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

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Ned is the author of five books, including the bestselling How I Won the Yellow Jumper and On the Road Bike. The sports journalist, television presenter and author has been involved with ITV’s Tour coverage since 2003. 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. We ride on dynamite,” 1923 ­winner Henri Pélissier told ­journalists, his kitbag including chloroform and cocaine, needed to push his body through the torture of the Tour.

Another fun fact for you: the third finger, left hand thing, while it’s great to know when you’re looking for someone to hit on in a bar, it’s a cultural thing, not legal. A rare survivor in itself given that most such reels would have been chucked in bin, the film needed tender care of a different kind: the need to be digitised.Boulting’s attention now is on the 2023 edition of the Tour but his lockdown project which took on a life of its own has clearly given him a new perspective on this gruelling event. A rather brutal character, he was noteworthy for the strike he led with his brother and another rider in the 1924 race, dropping out on Stage 4 and giving an interview to journalist Albert Londres that became the infamous “Convicts of the Road” story about pro bike racers. Looking at the map that begins the footage, it is indeed Stage 4 of the Tour de France, a whacking big 412 km (but not unusual length of the Tour stages then) effort from the port city of Brest to the seaside resort of Les Sables-d’Olonne.

Witty, discursive, and tons of fun, Ned Boulting has the Tour de France under his skin, and you will too by the time you've read this ― Al Murray. 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. Part memoir and part travelogue, this Roger Deakin award-winning book is also a paean to the magic and mystery of the coastline surrounding Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Beginning with a fragment of a century-old race, Ned has written a 'biography of the unknown rider'. Beyond this, the author builds an entire post-1923 Beeckman family tree, with some false starts and dead ends, ultimately meeting with Théo’s descendants in Belgium.There is the unsettling background of the covid pandemic distorting our sense of distance and connection. Apparently keeping this kind of film sitting around will void your homeowner’s fire insurance policy! If Boulting even mentioned the Petit Tour in 1923 – or, for that matter, the Critérium des Aiglons – I must have missed it. There is the Lost Generation of Americans in Paris (Hemingway scraping by with dispatches to the Toronto Daily Star) and so much else that makes up history in the 20th Century. And as the name suggests, it had its origin in another activity many people took to in lockdown, with time and unspent money to hand: bidding online at auctions.