Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #308159 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Synopsis
The mountains, that is where the greatest battles of the Tour de France are fought, where champions are made and where some of the toughest are defeated. It's where men like Christophe, Coppi, Bahamontes, Merckx, and Armstrong have shown their mettle. And it was where British cyclist Tommy Simpson died. This beautifully illustrated book looks at the scenic beauty of the mountain stages and at the men who have competed on them throughout the 100-year history of the Tour. This book replaces in our list a previously announced title on the same subject by Peter Leissl, which was cancelled (1-892495-48-1).

Customer Reviews

Not what it says on the cover !!!!
Don't be fooled - this is NOT an in depth look at the mighty mountains of the Tour de France as you might be lead to believe by its title and its 'spiel'....instead what you get is YET ANOTHER slow and methodical run through the great riders of the Tour and their exploits, but, wait for it, ONLY upto 1980, a time that the author decrees was teh end of the great era of cycling. Therefore any of us over under the age of 50 will not be able to enjoy reading about the stars that WE grew up with !
Simply this is AWFUL !!! It is littered with Typographical errors, bad grammar, mis-spellings...it is almost as if it has been translated from a foreign language...but no, its author is English.
I am apalled that I paid nearly £12 for this , hoping to read some derring-do accounts of the horror of teh GAlibier, ventoux and so on...instead I have already abandoned it as there is nothing in it tha I could not have written or found elsewhere and even the promised pictures are cyclist, not mountain, focussed.
Ignore this if you are a Cycling fan - buy soem of the great paperbacks that have come out recently, especially Fotheringham's Roule brittannia, a REAL cycling book !!!

Disappointing
This is the only cycling book which I have purchased and then returned, it simply isn't very good.

As other reviewers have said this is not an account of the roads of the mountain stages of Le Tour but rather an account of specific stages in the author's self decreed 'golden era of cycling'. Furthermore the photographs and illustrations are nothing special and fail to rescue a very disappointing read.

Avoid!

Au Contraire! This book rocks, let's set the record straight.
If you like the whir of a freewheel, a burn in your lungs and legs and the smell of Alpine air, you will enjoy this book.

It'll have to take a Yank to straighten this thing out, I read the soccer magazine FourFourTwo on occasion and it seems to me a dozen books on your soccer/football come out every month from the list that magazine runs as a feature and here some elderly Englishman writes an excellent book on cycling sport's Tour De France, apparently published out of San Francisco and I think it is outstanding. Maybe ye ol' Britishers ought to stick to footy instead and not put down an outstanding book. Now I'll admit, there are some typos, I won't dock it for that, he spells "very" "veru" in one place, hey, this book is about the Tour De France, that kind of sounds French, I think I'll let it slide. Then, there is the fact, that yes, it does seem that this book published in San Francisco does use Americanized English and not that of the home country. Valid enough criticism, why not take it up with the Publishing House, Van Der Plas publications, by the way, Bob Van Der Plas, I think he's a Belgian. You ever hear of Eddie Merckx? He's a Belgian. Belgians have won more Yellow Jerseys, that is Tour De Frances than anyone else except the French themselves. You got a problem with that?? I don't. Even the American reviews are mostly general reviews of this book but at least, it's not some cockamamie analysis. Yes, Mr. Yates, you should have said "colours" instead of "colors."

Some would say, hey, this is like the many books out there, what we in America might call Coffee Table books, you know, a big square or rectangular picture book, no, no it isn't. He covers a lot of detail. All of the major mountains are covered in the book in box features with details such as their grade and their elevation, a diagram, excellent stuff. Then, the book talks about details of the Tour De France and I'm sorry to anyone who says, what he tells us is run of the mill, Yates the Author, obviously hunted down NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS & OTHER ACCOUNTS, in Francais to give us the truth about this stuff. Apparently, he went to live there.

I doubt, if any other book in the English language talks in details about how the "mountains" went and became a part of the Tour and not certainly with the detail Yates tells us. So, mountains were added but back in 1910+/- and in places like the Pyrenees, they were not easily navigable, NOT navigable in the winter and sometimes, barely by summertime, by Tour Time. We learn how the Tour's inventor and architect Henri Desgrange or one of his surrogates in this case, inspected one mountain to ride during the Tour by leaving his driver who in the winter could not drive any further in the snow and indeed hiked up the mountain and down to the village on the other side, arriving there at 3 o'clock in the morning and search parties were sent out to find him. I don't think I've seen this in other books. By the way, the region's authorities warned against making the mountain a part of the Tour since the status of the road by summer was unpredictable. Desgranges sent his agent to size up the situation and against the position of the region's authorities, the mountain became a part of the Tour successfully. The fact, that early tour stages might be 250 miles long per day in the Tours heyday might be touched on in other Tour books but again, I sure haven't seen that point expounded on. How about that some of the Tours in the 1930s saw all riders using the same build of bike as each other? Lots of intriguing information is here.

And so, Yates cuts off the Tour in 1980 as being the end of the golden age of the Tour?? 1980, Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk won on a steel is real Raleigh?? Doesn't seem like a bad cutoff and within 10-15 years, EPO and Aluminum became the rage of the Tour. Sounds like a fair benchmark to call it the ending of the golden period of the Tour De France. I see a book by a Mr. Owen Mulholland calling Cycling's Golden Age from 1946-1967, so you decide.

Speaking of coffee table books, I think that is an issue that confuses readers on this book. It is a bit oversized, but not like your standard "history of the Tour" books, it's probably close to size per the cover of a children's story book like say a Doctor Seuss book, a bit bigger and has 160 pages of an informative narrative on big pages, that might come out to quite a bit on paperback sized pages, so it is still a comfortably long read. Once you get into it, it is hard to put down. Those big books are ones you look through, look at the pictures, this isn't like that. It's excellent telling us of the many greats, I might be remiss in failing to name all but let's say Eddie Merckx, you find out new things about him and the likes of Thys, Michel, Bottechia, Bartali, colourful figures are discussed in full and their personalities as well as how theirs and other races and stages figured in outcomes. Yates' descriptions of the stages themselves, the heroism and at times, treachery (similar to some of the reviews and ratings here btw) while he can not go through every stage out of a race that is over a hundred years old, would certainly do Phil Ligget proud. The author obviously loves the subject and is your proverbial walking encyclopedia on it.

Read this if you love cycling or else, stick to reading your bios on Beckham, Gerrard and other sporting heroes.