Advent 4 Non-Fiction

Maurice Garin

The First Tour by Isabel Best is a short and rather shoddy account of the first ever Tour de France, staged over six gargantuan stages in 1903. The competitors covered an unimaginable 3000 kilometres in those six instalments on fixed gear bikes and were responsible for their own repairs - no support cars or domestiques. The winner (by what remains a record margin of two hours and fifty minutes) was Maurice Garin. Notwithstanding the infelicities of the text, this booklet does just about manage to do justice to the super-human efforts of Garin and his competitors.

Henri Desgrange called him The Bulldog, but Garin, a chain smoker, was also known as 'Le Petit Ramoneur' - the little chimney sweep - owing to his job prior to turning pro. He was one of nine children born in a French-speaking village on the Italian side of the Alps. Legend has it that his parents swapped him for a large round of cheese when he was 14, possibly in order to smuggle him into France. Ten years later he set up a bike shop in Roubaix with two brothers, one of whom supported him at the 1904 Tour. Garin was tough enough to survive the harsh realities of early cycle sport. As an amateur in 1893, he grabbed another rider's spare bike when he punctured in Namur-Dinant-Givet, riding on to win.   

The Great Unloved

I've allowed the dust to settle on Chris Froome's latest Tour de France victory to see if it might garner more praise for him than the three previous triumphs. It has not. This remarkable professional earned a mere £400,000 for his three weeks and two thousand miles of toil - compare this to the more than three times as much that the equally steely (and similarly unloved) Jordan Spieth accrued at the Open golf. That's market forces for you.

The French like (the emphasis being on that 'like') to think that Froome is a drug cheat, their principal ground for that conclusion being that he is not French. There is no evidence to support this taint but then again I suppose that we do have to concede that we were all duped by the remarkable and villainous Lance Armstrong for the best part of a decade.

Heroic

For my part I find Froome heroic, as on reflection I do Spieth. It is no crime to be stoically and obdurately bloody good at your job. Chapeau.

A Day Of Continental Pleasures

It has been a remarkable first week of the Tour de France - eight stages down and five of them have been won by Britons. The teak tough Chris Froome won yesterday with a sequence of grinding climbs followed by an audacious final descent. He even found time to lamp one of those barmpot spectators who run alongside the competitors. For sustained drama and sheer bloody human endeavour Le Tour takes some beating. Allez Froome.

In the evening after a day of making some actual progress on my thesis (the mooted humanism of Bagehot and Shakespeare was bothering me) I followed the Tour highlights (introduced by the brilliant Gary Imlach - why does he not get more time on the major channels?) with a film I've been meaning to try for ages. The wait was worth it - Cinema Paradiso is a beautiful little movie. A peaen to the lost power of cinema and to the poignant imperfectability of first love, it is at its best in the scenes of Toto's childhood with Salvatore Cascio effortlessly stealing every scene he graces. 8/10.