1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession

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If you want to read an excellent cycling book which goes back to grass roots of the sport try 1 more Kilometre and were in the showers by Tim Hilton. I have no idea how Boulting managed to get this so wrong, missed Gallica’s captions and somehow dated the pictures to 1925. Most of Boulting’s padding comes from the On This Day in History files, the story of the 1923 Tour augmented by stories from the same time but elsewhere. I felt transported back with him to the very origins of bike racing and the world that created it ― David Millar.

The genesis for the entire project was the chance arrival in my life of a reel of ancient Tour de France film, of uncertain provenance, and unclear origin. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. At its core is a snippet of film of the 1923 Tour de France and it would be easy to say the book is about Ned’s quest to find out as much as he could about it.Most of it is really a self-indulgent lockdown diary, Boulting telling us how horrible the whole thing was, as if he was the only one to endure it. Fun fact for you: as the French bicycle industry went from boom to bust, the surviving companies had a tendency to pick up the pieces left behind by their fallen comrades. It sets him off in fascinating directions, encompassing travelogue, history, mystery story – to explain, to go deeper into this moment in time, captured on his little film.

An education in the effects of War (post and looming,) in a particular society (time and place) and how life reboots and copes. A previously unseen film of an early Tour de France bought at auction inspires Ned Boulting to unearth the story behind the people, places and times captured on film.It really shows just how much history we have no idea about and how fortunate we are to have a written record of almost everything happening today. If it were possible, if it didn’t make me sound insane, I would have to say that I fell in love with a year. Join him as he explores the history of cycling and France just five years after WWI - meeting characters like Henri Pelissier, who won the Tour that year but who would within the decade be shot dead by his lover using the same pistol with which his wife had killed herself. It's a personal story too of nobody particularly famous, but none-the-less whose story intersects with others more famous, and set in a context worth considering as we navigate our present.