Eight Things to Read and Watch Before Road Cycling Comes Back

Three books, two movies, and three streaming series to tide you over until the Tour Down Under

Photo Credit: PHOTOGOMEZSPORT / Luis Angel Gomez

It’s the end of the year, the dead of winter, the queasy interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s. A truly liminal point in the calendar.

Which means you’ve probably got time on your hands. And if you have a lukewarm relationship with relatives you see a lot, you probably have gift cards that can be spent on books and movies. If you’re in the mood, here are some things you can spend your time and money consuming before the UCI road calendar resumes in three weeks.

Breaking Away

An inner-circle Hall of Fame sports movie, an inner-circle Hall of Fame coming-of-age movie, an inner-circle Hall of Fame movie about the people of Middle America feeling left behind in a rapidly shrinking world. Paul Dooley’s best performance as a father who, while wanting the best for his child, doesn’t have the emotional toolkit to say “I love you” out loud. (This is a crowded field, considering Dooley’s work in Sixteen Candles and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.)

Dennis Christopher plays Dave, a cycling-obsessed 19-year-old townie in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1979. He struggles to get along with his family, while he and his slacker buddies (played by Jackie Earle Haley, Daniel Stern, a young Dennis Quaid, and the young Dennis Quaid’s ludicrous-for-the-70s six-pack) struggle to get along with the snobby Indiana University undergrads who dominate their hometown. The site of the climactic confrontation: IU’s legendary Little 500, a relay track cycling race. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder why Dennis Christopher didn’t have the biggest career of this lightning-in-a-bottle Diner-level cast of young actors.

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle

A few years ago, my wife decided out of the blue that she wanted to know everything there was to know about Lance Armstrong, and lucky for her, the mid-2010s were a great time to have this sudden urge. You couldn’t swing a musette full of syringes without hitting a book, a TV special, or a tell-all interview about America’s fallen secular saint.

Both of us read The Secret Race as part of an informal trilogy with Wheelmen and Cycle of Lies; these three books tell most of what you’d want to know about Armstrong, U.S. Postal, and doping in cycling at the turn of the century.

I think Armstrong himself has been examined more or less to death. Which is probably appropriate, given how perfectly he purported to embody the best parts of American society and ended up embodying the worst. But the most interesting thing about Armstrong, to me, is how he fit into the history of the sport, and the swath of victims and antagonists he left in his wake.

Hamilton is one of the foremost. By the time this book came out in 2013, he’d been suspended for doping not once but twice, and left the sport in disgrace. He’d had less to lose than Armstrong at his peak, but he’d lost it all the same. So by that point, he had no reason to pull any punches. Except, while most ex-athletes in his position would be embittered and hostile, Hamilton’s autobiography is introspective and self-critical.

Hamilton talks about using cycling almost as self-medication for depression, and eventually his unquenchable capacity to endure pain brings him to the brink of winning the Tour de France. Along the way, he get swept up in the U.S. Postal doping program, and while Armstrong has a catlike ability to sense and avoid trouble, Hamilton finds it at nearly every opportunity. The result is a narrator who is by no means trustworthy or admirable, but resoundingly sympathetic. It’s my favorite autobiography on any subject, and one of the best sports books I’ve ever read.

Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever, by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connor

This is, in my opinion, the best installment of the Lance Armstrong Syllabus. For completists, here’s everything I’ve read or watched on the subject:

• Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, by Juliet Macur

• Wheelmen

• The Secret Race

• The Armstrong Lie (2013 documentary), dir. Alex Gibney

• Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story (2014 BBC documentary), dir. Alex Holmes

• The Program (2015 feature film), dir. Stephen Frears, starring Ben Foster as Armstrong, Chris O’Dowd as journalist David Walsh, and Denis Ménochet as Johan Bruyneel—plus Jesse Plemons and Lee Pace in small supporting roles; the internet would’ve eaten this up if it came out now

• Lance (2020 two-part ESPN 30 for 30 documentary), dir. Marina Zenovich

Wheelmen is my personal favorite book about Armstrong specifically because it approaches him less as a tragic individual figure than as part of a system. How did he fit into the embryonic American pro cycling structure of the post-Greg LeMond era? How did he leverage doping into Tour de France success, and how did he turn that into a multi-million-dollar cult of personality? And then how did that collapse?

The whole story is worthwhile, but the more you hear about it, the more interesting the minutiae gets.

The End of the Road: The Festina Affair and the Tour that Almost Wrecked Cycling, by Alasdair Fotheringham

When Lance Armstrong saved cycling, this is what he was saving it from: A Tour de France almost undone by the biggest doping scandal the sport had yet seen. Fotheringham’s book is an in-depth stage-by-stage explanation of how it all happened and why the Festina Affair was able to cleave such a big gash in the credibility of the sport.

It’s also fun, for an American, to see characters like Hamilton, Jan Ullrich, Bobby Julich, and Marco Pantani treated as more than incidental obstacles for Armstrong, who was still on his way back from cancer treatment at the time and would only race the Vuelta in 1998.

Speaking of Pantani, there’s a great documentary on him—Pantani: Accidental Death of a Cyclist—that near as I can tell is not streaming anywhere but has been uploaded in full to YouTube. I’m not sure there’s a figure like him in American sports, and this documentary offers insight into what made him so special.

Tour de France: Unchained (Netflix)

I renew my complaint that they didn’t call the Netflix series Pedal to Survive.

The younger, two-wheeled sibling of Drive to Survive generates many of the same complaints as the original: It’s more PR than documentary filmmaking, it can only cover what stories the camera happens to capture, and as a result it can play fast and loose with the facts and narrative contours of the season.

We’re already at a point with Unchained that it took Drive to Survive about three seasons to reach: Hating it is a shibboleth. Real hardcore fans who know everything can pick it apart and dismiss it as infotainment for dilettantes.

So while acknowledging Unchained’s inability to capture every single nuance of the sport and every wrinkle of the race, it showcases the basics and really illustrates the pain, peril, and precarity of the sport in a way only all-access documentaries can.

The Least Expected Day (Netflix)

So if someone gets on your case for enjoying Unchained, you should shoot back with “But of course The Least Expected Day is better.”

I don’t think I’ve seen a docuseries with this much access to a team make the team look this bad, ever, in any sport. Race after race, the team directors show up and outline the day’s plan in vague terms, the riders crack, the directors shout at them over the radio, and then they cut to studio interviews in which everyone involved is completely befuddled as to what went wrong.

De Ronde—Behind the Scenes (Flanders Classics YouTube)

This series, which I mentioned in the Wout van Aert post from earlier this month, takes the opposite tack of The Least Expected Day. While the Movistar doc follows one team at a high level all year, with interviews and commentary, the Tour of Flanders behind the scenes docs stitch together footage from team cars, broadcast booths, and TV footage. It shows you everything you don’t see on live TV coverage, revealing a sport that’s chippier and noisier than the serene exercise you see during the race.

Slaying the Badger (ESPN)

One of the best 30 for 30 docs. Most stories about Greg LeMond start with his accidental shooting in 1987 and culminate with his incredible time trial win on the last stage of the 1989 Tour de France. Slaying the Badger tells the story of LeMond’s career before that, focusing on the 1985 and 1986 editions of the Tour de France.

LeMond was the first star cyclist from the Americas, and for a time he was the protègé and chosen successor of Bernard Hinault, five-time Tour winner and for my money the best grand tour rider who ever lived. Hinault and LeMond were teammates on the French Renault squad (Laurent Fignon, LeMond’s rival in 1989, was an up-and-coming rider on the same team), before Hinault left to start a new team, La Vie Claire.

La Vie Claire is famous for three things. First, it was only really a going concern for about three or four seasons before fading into irrelevance and eventually insolvency. Second, because Hinault and LeMond were there, it dominated grand tour racing in that short peak. Third, La Vie Claire had colorful Piet Mondrian-inspired jerseys that are generally considered to be the best in the history of the sport.

Hinault-LeMond is one of the sport’s great rivalries, an orgy of intra-team passive-aggressiveness and backstabbing that makes Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost look like Bert and Ernie. What makes Slaying the Badger so watchable is, yes, hearing the two protagonists (though mostly LeMond and his wife, Kathy) recount those days blow by blow.

But mostly, Slaying the Badger is great because it paints La Vie Claire as the most coked-up shit in the history of sports.

Everything about La Vie Claire was big, noisy, and messy in that wide-lapeled, Michael Mann-type mid-80s way. Directeur sportif Paul Köchli, a bespectacled Swiss coach who was brought on at Hinault’s urging, makes the Movistar leadership look like Bill Belichick. The best way I can characterize the team owner—businessman, politician, and sometime media personality Bernard Tapie—is that I’m surprised he never spent time in jail. After La Vie Claire, Tapie owned the Olympique Marseille soccer team, which won the Champions League and was accused of fixing a different match within a single eight-day period.

The MVP of Slaying the Badger is Andy Hampsten, the young American La Vie Claire rider who finished fourth at the 1986 Tour and later became the first American to win the Giro. Hampsten appears in the documentary to provide a neutral perspective on LeMond and Hinault; the two protagonists would offer wildly incendiary accounts of a certain incident, then the cameras would cut to Hampsten for something closer to the truth. And the whole time, Hampsten wears a hilarious look of bemusement, because he’d lived through just about everything the sport can throw at a person, and even with 30 years to process it, it’s like he still can’t believe some of the stuff that happened.

The hero of the story is LeMond, obviously, because this is an American documentary about an American athlete struggling against a French cycling public, large swaths of which hated him for being American. Also, because he was in the right more often than not.

I think there’s a tendency toward hagiography in treatment of LeMond. I get it. The 1989 Tour was an irresistible comeback story. And in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, LeMond as a public figure has always been strenuously, relentlessly moral. His refusal to countenance doping ended his career early, and his skepticism of Armstrong in particular—while highly controversial at the time—is one of the better-vindicated opinions in the history of sports takes.

You come away from Slaying the Badger liking LeMond, thinking he’s a good person, envying his adorably supportive and devoted marriage. (LeMond is the Michael Jordan of Wife Guys.) And yet, I get why the European cycling establishment thought he was so annoying.

Even in his own retelling of the story, and through what the directors of this pro-LeMond documentary show us, our hero is naïve, arrogant, and stubborn. Ironically for a cyclist, he doesn’t know when to pick his battles, so he ends up fighting everyone, all the time.

I almost burned the Salieri-Mozart reference on the Hamilton-Armstrong relationship, and I’m glad I didn’t, because it fits better here. (Not least because Amadeus is born of the same coked-up mid-80s maximalism as La Vie Claire.) The true genius of Amadeus is that seeing the story through Salieri’s eyes, you know he’s the badguy, the antihero, the smaller man, the manipulator, possibly even the murderer.

And yet by the end of the movie you want to kill Mozart too.

Slaying the Badger doesn’t go quite that far, but it does give the audience enough credit to show how exhausting the young LeMond must have been, and trust us to root for him anyway.

This should’ve been its own post, I’m realizing now. So go watch Slaying the Badger before I ruin any more of it for you.

Did I miss anything? Leave your recommendations for cycling books, movies, and docuseries in the comments.