The rider
"Far from a dry history of the sport, The Rider is beloved as a bicycle odyssey, a literary masterpiece that describes in painstaking detail one 150-kilometer race in a mere 150 pages. We are, every inch of the way, inside amateur biker Tim Krabbe's head as his mind churns at top speed along with his furious peddling during a mythical Tour de Mont Aigoual, a famously tough stage of the Tour de France. In the course of the race, we get to know the forceful, bumbling Lebusque, the aesthete Barthelemy, the young Turk Reilhan, and the mysterious rider in the blue jersey of Cycles Goff. Krabbe battles with and against each of them, failing on the descents, shining on the climbs, suffering on the false flats as the race speeds relentlessly to its final sprint. Privy to his every thought - on the glory and vagaries of the sport itself, the weather, the characters and lineage of his rival cyclists, almost hallucinatory anecdotes about great riders of the past - the book progresses kilometer by kilometer, thought by thought."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2002
Bloomsbury : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck, New York, 2002