On The Road Bike: The Search For A Nation’s Cycling Soul ( Yellow Jersey Press, 2013) ISBN 978-0224083362 [12] utterly captivating...an amazing concept and a truly fascinating adventure into cycling, history and people... a truly addictive read. * Cyclist * Most of Boulting’s padding comes from the On This Day in History files, the story of the 1923 Tour augmented by stories from the same time but elsewhere.

There’s the Seznec affaire, in which someone gets murdered and that is somehow linked to the very day of the Pathé newsreel by virtue of some piece of paperwork or other being signed by someone on that day. Boutling says: “Once I mined the actual cycling content in the film of all I possibly could, establishing which identifiable characters are in it, reading around their biographies, then my eye got distracted and I started to see what was going on in France and Europe on that day and over that summer and that’s when the project started to balloon out of all proportion. The story of an obsession. When cycling commentator Ned Boulting bought a length of Pathé news film featuring a stage of the Tour de France from 1923 he set about learning everything he could about it - taking him on an intriguing journey that encompasses travelogue, history and detective story.

Reviews

It started to take on the elephantine proportions that it has done because the political and cultural landscape of June 30, 1923, was absolutely fascinating. I am not a historian but I started to behave like a historian and tentatively started to reach a loose conclusion that actually that summer was the ‘end’ of the First World War, the afterglow of that conflict. After several "completely directionless" years, [3] his television career began in 1997 when he joined Sky Sports' Soccer Saturday alongside Jeff Stelling. He joined ITV Sports in 2001, and has covered a range of football events including the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and the FA Cup. He became a reporter for ITV's Tour de France coverage in 2003 and has reported at every Tour since, as well as on other cycling events including the Tour of Britain and the Vuelta a España. He also covered the London 2012 Summer Paralympics for Channel 4. [2] He was awarded the Royal Television Society's Sports News Reporter of the Year Award in 2006. [5] Boulting branched out into commentating in 2015, providing commentary for ITV4's coverage of the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire [6] and the Vuelta a España alongside David Millar. [7] Boulting and Millar commentated for ITV4 on the 2016 Tour de France and subsequent ones. [8] Beginning with a fragment of a century-old race, Ned has written a 'biography of the unknown rider'. And in honouring him he's told us more about bike racing, the Tour and about Europe in the years between the wars than we'd ever have learned from a book about a star * Michael Hutchinson, racing cyclist and writer * a b Marquand, Rupert (11 August 2013). "Winning over the cycling audience". Bedfordshire on Sunday.

Boulting made his darts commentary debut at the 2020 Masters after being a long term pundit for ITV Sport PDC events. [10] The footage comes from the fourth stage of that year’s Tour, the 400-plus kilometre haul down from Brest to Les Sables d’Olonne. It starts about 150 kilometres and six hours into the stage, still another 260 or so kilometres and more than nine hours of racing to go. After Henri Desgrange gives the signal for the riders to restart after a two-minute stop to sign-in at the control in the town of Lorient, the peloton gets underway again.

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