Ned Boulting

I have watched the Tour on Channel 4 and now ITV 4 for many many years now, and read as much about the sport and the riders as I can. It was nice to read up on the view from the journalist.

Boulting was a football journalist before landing in France 2 days before the start of the 2004 tour with almost no preparation. He was briefed by members of the team and dropped from a great height into the deep end. The first interview he had with a rider he asked about the yellow jumper (normally jersey) and his reputation was made.

The book loosely follows each Tour, and is interspersed with lots of chapters on individuals in the production team, and riders. There are some really funny bits, and a poignant tribute to a great camera man. This was written prior to Wiggins triumph in 2012, and he writes of the promise that he shows in the Tour, and the Fall of Armstrong, that with hindsight the signs were probably there.

Great read, must for all cycling and Tour fans… (more)

A fun enough read but mostly just a collection of silly tellings of silly tales. It's really targeted to a British audience - I'm from the USA and found a lot of the language tricky. Even the title - I'd suspect most USA folks don't know that what we call a sweater, the Brits call a jumper. Beyond that, I expect this book will make most sense to someone who really follows the Tour de France. I have a pretty marginal interest in bike racing, but enough to keep me reading the book. Insiders will probably pick up a lot of inside jokes. Real outsiders will probably find the book impenetrable.

This book was published maybe a year before Lance Armstrong was disgraced for using drugs etc., various outlawed performance enhancement technologies. Boulting circles around the issue in this book, but he was just a little too soon to be able to follow through. Of course suspicions, about not just Armstrong but a large fraction of the leading riders, had been rampant for years. Anyway it's not a primary focus of the book. Mostly the book is just about what it's like for a TV journalist to cover the Tour de France, an inside look.… (more)

The 2003 Tour de France: the ITV coverage had gained a new, and staggeringly annoying, roving reporter, Ned Boulting. I would never have imagined that nine years down the line I would be choosing to read his book. 'How I Won the Yellow Jumper' is a fun and entertaining meander along Boulting's journey from cycling ignoramus to devoted fan, with plenty of annecdotes about the crazy life in the travelling circus that is the Tour de France along the way.

This book is so entertaining because of Boulting's enthusiasm for the sport, despite its many problems. Although mainly a lighthearted recollection, it is routed by analysis of characters and events, showing a real understanding of the personalities and mechanisms of cycle racing. It was also illuminating to hear about the practicalities of life behind the scenes and how the coverage comes together.

My main complaints concern the over-reliance on clunking similes, and the presence of too many grainy photographs of nothing in particular. Since these are personal photos, they could have done with some judicious editing and the remaining pictures reproduced on colour pages. I also found the framing narrative of Boulting's 2003 cycle accident ineffective.… (more)