Or 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. Following on from the success of his Bikeology tour, in 2018 Ned announced his newly revamped 'Tour de Ned'. A one-man theatrical cycling roadshow that tours the UK in conjunction with the Tour de France from 28 September - 17 November. [9]

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: There’s the Seznec affaire, in which someone gets murdered and that is somehow linked to the very day of the Pathé newsreel by virtue of some piece of paperwork or other being signed by someone on that day.Boulting was also in a strange situation of possessing what turned out to be the only copy of this news reel in existence but with intellectual rights belonging to Pathé Cinema France. A sensible trade-off was reached with Boulting taking on the rights but Pathé then having a copy for its archives. It started to take on the elephantine proportions that it has done because the political and cultural landscape of June 30, 1923, was absolutely fascinating. I am not a historian but I started to behave like a historian and tentatively started to reach a loose conclusion that actually that summer was the ‘end’ of the First World War, the afterglow of that conflict. 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 discovery

Norris Edward "Ned" Boulting (born 11 July 1969) is a British sports journalist, television presenter and podcaster best known for his coverage of football, cycling and darts. Boutling says: “Once I mined the actual cycling content in the film of all I possibly could, establishing which identifiable characters are in it, reading around their biographies, then my eye got distracted and I started to see what was going on in France and Europe on that day and over that summer and that’s when the project started to balloon out of all proportion. Wherever Boulting looks, death is to be found. It’s almost like he’s living out a Fast Show sketch. Please Gamble Responsibly. Call 1-800-NEXT STEP (AZ), 1-800-522-4700 (NH), 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), 1-800-BETS OFF (IA), or visit OPGR.org (OR) or www.1800gambler.net (WV). Other Pathé newsreels from this era exist and you can see many of the same people in them, including the likes of Henri Desgrange, Ottavio Bottecchia and Henri Pélissier. You’ve probably seen some if you’ve ever watched any of the French TV programmes celebrating the Tour’s history. But this one is a fresh discovery.Despite concentrating on this single day of the stage, the book is much more than a simple cycling history, however, or just a memoir of his own research obsession.