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

Product Information

Since April 2020 Boulting has co-presented the podcast Streets Ahead with Adam Tranter and Laura Laker. The podcast involves discussions of active travel infrastructure and often includes interviewing guests. This is such a poignant book. Ned Boulting is conjuring ghosts. I don't know of many things more thrilling than this. A wonderfully imaginative and evocative work - Philippe Auclair. The genesis for the entire project was the chance arrival in my life of a reel of ancient Tour de France film, of uncertain provenance, and unclear origin. It’s only 2 and a half minutes long, but it contains enough material for to fill not just one book, but many. It’s that rich, because if you stare hard enough at any moment of recorded time, it will reveal shards of both the past and the future. Its present tense is only the visible part of the iceberg.

Cycling is full of half-remembered forgotten heroes. Take my good friend Teddy Hale, the Irishman who wasn’t. I and others have tried to research and write about his story, have buried ourselves in the archives and spoken to his descendants and still we know little about this Englishman who won the 1896 Madison Square Garden International Six Day Race while pretending to be an Irishman. 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: 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. Other Pathé newsreels from this era exist and you can see many of the same people in them, including the likes of Henri Desgrange, Ottavio Bottecchia and Henri Pélissier. You’ve probably seen some if you’ve ever watched any of the French TV programmes celebrating the Tour’s history. But this one is a fresh discovery.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] Norris Edward "Ned" Boulting (born 11 July 1969) is a British sports journalist, television presenter and podcaster best known for his coverage of football, cycling and darts. 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. Weaknesses: Boulting doesn’t even attempt to offer an argument for why his piece of Pathé history is important Ned Boulting’s history of Not The 1923 Tour, in 940 grisly deaths fmk

How Cav Won the Green Jersey: Short Dispatches from the 2011 Tour de France (Vintage Digital, 2012) What it is: The clown prince of cycling commentary wipes off the greasepaint after acquiring a Pathé newsreel from the 1923 Tour and sets off on a voyage of discovery Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence – studying each frame, face and building – until he had squeezed the meaning from it. It sets him off in fascinating directions, encompassing travelogue, history, mystery story – to explain, to go deeper into this moment in time, captured on his little film.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.”

That was in itself not a foregone conclusion at all,” says Boulting. “The film from that era predates celluloid so it was made of nitrate. Not only is it very brittle with the passing of age but also highly combustible, something I didn’t realise at the time but subsequently was pointed out to me – that even having it in my house would have invalidated my buildings insurance. It has been known in a raised temperature to spontaneously combust.” Many of the details of that stage in 1923 are astonishing to the modern reader. For a start, it was 412km long when today 220km or so is commonplace. The cyclists raced on gravel roads with, of course, far more rudimentary bikes and refreshments.Faced with a cultural assumption and competing probable and improbable outcomes – Griffon jersey, saying the photo is either 1923 or 1924, and possible wedding ring, meaning the photo would have to be after 1925 when he should be wearing a different jersey – which razor do you think Mr Occam would suggest you choose to shave with? Boulting may reach for the one designed by Heath-Robinson but you should be going for the single-bladed Bic disposable. Pidd, Helen (26 May 2011). "Review: How I Won The Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting - Helen Pidd". The Guardian. Wherever Boulting looks, death is to be found. It’s almost like he’s living out a Fast Show sketch. It looks like he is a wearing a wedding band, so it must have been taken after February 1925 [when he married]. But he is wearing a Griffon jersey, a team he reportedly left at the end of 1924.”