Why Pro Cyclists Should Stick To Riding, Not Writing

I’ve just finished reading the autobiographies of Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook and professional riders Victoria Pendleton and David Millar.

One was a brilliant, funny, candid account of life in the fast lane.  The other two were written by cyclists.

It’s not enough to say we shouldn’t expect too much in the way of literary excellence from professional sportsmen.  If a working-class lad from Salford who misspent most of his adult life as a rock and roll star in one of the world’s biggest bands can do it, why can’t Pendleton, Millar, et al?  You could argue they’ve got even bigger stories to tell.

But the fact is, they’re rubbish.  While Hooky apparently wrote his 300-page epic, Unknown Pleasures, on his own, Pendleton and Millar required the help of professional scribes, the Guardian’s Donald McRae and The Times’ Jeremy Whittle respectively.  And they’re still as dull as ditchwater.

Hooky’s book contains a fair few references to drugs.  So does Millar’s, largely in a whiney, “it-wasn’t-really-my-fault-the-big-boys-made-me-do-it”  tone throughout its 350 pages. 

As for Pendleton, in lieu of anything quite as nasty as drugs, our favourite new Strictly Come Dancing star reveals that she self-harmed.  I’m a massive fan of Pendleton the cyclist and person (if not the writer), but I’m afraid her references to self-harming in this book – which basically boil down to a couple of incidents, once at sprint school in Switzerland, the other after her gold medal success at the Beijing Olympics – don’t half appear strangely contrived, almost like add-ons in a bid to give her story more of a USP.  She claims that coach Jan van Eijden – the bald bloke who always held up her bike at the start of her races – is the only outsider to have witnessed her doing this, so until we hear his side of the story we can’t be sure.

But if she, McRae and their publisher really thought the scene after her Beijing medal success – a series of bitter confrontations between Pendleton, van Eijden and his British Cycling colleagues Shane Sutton and Dave Brailsford over her “illicit” romance with BC sports scientist Scott Gardener – really needed a bit of blood and gore – self-inflicted with a pair of nail scissors – to make it more interesting, then they might as well go and write for Emmerdale. It adds nothing to her story at all.

At essence, the second and more interesting part of Between The Lines is a love story, a Romeo and Juliet with cleats.  For falling in love with a “colleague” – whom she is now happily engaged to – Pendleton was treated very shabbily by Brailsford, van Eijden and, most of all it seems, Shane Sutton.  They were more concerned with “protocol”, than affairs of the heart that didn’t involve being connected to an ECG monitor.

I’m glad Pendleton has shamed them in her book.   The day all the romance is lost from cycling will be the day I hang up my Jacques Anquetil retro-jersey and put away my sandalwood-scented Rapha saddle cream for the very last time.

David Millar’s story of how he doped and found redemption by blaming the system rather than himself, Racing Through The Dark, is, like Pendleton’s book, at least 200 pages too long.   He comes across as a chinless posh boy saved from terminal fecklessness by being gifted at riding a bike.

His exultation at the demise of his Cofidis team boss Alain Bondue over an incident involving a slipped chain is the deeply unpleasant crowing of a boarding school bully.  He hints darkly that Bondue was to “blame for a lot of things stretching back over the years”, as if Bondue had bundled him into a car and raced him to the nearest crack house before forcing him at knifepoint to shoot up.

This theme recurs every few pages – “it wasn’t me, guv, honest, it was the system wot dunnit.”  It becomes tiresome bordering on parody.  And there’s something very, very sinister about how Millar appears to be in awe of his “good friend Lance” right up until the final few chapters when, without explanation, he’s suddenly not a mate any more.

In view of recent events, that’s the story I’d really like to read.

Between The Lines, by Victoria Pendleton(with Donald McRae). HarperSport, hardback, £20.

Racing Through The Dark, by David Millar.  Orion, paperback, £8.99.

Unknown Pleasures – Inside Joy Division, by Peter Hook.  Simon & Schuster, hardback, £20.

Picture via BBC