A Significant Other

Matt Rendell. Weidenfeld and Nicholson 2004. 182 pages hardback, £12.99. ISBN 0-297-84716-3

Most cycling writers want to write a history of the Tour de France. But when you try, you find that you can't – not in any conventional sense anyway. For one thing a mere summary of each year's race plus a list of results, while being a valuable record, is neither satisfying to write nor to read; for another it's been done already, most notably by Pierre Chany, whose 950-page work is history, commentary and record book. So you need another angle, a different perspective.

Geoffrey Nicholson set his two Tour histories in frames, the first ( The Great Race ) that of the 1976 Tour, and the second ( Le Tour ) in the 1990 event. Matt Rendell employs two overlapping frames. The first is not the entire race, but a single, pivotal stage, the 15 th of the 2003 Tour, where Armstrong fell but picked himself up and went on to a devastating victory at Luz Ardiden. The second is that the event is seen through the senses of a single rider, Lance Armstrong's domestique Victor Hugo Peña, normally a barely-acknowledged servant, but now, as the first Colombian to wear the Yellow Jersey, a Significant Other.

But Peña can't tell the whole story by himself, so from here on we move into a satisfyingly complex structure in which Peña's story, past and present, is intercut with Rendell's history of the Tour: its origins in the Dreyfus Affair, sponsored by an anti-semitic millionaire, its growth, its economic importance, its globalisation. A further strand is the author's account of the nature of cycle road racing, based as it is on the idea of slipstreaming, which itself creates the idea of the domestique, a shadowy figure who (despite Desgrange's opposition) appeared even in the earliest Tours. If there were no slipstream, the domestique would have no labour.

Anyone who's read his Kings of the Mountains (reviewed here 1/2003) knows that Rendell is a Spanish-speaking social historian with a special interest in Colombia, that tragic country of self-inflicted injury, where one percent of the people own 99 percent of the wealth, and growth towards a better life is blighted by cocaine and civil wars. The days of hosting the World Championships are gone, along with the coffee boom and the promise of economic prosperity.

Peña is the son of a postman, brought up with enough food but little else in a single-room dwelling. Yet a month before the start of the Tour, lured by wild stories of his fabulous wealth, that he had $120,000 in a safe, masked bandits entered Peña's house and robbed him at gunpoint, taking anything they could find. But he still got to the Tour, rode a good prologue, and the team time-trial put him in the lead.

It's not clear exactly what method the author used to construct the Peña sections, but they are presumably based on copious notes and tape recordings of the rider talking. Some of it must be conjecture, but the overall effect is of a skilfully-written novel.

The style is generally easier and more fluid than Kings of the Mountains , but there are still sections where the figures, dates, places, names and numbers are excessively dense. You ask, ‘Wouldn't it have been simpler to put this in some sort of table?'

Rendell's thesis is that internationalisation has not benefited the sport as, for instance, the same process has benefited football. The sport's showcase event, now more than ever before, is the mighty Tour, a race dependent on the efforts of a labouring class on behalf of an aristocracy. The cycling World Championships and World Cup (which in football are everything), are to all intents and purposes, sideshows. Cycling has not been ‘socialised': it's still an aristocratic and hierarchical sport based on patronage, virtually feudal. The modern sponsored professional cyclist is a ‘startling embodiment of the business philosophy, developed in the mid-1980s, that successful corporations should primarily produce brands as opposed to products.' It's a hierarchy supported by ‘anonymous travail', from the Taiwan sweatshop to the sweating domestique on the climb to Luz Ardiden, the victim of ‘a Faustian pact gone wrong'. Even so talented a rider as Peña looks unlikely ever get to get his chance to try for the win.

At the end we do get a table, in which Rendell attempts a classification based on points which ranks the participating nations (fifty of them by now) according to their success. Not very surprisingly France comes top, but the USA was already up to fifth (it'll be 4 th now), Ireland is 10 th and Britain 18 th .

There's an index based mostly on names of people and places, which is useful when you want to look at something a second time. And you will, because it's not only a fine piece of story-telling, but also a masterly analysis of a sport and a world which may have taken a wrong direction. RM

Ramin Minovi