Book club: The Cyclingnews team’s must-reads

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As someone who has torn through many, many cycling books, picking just one to recommend feels like choosing a favourite child, but I’ll settle on one that has stuck with me because it’s truly affecting. The Descent by Thomas Dekker tells the story of a very dark period in cycling, with Dekker chronicling his own downfall into doping and other questionable behaviour in very raw and often unflattering terms.

Even more so than the headline books from that time like Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race, this book really opened my eyes to just how ugly cycling’s past was, not just the doping but the recreational drug use and hedonistic partying in an era where cyclists were really celebrities. Be warned, this is not a cosy read.

If you’re buying for someone who has read a lot about cycling and wants to go deeper than the latest big-name biography, I can’t recommend this enough.

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If, like me, you prefer looking at pretty pictures than reading words then I heartily suggest you go for The Rough Stuff Fellowship Archive, a collection of beautiful photos amassed from the oldest off-road cycling club in the world.

In the days before gravel, and even before mountain bikes, the hardy members of the RSF would go out on rides armed with sandwiches, stoves, tweed, canvas luggage, rim brakes, and alcohol. They would think nothing of pushing a tandem over a mountain pass in the Lake District, riding across the forbidding inner reaches of Iceland, or riding to Everest base camp on bikes definitely not cut out for riding off-road by modern standards.

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All of these adventures were documented in lush detail on 35mm colour negative and slide film, before being forgotten for years, rediscovered, archived, and finally collated into this glorious collection.

Mine lives permanently on the table, alongside the brilliant second volume, to serve as inspiration, and it gets thumbed through with alarming regularity. I promise you it will make you reassess what you think bikes are capable of with the right mindset, and the club motto of “I never go for a walk without my bike”.

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The Hour chronicles multiple British time trial champion Michael Hutchinson’s attempt to break the World Hour Record in 2003, and is a book I enjoy returning to time and time again.

Hutchinson’s book examines the history of the hour record and its long list of legendary holders, as well as documenting the author’s own attempt to break Chris Boardman’s athletes hour record and take his own cycling career to the next level. It’s a humble, humorous book that even a non-cyclist without prior knowledge of the sport could pick up and enjoy.

Hutchinson ultimately failed in his attempt; equipment woes and the UCI making life very difficult meant the odds were always stacked against him. I admire his honesty in cataloguing what must have been a disappointing experience during a strange era for the hour record, where modern technology could not be used.

This is a book about a failure, but I guarantee it will put a smile on your face.

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When Welsh journalist Geoffrey Nicholson died in 1999, he was described in The Guardian’s obituary as a writer who “transformed the character of sports journalism in the late 1950s by eschewing tabloid clichés and public relations hype and introducing a quality of writing that matched, and was sometimes superior to, that on the arts and foreign pages.”

All of that, and more is evident, in his 1977 book about the Tour de France, and it remains a key reference point for writing about cycling in general, and the Tour in particular. Riders are described as memorably as the race itself, like his description of the great Spanish climber Julio Jiménez, for example: “A small bird-like figure…he was also balding and never looked particularly well, but on the first steep slope he would prance away as if he had springs in his calves.”

At the time, The Great Bike Race was a hugely appealing introduction to a race like the Tour, which at the time was barely known outside the mainland European continent. Even now, its wry humour and insights into sport are as vivid and appealing as they were half a century ago.

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In Le Métier, Canadian racer Michael Barry, his book illustrated with photos by Camille J McMillan, documents one of his final seasons on the bike. It’s not a book focussing on headline-making revelations and scandals or the glamour of big personalities and major races.

Instead, the focus is on the reality of a year – four chapters are split into Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter – as a road captain domestique approaching the end of his career.

There are quiet reflections on early season camps and the mundane everyday, on the misery of wet, cold spring Classics racing, on what it’s like to race and live a Grand Tour, on crashes, the fear of more, and the twilight of a career.

According to Barry, the titular phrase means the “sacrifice, savoir-faire, and passion that makes professional cycling different from most other sports as it requires an athlete to give in virtually every facet of [their] life.” It’s set during the 2009 season, but could well be any, and it’s the only book I’ve read that offers such an insight into a professional racer’s year on and off the bike.

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In the opening chapter, Hoy walks readers through the early days of his terminal cancer diagnosis in excruciating detail. He recounts the early conversations with doctors and nurses, and the grief of learning his two-to-four year prognosis. I listened to this as an audiobook, read by Hoy himself, and recall fighting back tears on public transport as he recounted the painful discussions with his wife Sarra and deciding how to tell their children.

But as the book develops, it follows Hoy as he comes to terms with the diagnosis and undergoes treatment. He candidly describes chemotherapy, its brutal physical effects, and in a way that only a cyclist would, he likens the cycles of treatment to blocks of intense training.

It’s a gut wrenching read that teaches gratitude, mental resilience and making the most of every moment, and a must-read for anyone, no matter if you’re a keen cyclist or not.

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I began reading this book with little idea of what to expect, and finished it shortly after, with a renewed desire to get out on my bike. Despite being just 148 pages long, Krabbé’s depiction of an amateur cycling event in the Massif Central blurred the lines between fact and fiction, succinctly ticking off the many thoughts and emotions that I suspect most cyclists have on a ride, whether they’re spinning solo around their local loop or tackling a sportive to the summit of Alpe d’Huez.

Even for a ‘non-racer’ cyclist like myself, I distinctly remember how Krabbé’s words resonated to the extent that I had a burning urge to thrash out a few laps of my local park circuit as soon as I put the book down. Its fast pace only adds to its enjoyment, and for someone like myself who can often struggle to sink their teeth into lighter-hearted cycling literature, this was consumed at a remarkable rate.