26 Books

Marco Pantani holds the record for the quickest ascent of Alpe d’Huez, perhaps the most famous climb in road cycling. Not only that, but he also holds two of the next four fastest times. What’s sad is that all of these times were, almost certainly, set with the help of EPO, a drug that increases the red blood cell count in an athlete, providing startling increases in endurance.

The Death of Marco Pantani

Matt Rendell
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.

“Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour by eight seconds!” – “No monsieur, I’m the guy who won it twice.” Despite winning the world’s greatest cycling race twice, Laurent Fignon is still famous as the man who lost to Greg LeMond by just eight seconds in over three thousand kilometres and 87 hours of racing.

We Were Young and Carefree

Laurent Fignon
Yellow Jersey 2010, Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99

Fignon, who died in 2010, takes the unusual step of recounting the most famous incident of his career at the start of his book with the following anguished words:

Come on, let’s burst the abscess before we really get started. The would has to be left open. Let it bleed away in silence. It will bleed a good while yet.

(There’s more than a hint of Amfortas about that paragraph!) While this decision makes for a more exciting opening than a load of guff about his childhood, it does somewhat hurt the architecture of the story.

David Millar is one of the best cyclists Britain has ever produced. He is also an admitted drug cheat. Although a good percentage of the public assumes that every professional cyclist is a cheat, today the sport is probably cleaner than it’s ever been, and Millar has played a big part in helping it clean itself up.

Racing Through the Dark

David Millar
Orion 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £18.99

This is the kind of complicated story that the media doesn’t really like very much, hence the stupid coverage of the possibility of Millar’s lifetime Olympic ban being lifted, something that he has not sought, but which has come about because of a separate legal challenge to the legality of the BOA’s policy of lifetime bans.

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.

How I Won the Yellow Jumper

Ned Boulting
Yellow Jersey 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £12.99

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.

Just over six months ago, I started commuting to work by bike again after many years away from the saddle. For some reason, this time was different and I gradually became more and more hooked on riding, gradually metamorphosing from a sedentary public transport user into a lycra-clad road warrior.

It’s All About the Bike

Robert Penn
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 208 pages, £8.99

Before long I was going on reasonably long rides and within six months had completed my first 100 mile sportive. Now, I ride at every opportunity, doing at least 40 miles at the weekend whenever I can get the time. What is it about cycling that’s so addictive? I set out to read as much as I could about this remarkable machine and its aficionados.

The three books here represent three very different approaches to food, but they share a purpose: joy in eating. You might hope that all cookbooks would have that in common, but unfortunately you’d be very wrong.

Exciting Food for Southern Types (Penguin Great Food)

Pellegrino Artusi
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99

Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. It’s hardly about cooking at all, and the recipes are sketchy and difficult to follow.

Ron Jaworski was an NFL quarterback for more than 15 years. He spent the bulk of his career with the Philadelphia Eagles and took them to their first Super Bowl. These days he is an analyst on Monday Night Football.

The Games That Changed the Game

Ron Jaworski
ESPN Books 2011, Paperback, 312 pages, £10.22

In this book, Jaworski looks at seven NFL games that he believes represent important moments in the tactical development of the sport. He gives the background to the coaches and players involved and then examines the film of the game to explain how the tactical innovation in question played out.

This is one of those books that feels like a good, long magazine article that has been expanded beyond the range of the material. Other examples include The Long Tail, Freakonomics and anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, Gladwell is probably the apotheosis of the form: his books feel like over-extended articles; his articles feel like over-extended anectdotes.

Super Crunchers

Ian Ayres
John Murray 2008, Paperback, 272 pages, £9.99

Ayres at least has an interesting story to tell. The rise in the practice of analysing large data sets is changing the way many areas of our lives work, from finance to medicine, shopping to wine criticism. These changes are profound and although they will help us to make better decisions, they will also make a lot of people uncomfortable, not least those who consider themselves experts.

Originally planned for release next year, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was brought forward after the Apple founder and former CEO died in October. Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times in the last years of his life and spoke to Jobs’s friends, former colleagues and to key figures at Apple. This kind of access to the man and his company is unprecendented, given that both are known for their secrecy.

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
Little, Brown 2011, Hardcover, 656 pages, £25.00

The result is a book that those with a casual interest in the technology world will find informative. However, technology experts, particularly those who follow Apple closely, will be disappointed. There are scattered technical errors and assertions by Isaacson that betray his lack of expertise but mostly the problem is that he hasn’t really uncovered enough that is new.

I don’t re-read books very often, as regular visitors to this site will know, but this is my second reading of Take Your Eye Off the Ball this year. Strictly speaking, it’s somewhere between a re-reading and a new book, since this Playbook Edition updates the original with more than 50 pages of new material.

Take Your Eye Off the Ball [With DVD]

Pat Kirwan
Triumph Books (IL) 2011, Spiral-bound, 288 pages, £15.94

The main changes are in updated examples from last season as well as new sections on this year’s NFL Draft and an added chapter on the special teams game.