Alfie on wheels

The Yellow Jersey: Ralph Hurne. Breakaway Books 1998 (updated). 285 pages paperback. ISBN9 781558 214521

In some vague, unspecified era when the Beatles are already old hat Terry Davenport, English ex-pro roadman, now 37 and living in Belgium, tells his story. A womaniser, lazy and self-destructive off the bike, his job as team manager is pretty much a sinecure – he has only one rider to look after, apparently, and apart from a bit of motor-paced training spends his time dallying with a well-off expat antiques dealer, her daughter, a visiting New Zealand 19-year-old, and anyone else daft enough to fall for his good looks and a chat-up line first used in Ancient Rome.

The character is made to serve several purposes: at one moment he's dim, irresponsible and repulsive (talking like Michael Caine in Alfie and referring to women as 'it'), but when the author wants to make a point Terry comes on like Bertrand Russell with a hangover.

One of the problems with sporting fiction, book or film, is that sport is itself already a melodrama – you can't make something larger than life when it already is. Fictions therefore move the interest into the characters' private lives, which are usually unbelievably frenzied or stultifyingly dull. Here they just seem contrived and unconvincing, and the racing is exactly as convincing as the dialogue. But the sporting background still has to be made to seem authentic, convincing, real. Hemingway managed it in his boxing stories, for instance, but Ralph Hurne knows very little about cycle racing and it's not clear who his intended audience is supposed to be.

At times the novel seems written for laymen – throughout he avoids the technical language of cycle racing even when the characters are talking to each other, and words like 'jump' are presented in inverted commas and explained as 'sprint'; yet he refers casually to an 85-inch gear without a hint of explanation – though he reveals later that he doesn't know what it means. There's never any sense of what it actually feels like to ride in a race, and the accounts of racing are laughable: despite being retired Davenport seems to need very little training, wins a motor-paced race just like that, and then finds himself leading the Tour (yes, that Tour) after four riders are slung out for a positive dope test. A young rider says of the Tour, 'I'll win'. Davenport replies: 'That's the spirit! Get stuck into those sprint finishes and you've got every chance!' Tell that to Mario Cipollini. A few pages of this tosh soon has you saying 'I don't believe this', and that's fatal.

First published in 1973 this third reprinting is 'slightly updated' – at one point a British official refers to Kelly, under the obvious impression that Sean was English. And Margaret Thatcher (whom the hero, a natural Thatcherite, loathes) is Prime Minister. Still, this is virtually the only novel in English based on cycle racing – an ill-favoured thing, but our own. And it's not too expensive. Take it to Mallorca with you next March.

Ramin Minovi