23 Days in July

23 Days in July: a film by Tim Sullivan. 52 minutes + 56 mins extras. £19.99 from Bromley Video Entertainment, Ten Acre Farm, Stonehill Road, Ottershaw, Surrey KT16 0AQ. Phone: 01932-879940 orders@bromleyvideo.com

IN 1982 PHIL ANDERSON wore the yellow jersey in the Tour de France for nine days and finished fifth overall. The following year an Australian company made a film of his ride, hoping that he'd win. Circumstances combined to thwart him. First, there was never a realistic chance that Anderson could ever win the Tour - he just wasn't a good enough climber; and second, he was a member of the rabidly Francocentric, disastrously mismanaged Peugeot team. Anderson, Millar and Roche, not being French, were all wasted in trying to protect Pascal Simon whose broken shoulder blade, everyone knew, must result in his abandon as soon as the race hit the Alps, and he duly abandoned, and everyone's efforts were wasted. But they were pros, and one assumes that they got paid for doing what they were told to do.
The fact that their man didn't pull off the big win is, if anything, an advantage. The result is a really excellent movie (designed, I assume, to fit into a one-hour TV slot) which is about the Tour, rather than of the Tour. I think the washed-out colour is deliberate and meant to evoke nostalgia, rather than merely being a faded print, but it works either way.
The extras are an interview of Anderson by Phil Liggett, which is much too long - you really needa historian's motivation and concentration - but which nevertheless contains a number of interesting insights: the sheer pain of professional racing and even training, going to the Alps to train over 12 cols in four days, turning pro rather than wait a few months for the Olympics, because you want a career, not a one-off. Most curious is Anderson's view that re-introducing amateurs to the Tour would 'kill the sport'. There's some unintentional humour too, caused by leaving in all Liggett's fluffs and stumbles.
The other extra is half an hour's really excellent footage of the 1985 Amstel Gold, run off in the most wretched conditions of rain and cold, steel frames, toeclips and straps, flapping brake cables, nearly all filmed at road level in the mud and wet, from a motorbike, the rawest racing you ever saw: vélo verité.