How Cav Won The Green Jersey, Ned Boulting (2012)

A tv presenter’s amusing backstage view of the 2011 Tour

Vintage Books EAN 9781448129386 20,000 words £2.69 (eBook – available for Kindle)

This is not the book for you if you are looking for an answer to the question implied by its title. Indeed, although the Manx sprinter does feature several times in the narrative, you will lean almost nothing of how he achieved his success during the course of its 20,000 words.

Instead, Boulting, one of the presenters of ITV’s Tour coverage, shares the ruminations and reflections of one who is paid to circumnavigate France every summer in search of rider interviews and novel ways of explaining the race. His summer marries the predictable grind of producing a daily television package, with a Gallic version of Wacky Races.

Happily, he is an entertaining writer who skilfully finds fun in his daily obligations and weaves them with some of the lesser tableaux of Tour action. In the throng at press conferences, jousting with Belgian tv crews in the ‘mixed zone’ (where riders give interviews) he reveals himself as more of a fan boy than a reporter to Tommy Voelker. His frustrations are those of a bit-part functionary in a vast, rolling carnival, but he enjoys the momentary exposure to greatness that is the magic elixir of watching a grand tour.

Here he is, lifting the lid on the ‘packages’ in which he and Chris Boardman demonstrated some of the principles of mass-start racing, on moving bicycles for the benefit of ITV’s viewers:

“We re-shot the sequence, and this time I threw the theatrical kitchen sink at it. Cheeks-puffing, snot-wiping, legs-akimbo, I selected a ridiculously easy gear so that I could best express the expended effort through the visual medium of spinning my legs ludicrously fast. I felt like I had captured the essence of suffering. This was a refined distillation of the very nature of the sport. I had brought the agony into people’s living rooms. I felt artistically fulfilled.”

Alas, when he saw the pieces himself he was forced to concur with the sizeable section of the television-watching public who thought that he looked ‘an utter arse’.

Diverting as Boulting is, it is the flashes of what was surly one of the most gripping Tours ever that sustains his writing. As a snack-sized remainder of last summer’s action, it is sufficient to stimulate the saliva glands. By the end, however, I was yearning for a rather more substantial serving.

TD Mar 12