on the Ventoux: he swallowed it up "with the voracity of a cannibal wolfing down a leg of archbishop".

Can any of this year's riders approach such an exalted state? That's what we need to know. Not their latest haematocrit reading.

Chris Maume