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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I read this back in May and in the time it’s taken me to write about it the football season has rolled around again. Wilson’s book is a thorough guide to the history of tactics in football, from the days when the majority of players were attackers, through to the modern game, in which teams frequently play without a recognised striker.

Though Wilson, as an English writer, spends a lot of time on the game at home, he also finds time for extensive examinations of how the game developed across Europe and South America.

Pat Kirwan is a former NFL coach whose spells with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Phoenix Cardinals and New York Jets allow him to bring a real expertise to his punditry. His aim with this book is to help NFL fans get more out of watching the game by drawing their attention to some of the less obvious things that happen on the field.

It’s not a book for complete novices; Kirwan assumes a fair amount of knowledge of the sport but anyone beyond beginner level will find something useful here. I’ve been watching American football for 25 years but I still learned a lot from reading this.

I like Spanish football a lot. I’ve seen Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and Athletic Bilbao at home and seen Real Madrid play against Levante – Valencia’s second team. I find the footballing and fan culture fascinating, though I don’t know much about either. That’s where this book comes in.

Philip Ball explores, chapter by chapter, the Spanish regions and their major clubs. All the time he searches for evidence of ‘morbo’, the almost untranslatable Spanish term that means, roughly, the passionate animosity between rival supporters.

There are plenty of fascinating stories here – from the sport’s birth in Spain thanks to Englishmen abroad to the often seedy backroom dealings over players, managers and even stadiums.