Uphill Battle: Cycling's Great Climbers

Rating:
Summary: Against Gravity
Review: Owen Mulholland is known as a writer of cycling history and "Uphill Battle"is a worthwhile addition to the specialized genre of books for bike nuts. While there has been a recent torrent of books on the Tour de France, this book also describes some interesting and exciting stages of the other great stage races, the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta in Spain.

The book is arranged in chronological fashion as a series of brief biographies of climbing cyclists. The stories really begin in 1905 when mountains were introduced into the Tour de France for the first time. It is a never-ending amazement to me how incredibly difficult the early Tours were, with terrible roads, fixed gear bicycles and gargantuan stages. For example, the 1926 Tour, Mulholland informs us, was almost twice as long as the current version!

It is true that many of the stories have been repeated for decades-what fan of the Tour does not know of Eugene Christophe and the broken fork, or poor Rene Vietto turning around for his team leader, or Merckx's virtuosity in seemingly everything? But there are a lot of other good stories here about riders who had their moments of glory in the mountains and then, over time, slid out of sight. Some riders were not known for their climbing at all, including Rik van Looy, but still managed to go for the prize when it beckoned.

The chapter on Lance Armstrong is the longest single one in the book and is a good recapitulation of Big Tex's career to his fifth Tour de France victory in 2002. While Mulholland does not fawn over Armstrong, it is clear that Lance Armstrong is a rarity in pro cycling as a rider who is not only superb at time trialling but one of the very best at climbing as well.

The book could have used better editing in avoiding the occasional repetitions. As well, the Modern Era is represented by allrounders, such as Fignon, LeMond, Indurain and Roche instead of the pure climbers one would expect to see. That said, the chapters on the Columbian star Luis Herrera and the Basque Roberto Laiseka are illuminating, and the chapter on Marco Pantani captures the very ambivalent record of this Giro and Tour winner.

The book could have been improved with more on other races with difficult climbs but as it stands it is an entertaining and enjoyable account and worth recommending. There are some very good pictures, including a great one of Anquetil and Poulidor elbowing each other like sprinters as they climb the Puy-de-Dome in 1964. Bikes of steel, men of iron.




Rating:
Summary: Mediocre stories, poorly told
Review: This book reads more like a series of magazine articles than a coherent history.

Mulholland has some grammatical quirks - mostly his pronouns get out of whack - making me read many sentences several times to sort out who he's talking about. He is fixated on Franco and torture in Spain; this gets somewhat boring.

Other quirks that really made me want to put the book down even though I wanted to know the stories were his repeated parenthetical explanations of things like the fact that 'Giro d'Italia' is the Tour of Italy. If he thinks his readership don't already know this, he could explain it once and then leave it alone. Lavishes praise on Armstrong, bags out Pantani, and ignores Virenque.

Some good stories, but I found the grammatical and stylistic problems greatly distracting.