Tim Krabbé

Krabbé is especially good at capturing the mental experience of a bike race (or any grueling ride): the weird interior verbalisations and tics and fantastic reveries the brain concocts to distract itself from bodily suffering. And happily, he avoids allegorising or making this story of a single, four-hour bike race into a series of life-lessons. My ranking of cycling fiction is updated:

1. Curious George Rides a Bike — H. A. Rey
2. The Rider — Tim Krabbé
3. The Wheels of Chance — H. G. show more Wells

Although if you count The Third Policeman as a cycling story then all those will slide down one spot. show less

This was The Peregrine all over again except it was about cycling, competition cycling. Throughout the whole of the book you are on that bicycle sweating, pumping, calculating and grinding your way up those hills. To say this book is intense is a complete understatement, it is more like a mind swap. I could feel the rain on my face and feel the spray from the bicycles in front of me every step of the way. Even if, like me, you have no interest in cycling or indeed any other sport, this book show more should be read just for the sheer concentration and intensity that went into it. show less

A fantastic, dense, fast paced first-person account of riding the 137 km Tour de Mont Aigoual bike race. At the start Tim Krabbe glances at the tourists and locals watching and thinks, 'Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.' The kilometres of the race roll and are described as riders make a break or get left behind. Tim Krabbe is in the leading break and is hoping to win. The tension increases as I turned each page. Occasionally the narrative leaves the race to describe show more previous races or tell us about cycle racing heroes, we are in Tim Krabbe's head as his thoughts wander through his own short racing history and the longer history of the sport. As the race goes on and he becomes more tired his thoughts make less sense and we enter a dream world for a time. The reader is taken to the depths of despair with a poor descent and a puncture and to the highs when all is going well and another rider is left behind. The drive and the selfishness of a racing cyclist is displayed as well as the frustrations of a cyclists who refuses to take his turn at the front of a break, a 'wheel sucker'. Towards the end he writes, 'At any given moment, every human being has at his disposal a brief, intense death struggle that doesn't hurt and which lasts twelve seconds. That's the animal sprint. Of all the things that prevent the rider from achieving the speed of light during those twelve seconds, pain is not one.' If you have ever watched a cycle race and tried to guess what is going on in the rider's minds as they sit in the peloton or make a break for the lead then this book will answer all those questions. It is well written and a brilliant read. The adrenaline and pain, the joyous victories and the despair of losing, the loyalty and the competitiveness are all here. show less

This is often referred to as the classic book about cycle racing, although no-one seems to be quite sure whether to describe it as a memoir, a novella, or a piece of journalism. On the surface it's simply a first-person account of a tough road race in the Cevennes in 1977 where Krabbé took part: although better known as a journalist and chess player, he was also a keen amateur racer in his day.

It's a very literary kind of work. This is not a raw report of the race, but a carefully show more constructed analysis of what is going on in the rider's mind as we go through all the various elements of road racing: preparation, riding in the péloton, climbing, descent, making a démarrage, riding in a breakaway group, the sprint, the post-mortem. The course of the race is used to illustrate tactics, the way different personalities ride, the effects of weather and fatigue, and so on.

Krabbé points out that the only rider whose pain he has ever experienced is Tim Krabbé: he's trying to get beyond that, to generalise and relativise his subjective experience and make it accessible to the reader. One way he does that is by punctuating the narrative with anecdotes from cycling history and from his own experience, as well as with passages in which he describes dreams and imagined meetings with great cyclists.

Cyclists clearly like this book, but I think this is also a book about sport that works for people who aren't particularly interested in sport as a subject. A bit like "The loneliness of the long-distance runner" - Krabbé doesn't reduce this extreme sport to a metaphor for something else, but he does connect it to human experience in a way that perhaps doesn't explain it, but does give us a bit of insight into why someone would do something as crazy as entering a 150km race over four cols. show less