Chasing Lance: Martin Dugard. Time Warner Books
2005. 240 pages paperback, £10.00. ISBN 0-316-73281-8
THE LANCE PHENOMENON has enthused and intrigued Americans
like no other story in the history of cycling. The result is that all
sorts of unlikely people have taken off on the quest for the 'real'
Armstrong: born-again recreational cyclists, rock singers, photography
legends, groupies of all kinds.
Martin Dugard is a serious journalist with a list of
books to his credit that have nothing to do with cycling, but a technical
ease with language that increases the likelihood that you'll enjoy what
he writes. Ever since the days of Mark Twain, the journalist who makes
himself a character in the story he's writing has provided an extra
dimension. 'Chasing Lance' obviously has several meanings: anyone who's
tried following the Tour for a few days understands the literal meaning;
then it's what all the other riders are doing; and, of course, it's
Dugard's own attempt to find the 'real' Armstrong, to grasp what motivates
him, to get a handle on his demons.
Dugard's personal odyssey starts with his attempt to get from Paris
to the start. He's hampered by problems with direction and map-reading
which you'd have expected an explorer to have cracked years ago. When
he ran into a traffic jam in Nîmes (he says), 'an hour from the
Atlantic coast', I began to see why he was having difficulties. Do you
think he meant Nantes? By the end he might have realised that the Tour's
raison d'être is the French love affair with the motor-car - I
mean, it was founded by a paper called L'Auto. But he eventually makes
it, enjoys French food, gets his accreditation, meets up with his buddy,
reluctantly takes on board a photographer known as The Legend, and gets
down to chasing.
From here on until The Legend leaves, it's Three Men
in a Citroën, chaotic, funny, madly logical. The Legend, a man
of a slightly earlier generation, must be the only American who's unfamiliar
with the demotic 'dude'. Perhaps he never watched Friends.
The general structure is a bit like Geoffrey Nicholson's great Le Tour,
the standard by which all other books on the Tour de France are judged,
but without Nicholson's inside knowledge - Dugard's on a learning curve.
He interweaves his growing knowledge of France - its history and its
great race - with the accounts of each stage. Since he takes nothing
for granted, he may actually have succeeded in explaining the Tour to
the uninitiated better than an expert might.
And he gets quite a long way in explaining Armstrong, who emerges as
a cross between a petulant teenager, a devoted and responsible father,
a charming acquaintance, a life-long bearer of grudges, an icon rightly
revered by cancer sufferers, a lover of childish and unpleasant practical
jokes, an inspiration to millions, a psychopath self-centred to the
point of autism - in short, everything you'd expect from any monster
sacré. We can't begin to understand what it took to overcome
his huge problems, but he must find it almost intolerable to be stuck
with Lance Armstrong twenty-four hours a day - so it's not surprising
that his tolerance for others is so fragile. Anyone who's left his team
is comprehensively dismissed as 'the pieces of shit we got rid of.'
Good ole Lance.
The book is aimed primarily, I suppose, at the American
layman - Dugard explains words like peloton, baguette, and how a time-trial
works. He's a real writer, well-read and not afraid to include references
to people like Carlyle in a book that's ostensibly about sport.
A few very small things irritated me - I dislike the contemporary style
of calling the Tour a 'championship'. But it's really a very enjoyable
book, and my only other complaint is that there's no index - even in
what amounts to a storybook it would help quite a lot, especially if
you're going to go back to it again. But it's extraordinarily good value
for money at a tenner, you'll enjoy it, and it's the ideal book to give
to someone close to you who doesn't quite understand why you go mildly
insane in front of the telly for three weeks in July.
Ramin Minovi