1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession

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As interesting as the story of how Boulting pins down the precise year of the film, 1923 – weather reports and clothing confirmed it couldn’t have been 1924’s appalling heatwave – and starts to attach names to faces, is the insight he gives into the “heroic age” of cycling. The roots of the Tour were in a battle for supremacy between competing papers, and egos, as well as an urge to teach the French about their own nation – “France was still in the process of convincing its constituent parts… that it was indeed a whole and coherent entity”. Added to this was, by 1923, an air of defiance to the immediate post-War Tours, cycling through the devastated landscape in which the guns had finally fallen silent. The real issue here isn’t that Boulting isn’t aware that Thomann was an Alcyon subsidiary (never mind that it’s even on a rather well-known digital encyclopedia). It’s that, just because Boulting doesn’t understand it, the explanation is “lost to time, unreported and now unknowable.” Boulting is certainly no stranger to cycling or to writing. The sports journalist, television presenter and author has been involved with ITV’s Tour coverage since 2003. Ned Boulting’s voice is synonymous with cycling coverage and, as one might expect, he has a devotee’s commitment to the sport. “This is the story of an obsession,” he writes at the beginning of 1923, a curious, absorbing mix of historical sleuthing and travel writing. He’s not lying. The pandemic arrested the usual rhythms of his life: “I measured out my life in yellow jerseys,” he notes, when he’s ­confined to providing commentary from the studio, biking to Kent rather than the mountain passes of France. To add injury to insult, he also broke his arm and was left in a deskbound state, mourning the general shutdown. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our

Or how about the first woman of the Hour, Mlle de Saint-Sauveur? Several people have tried to find out more about her but all we’ve been able to learn at this stage comes from a couple of races before her Hour record and a couple of races after. We don’t even know her first name. Even in the cycling-fanatical town he lived all his life in east Flanders, which is the heart of professional road racing, no one has heard of him.” 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. Boulting produced and directed Dutch Master – A tribute to Dennis Bergkamp for Sky Sports in 1998, and Steven Gerrard – A Year in My Life for Sky 1 in 2006. [2]

Watch the film

How I Won the Yellow Jumper: Dispatches from the Tour de France ( Yellow Jersey Press, 2011) ISBN 978-0224083362 [11]

Still image from the Pathé news film of the fourth stage of the 1923 Tour de France which inspired the new book by Ned Boulting. Fourth stage map from the Pathé news film of the fourth stage of the 1923 Tour de France which inspired the new book by Ned Boulting. Boulting was born in Andover, Hampshire [2] but moved to Bedford as a child. He attended Bedford School, where he studied for A-levels in French, German and English, before reading modern languages at Jesus College, Cambridge. [3] He is the grandson of film director John Boulting [4] Career [ edit ] Yes, that’s right. Yet another cycling book that flogs the dead horse of Alfred Jarry. And, better still, Ernest Hemingway gets to make an appearance too! I have no idea how Boulting managed to get this so wrong, missed Gallica’s captions and somehow dated the pictures to 1925. But wrong he got it. And then he went and compounded the error by making a mystery out of it, with eagle-eyed Ned spotting something he thinks significant in the picture with the bouquet:

About the contributors

If it were possible, if it didn’t make me sound insane, I would have to say that I fell in love with a year. I fell in love with a moment in time. I fell in love with a single event that is bigger than everything I have ever imagined. This is my testament to a race that is bigger in scope than even its creator imagined possible. This is my love letter to the Tour de France.