Ned Boulting’s voice is synonymous with cycling coverage and, as one might expect, he has a devotee’s commitment to the sport. “This is the story of an obsession,” he writes at the beginning of 1923, a curious, absorbing mix of historical sleuthing and travel writing. He’s not lying. The pandemic arrested the usual rhythms of his life: “I measured out my life in yellow jerseys,” he notes, when he’s ­confined to providing commentary from the studio, biking to Kent rather than the mountain passes of France. To add injury to insult, he also broke his arm and was left in a deskbound state, mourning the general shutdown. The real issue here isn’t that Boulting isn’t aware that Thomann was an Alcyon subsidiary (never mind that it’s even on a rather well-known digital encyclopedia). It’s that, just because Boulting doesn’t understand it, the explanation is “lost to time, unreported and now unknowable.” I have no idea how Boulting managed to get this so wrong, missed Gallica’s captions and somehow dated the pictures to 1925. But wrong he got it. And then he went and compounded the error by making a mystery out of it, with eagle-eyed Ned spotting something he thinks significant in the picture with the bouquet: That was in itself not a foregone conclusion at all,” says Boulting. “The film from that era predates celluloid so it was made of nitrate. Not only is it very brittle with the passing of age but also highly combustible, something I didn’t realise at the time but subsequently was pointed out to me – that even having it in my house would have invalidated my buildings insurance. It has been known in a raised temperature to spontaneously combust.” It looks like he is a wearing a wedding band, so it must have been taken after February 1925 [when he married]. But he is wearing a Griffon jersey, a team he reportedly left at the end of 1924.”

one of the most intelligent sporting books i have come across...the writing is compulsive, eloquently conveying the twists and turns of the story as it unfolds...excellent -- thewashingmachinepost Boulting says: “I imagine you could ask 100 cycling enthusiasts across the world whether they had heard of him and not a single one would say yes because he a was very, very good rider without being one of the greats. He went on to win two stages of the Tour de France and finished just off the podium so he was a notable rider but for whatever reason his story has been entirely forgotten.Another fun fact for you: the third finger, left hand thing, while it’s great to know when you’re looking for someone to hit on in a bar, it’s a cultural thing, not legal. It’s more a guideline than a rule. There are some of us who ignore it.

What it is: The clown prince of cycling commentary wipes off the greasepaint after acquiring a Pathé newsreel from the 1923 Tour and sets off on a voyage of discoveryOr how about the first woman of the Hour, Mlle de Saint-Sauveur? Several people have tried to find out more about her but all we’ve been able to learn at this stage comes from a couple of races before her Hour record and a couple of races after. We don’t even know her first name.