Book Review: Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession. by Bradley Wiggins and Herbie Sykes; 2018, HarperCollins

 

 

 

For someone who likes to portray himself as an iconoclast, it may seem strange for Bradley Wiggins to be involved in such a project. However his love for cycling, its history, protagonists, pageantry and traditions is well know and is an interesting angle to come at in thiswork. While he looks at riders from through the years who inspired him to take up what was an unfashionable sport in Britain at the time, it is part history lesson, part-autobiography.

It is well illustrated with items from his own collections, genuine jerseys worn by those who he writes about and with some interesting photos. Each rider has his own chapter (no room for Beryl Burton, which as Wiggins was essentially a time trialist who lost enough weight to stick with the climbers, is a big omission,although I suppose we can't define other folks heroes for them). The inclusion of Armstrong raised some hackles at the time but, on the flip side we can't say that the Texan didn't have an impact. Whether we like it or not he was a part of our history and it would be more dangerous to pretend he didn't exist and write him out totally. It is also where Wiggins (helped by Herbie Sykes) is able to reflect on his own experiences and how these are mirrored by the lives of the riders he is ostensibly discussing. This allows him to avoid having to deal with some of the more unsavoury episodes some of these people were involved in, normally using the formula "rider x had a difficult time on this Tour, which reminds me of when y happened to me".

In many cases Wiggins is very clear about how he liked winning the Tour but didn't like being a Tour winner, with all of the issues that caused him. There is also some insight into Froome's actions on that 2012 Tour, that while interesting, allow for more distractions away from things he may not want to talk about in regards his subjects.

In fact there are often entire chapters where the rider meant to be the topic of discussion is only mentioned at the start and the end, with the main section being about Wiggins himself.  In effect this is almost an autobiography in disguise.

However the whole package does reflect the contradictions within Wiggins himself. On one hand he wants to present himself as the perennial outsider (being a cyclist from an early age, the influence of his father and mother, growing up in an age when soccer was the mainstay of sport), but on the other he still plays up the laddish persona  that so many males adopt to try and fit in with some perceived notion of this is what men do. He even mentions that his favourite photo of all is Nencini having a cigarette after winning the Tour (never mind that Nencini died of cancer at 50)- the sort of stuff that really looks like someone trying hard to be cool,  and as I mentioned in the beginning, an iconoclast (though how much of a laddish outsider you can be with the three letters "S", "I" and "R" in front of your name is up for debate).  He wants to be seen at the centre of his sport in one way but also wants to retreat from this as well.  No matter what persona he tries to adopt, this book appears to be Wiggins is still trying to find out who he is and while on the surface the main focus is supposedly on the other riders featured, behind it all is a man who is still tryign to shape an image that he can be comfortable in.

Book Review- "The Invisible Mile" by David Coventry, (2015, Picador)

Verbosity does not always equal profundity

Let me begin by saying that David Coventry writes beautifully. Or, to be more precise, he writes beautiful, individual sentences, laced with metaphor and discriptive prowess, and keen observations. So why do I make the distinction? Simply because almost every single sentence in the book is overwritten in this way. It makes reading more of a slog than actually riding the 1928 Tour de France. Often I found myself getting agitated because sometimes being direct is fine- not every element of every sentence should require mental gymnastics to get to the core of the plot. Don't get me wrong- I like an intellectual challenge but this book simply seems to ignore what Freud, in an other context once said- "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!".

In many cases it feel that the author has mistaken verbosity with profundity. There are many conversations detailed in the book, but they are more like those you would expect from characters in a surrealist existentialist play directed by sixth formers- almost a parody, where every single word and action is drenched in meaning and no one responds simply or directly. You get the feeling that even asking any of the characters what time the stage starts the next day would result in a treatise on the fluiduty and temporal nature of time rather than a simple "9:30am". Even the conversations and contributions from the crowds watching the Tour go past are framed as profound- the simple peasant woman mourning her daughter lost during the war seems to speak like a philosophy professor leading a symposium on the nature of loss.

As for the narrator- I don't remember ever getting so annoyed with a fictional character! If he used the energy he expended on his deep conversations (internal and external), getting drunk and spending nights with a female (both in bed and on car journeys in the middle of the night)on actually riding his bike, he would have beaten Franz, never mind Opperman! Cycling is a sport where conservation of effort is one of the keys to success, and this is not reflected in the writing in this book. The closer we get to the end, the more of the character of the narrator is revealed and it is impossible to have any empathy or sympathy for him the longer it goes on.

There are some twists as we go on, but these are signposted quite early for the more attentive reader (and anagram fans might pick up on one of the most unsavory reveals before it happens). The end of the book left me with mixed feelings- glad that I had finished it, but the actual denouement seemed a bitter cop-out- an attempt to make the reader feel even worse about human nature than a book that is grounded in the aftermath of the First World War (as individuals and countries were still trying to come to terms with it) and other personal tragedies already does.

Coventry has blended fact and fiction in this book- some of the riders and events were real, whereas others are not. This can be distracting if you actually know about history of the Tour de France- yes 1928 did see the first NZ/ Australian team enter and Opperman was a real person (in fact his life story would be worthy of a work on its own). Frantz really won that year and others like Bottecchia who was mentioned in passing existed (although Conventry got the dates of his victories wrong). The narrator is a fiction as is the names of many of the teams he mentions, so part of the problem when reading is the little voice at the back of my head that kept pointing out what was real and what wasn't. To be honest being a cycling fan could actually be an obstacle in getting through this book.

Of course maybe the frustrations, the hard going and the lovely writing are a clever ploy by Coventry to allow the reader some sympathy with the struggles of the riders. After all, they are also surrounded by beauty but are unable to appreciate it because of the demands of just making it through. I felt guilty about not always appreciating Coventry's skill with the written word, but I had had reached saturation point. Sentences that danced around and around what they were meant to describe and left room for ambiguity, and phrases used where words would have done ( "bullets" is dramatic enough instead of "shouts of death") meant that the whole book could be submitted to Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.

Perhaps Coventry's undoubted skills as a wordsmith would be better suited to a travelogue type book, because he could definitely replicate natural beauty on the page, but as for "The Invisible Mile" I have never been so conflicted about a book before. While I don't want a simple linear "We did this and then did that", this doesn't come anywhere near the quality of Tim Krabbé's "The Rider" which takes the same cerebal, pyschologicial approach but does it so much better without feeling so forced.