The Rider by Tim Krabbe Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Rider
Book Review: The rider
Summary: 1 Stars
I have been waiting nearly four week for this book to arrive. This is my first purchase from Amazon, and I am not impressed. I cannot even find a contact email to complain, hence my protests have been place in this unlikely space. Carboncopy is not happy.Book Review: fun, quick read
Summary: 4 Stars
Run, quick read. Great book for any cyclist. I could relate to some of his stratedgies as he was going thru the race and his feelings of praying for a mechanical. The book tends to jump around a bit, think "Lost style" flashbacks. This book will get passed on to some friends in my group ride for sure. One of the best cycling books I've read, still like Obree's book best though.Book Review: great real racing book
Summary: 5 Stars
this book was great for anyone who races bicycles. the book was very well written, and was really about the old school of racing when you had to shift on the down tubes..and no radio communication in the races.Book Review: masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
More than twenty years ago Australian classics specialist Allan Peiper reported for Winning magazine his experience in racing the Tour of Flanders. His writing captured my imagination, drilling into my consciousness the essential core of the bike racing experience at the highest level. His article has stood for me, to this day, as the paradigm of race writing.
Yet what Peiper did in his race reports, Krabbe, I now learn, had done 10 years before in his fiction. The race he describes was June 26, 1977: "Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me." And so it begins. I was hooked.
In contrast to today, with so much attention paid to doping, so much emphasis on equipment, to the model of seeming effortless domination established by Indurain and perfected by Armstrong, the racing culture of 30 years ago, so well rendered by this book, offers an attraction which I could not resist. The focus is on the rider, his internal struggle against himself, his rivals, and the world around him. To not just resist suffering but to actively embrace it: "after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature's payback for the homage they pay her by suffering.... That's why there are riders. Suffering you need; literature is baloney."
Each bike race I have done is like an epic. How to capture one in words? Yet Krabbe has done so. Nobody who has raced can possibly read this book without feeling a deep resonance, a connection of understanding which goes beyond the text. The protagonist consumes figs instead of gels, struggles with his limited, relatively poorly shifting gears, and must mathematically deduce his speed from his perceived cadence and gear, but his essential being is the same. Bike racing is as it has always been, about confronting ourselves, beating back our fears, and finally, reflecting. Krabbe captures this to perfection.
The map and route profile from the race is available here:
http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Ronde-van-de-Mont-Aigoual
Book Review: the best cycling novel...
Summary: 5 Stars
This is easily the best novel I've read about bicycle racing--it's relatively short, no murders, no love interest, just
bicycle racing pure and simple. It centers on a single minor
1-day race in southern France, 150 kilometers in the mountains,
and a racer (Krabbe) who is decent but not professional caliber.
The novel is part stream-of-thought, part flashbacks to Krabbe's
other 300+ races, part anecdotes about the great cyclists from
the Tour de France and elsewhere. If you want a baseball
analogy, Krabbe would be playing in the low minor leagues, and
describing the life there, and relating some tales about well-
known major-leaguers--kind of a Ron Shelton [Bull Durham] of
bicycle racing. In the Tour de France, the police keep the roads
clear for the racers: in the Tour de Mont Aigoual, police are
at intersections directing the racers, but you share the road
with ordinary drivers. Krabbe describes speeding down steep
mountain roads and having to plan in his mind what to do if a car
comes around the corner towards him while he's doing 60kph.
A very involving, finely-written book!