Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129579 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
A history of bicycle racing's dark side from the earliest days of the sport in the 1800s right up to the present day. The author has spent twelve years researching a fascinating century-long tale of trickery, drug taking, doping, team scullduggery, sabotage, ringers, race fixing, fraud, spectator sabotage, violence, poisonings, political infighting and sudden deaths.

Customer Reviews

Winning at any cost
Winning at Any Cost
Cyclists have used drugs to improve their performance almost since the invention of the bicycle. At first the pharmacopoeia was primitive: ether, wine, cocaine, strychnine. The riders used anything they thought would ease the misery of the impossibly long distances that characterized racing in the early twentieth century.
Over time, as the drugs grew more effective, the riders adopted them. In the 1930s amphetamines were synthesized, followed by steroids, EPO and now human growth hormone. Almost always the riders have stayed 1 step ahead of the detectors.
Going back to nineteenth century original sources, Les Woodland has put together a riveting and distressing chronicle of cheating in bicycle racing. His discussion of the 1998 Festina scandal is simply superb.
As with all of Woodland's books, it is written with style and authority. This man knows the sport as few others.
- Bill McGann, Author of The Story of the Tour de France

More a skewed look at than a textbook
It's an interesting subject and parts of this book are genuinely interesting especially the latter bits about drug cheating and it's apparent epidemic proportions but then there is a lot of stuff in it that is a bit uninteresting too, a lot of the early stuff is cycle history rather than cheating. There are lots of side interest panels that sometime tell you what you've just read in the text or sometimes completely contradict it, but most are just pointless, as if the author has been told 'this is how the book will look, can you just fill these bits with any old rubbish'. The book is also either extremely poorly proof read or has in some sections just been translated word for word from foreign because good English it ain't. The aesthetic of the book is that of a textbook but it actually reads like a semi humourous travel guide book ala Bill Bryson but not quite. Out of the 3 bikes about bike cheating I've bought recently, this was the least enjoyable.