Product Description

Racing cyclists all ride the same frail machine and all are equal before the demands of the road. But what is it that makes a winner? What special attributes do winners need to give them that extra edge? This title analyzes the moral strength, cunning and tactical acumen of the champion cyclist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1010256 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 220 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Picking up where Tour De France: The History, The Legend, The Riders left off, Graeme Fife's Inside the Peloton pedals over similar territory. This time out, rather than dedicating chapters to the most punishing of the famed energy-sapping climbs of the Tour, Fife looks at some of the great characters whose feats have made the race one of the great endeavours of the sporting world. From Eddy Merckx, undoubtedly the greatest of them all, to Charlie Holland, an early English pre-war pioneer, each rider covered brings with him stories of the tours in which he raced and the contemporaries with and against whom he rode.

Fife illustrates well that, of course, it's not just the winners that add to the legend of the Tour. It's also some of the lesser lights, the "domestiques", riding to work for their team leaders. Chapters on Paul Sherwen and Sean Yates, two Britons in their time considered highly amongst the worker bees of the peloton, highlight the selflessness of the role. The hierarchy inside professional road racing on the continent has largely been near feudal; only the last decade has seen changes to that. In the chapters on the British heroes, the sheer arrogant and unnecessary insularity of British cycling is made clear by Fife; it's no surprise we're still waiting for the first Englishman to win the Tour de France, at a time when an American (Lance Armstrong) has just won his third in a row. Without such success professional cycling will retain its low profile in the British sporting consciousness. Meanwhile, authors like Fife continue to provide the English language with a disproportionate amount of highly readable literature on the sport. --Trevor Crowe

Phil Liggett
An absolute gem - a brilliant piece of work

The Independent
A superb study of what it takes to be a top racing cyclist

Customer Reviews

A Mixed Bag
Graham Fife is certainly an enthusiast for professional cycling, and views it as a sport steeped in tradition and history that one needs to consider when thinking about the sport today.

The book is presented as a series of chapters about named riders, supposedly based on conversations with the men in question. Themes that run through the book are how professionals need to "faire le metier" (learn their trade), to suffer, and be prepared to make sacrifices for their leaders.

There is a lot of material here that the enthusiast will find interesting, but I feel the book mainly falls down due to Fife's rambling style.

For example, the chapter supposedly on Fred Moncassin contains an extended (2 or 3 page) rant from Fife about the bad side of Lance Armstrong and the way he behaves. The chapter continues to get sidetracked on various other historical episodes that don't really connect at all to each other, or to Fred himself.

Generally, there's too much of Fife's opinion and other historical material (a lot of which is familiar from his other book), and not enough of the words and thoughts of the subjects.

There are also a number of surprising factual errors, from riders names (Erik van Hooydonck ? Who he ?) to important issues such as the fact that Dave Rayner was killed in a nightclub incident, not a car crash.

Good start, but check the facts
Great first chapters, and Fife draws interesting portraits of some of cycling's greats. But you get the impression of an agenda (anti Armstrong, anti BCF) where the facts pertinent to Fife's argument are used without any discussion or reference to counter-arguments. Proofing could have been better, and there are a couple of glaring errors even non-cycling fans can spot. Not least because Fife contradicts himself later in the book.
Still worth a read for cycling fans.

A disappointing read
As a lifelong cyclist, I was pleased when a colleague lent me this book. A couple of hours later that pleasure had evaporated by the time I had trawled my way through this hotchpotch of a book. There are plenty of facts about the those cyclists whom Fife regards as key T de F characters, and most of them are correct. However, the overall impression is that this author has cobbled together a series of second and third hand stories to use as a platform for self promotion.

Few cyclists have much interest in mythology, French slang, and quotations from Noel Coward, for those who are this book would be ideal. For the rest of us there are other cycling books which would make a better choice of reading this Christmas - William Fotheringham's Simpson biography, or Graeme Obree's 'Flying Scotsman'.

I'm just relieved I hadn't actually bought 'Inside the Peloton'. It certainly isn't on my Christmas list this year, and won't be in the future.

John Richards