26 Books

Ned Boulting is an irritating bloke who pops up asking stupid and obvious questions of footballers on the telly. Some time ago, he began doing the same thing for the biggest event in cycling: the Tour de France. This book is the story of how he went from knowing nothing  about it to being able to sell a book about knowing nothing about it.

I find Boulting’s writing almost unbearable, mainly because it’s exactly like hearing him speak, only it’s directly inside your brain. He’s one of those commentators who loves to point out what to the intellectually lazy seem like portentous parallels between two happenings despite there being no causal relationship at all. You know the kind: “the last time Barcelona played Man United on a Tuesday night, a short man with a bad hair cut scored the winner. Can Nani emulate Messi tonight?” or some shite like that.

Given that sports presentation is an almost exclusively male preserve (why?), it’s perhaps not surprising that banter seems to constitute 90% of a commentator’s verbal armoury. It’s wearing enough when you have to listen to it, but when every single page sounds like this, it’s almost impossible to take.

Boutling has always seemed like someone who does very little preparation, and that turns out to be spot on. Amazingly, this is consistently held up as hilarious rather than evidence of rank unprofessionalism; the title of the book is a reference to him saying ‘yellow jumper’ on air rather than ‘yellow jersey’ because of how little he knew when first asked to join the ITV cycling team. Muddling through is seen as worthy, in stark contrast to the preparedness of the athletes participating in the race.

This is a generalised problem with sports presentation in Britain. Ignorance that would be completely unacceptable in an American Baseball or NFL commentator is all too common here, to the extent that it’s difficult to think of any decent commentators at all. Insightful coverage of sport can be found if you look hard enough (especially online), but next to none of it makes it onto the TV, where platitudes, cliché and received wisdom rule.

Sport writing is also stuffed full of terrible prose, and Boulting’s is no exception:

What could possibly be gained from dragging both of us into discussions about the white chocolate chips in the muffin that sat glowering on a saucer in the middle of the table?

How on earth is it possible for a muffin to glower? This kind of thing is what Boulting mistakes for sophisticated writing, but it just grates every time. Only very rarely does he find an apposite metaphor. Almost every sentence could do with editing:

The wine, a bottle of Château du Val de Mercy (one of the rare occasions on which I actually committed to memory a memorable bottle of wine) was as beautiful to drink as French wine often is.

That sentence is replete with errors. By definition, memorable bottles of wine are committed to memory; he means he committed the name, which is different. Then it sounds like he’s saying that the bottle of wine was an occasion, whereas if he’d said “this was one of the rare occasions” he could have cleared up that ambiguity. Finally, his description of the quality of the wine is circular: a bottle of French wine is as beautiful to drink as French wine can be, which while unarguable is also not useful information or even a compliment (it would be true if French wine was routinely hideous).

Further on he refers to French policemen possessing “purposeful briefcases”, which is either a strange formulation or an under-reported technical breakthrough in the field of attaché case design. I wouldn’t nitpick like this if the entire book wasn’t infested with this type of mind-numbing stuff.

Sadly, whatever value there is in Boulting’s story is thoroughly occluded by his terrible prose. If you want to learn about the Tour, there are plenty of better books than this.

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