Product Description

Ships from Spain. Please allow 10-18 business days to arrive at UK address (10-21 worldwide) due to postal service checks and customs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #366545 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
A rattling good ride through the highlights of each race...a brisk solo breakaway through a history littered with bad behaviour… hugely entertaining - Independent

From the Inside Flap
The Tour de France is probably cruel and it’s undoubtedly unusual, but it also makes for an exceptionally good story. After 104 years and 94 laps of the France (time out only for World Wars), the fine spectacle of life-threatening exertion, bare-faced cheating, road-side sabotage, ludicrous clothing, extreme intimate discomfort, and grown men at the absolute end of their tethers has gathered the race an audience of millions. With the Tour taking to London’s streets, Blazing Saddles takes a no-holds-barred look at its history - the rivalries and controversies, the blind passions and filthy suspicions, the wheeling and the dealing Embellished with over 100 classic images, Matt Rendell’s vivid and entertaining history plunges deep into the peloton, combining the Tour’s golden legends with tales from its dark side to capture the indomitable, inimitable spirit of the world’s greatest race.

From the Back Cover
Blazing Saddles is a rip-roaring sprint through 104 years of Tour de France history: a riotous tale of tough nuts, bad blood and bitter pills. 1904 “The Tour de France is over and its second edition, I fear, will also be its last.” Henri Desgrange 1908 “It has been said I owe my greatest victories to drugs. Allow me to reply: do you seriously think a man, however strong, could survive such treatment for 28 days?” Lucien Petit-Breton 1924 “I’ve lost six toenails out of ten. They fall off, one by one, on each stage.” Henri Pelissier 1957 “To prepare for a race there is nothing better than a good pheasant, some champagne and a woman.” Jacques Anquetil 1993 “The bottom line is, I’m a competitor and I like training hard and going out and kicking ass. I like it, and I got a lot more ass to kick.” Lance Armstrong 2006 “I mean, it was 11 to 1! You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?” World anti-doping agency chief Dick Pound on Floyd Landis’ testosterone level.