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

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It’s a meandering journey through French history, French geography, the Tour de France and it’s personalities. A scrap of newsreel film, a century old and two and a half minutes long, sweeps Ned Boulting back not just into the world of a forgotten hero of the Tour de France but into the forces that shaped that world: a collision of sport, war, family and destiny.

Beginning with a fragment of a century-old race, Ned has written a 'biography of the unknown rider'. Beeckman was a solid if ­unremarkable member of his cohort; his attack captured on film a rare occasion in which he especially troubled the limelight. 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. Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence - studying each frame, face and building - until he had squeezed the meaning from it.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.

There is the unsettling background of the covid pandemic distorting our sense of distance and connection. Boulting spends the years of the Covid shut down tracking down information about the 1923 Tour but also the identity of the riders who are on the film.Take these two pictures: Théo Beeckman, who tipped the scales at about 65 kilos for each of the Tours between 1922 and 1926.

A random auction purchase, combined with the stresses of COVID isolation, and we are taken back to midsummer 1923. I felt transported back with him to the very origins of bike racing and the world that created it ― David Millar.Quirky, perhaps a little esoteric but enchanting and (to me at least) fascinating account of a tiny and previously forgotten snippet of the 1923 Tour de France, but expanded to take in a much wider context. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Ned Boulting, a gifted commentator both on and off the bike racing, has written his own personal homage to the Tour de France 1923, intertwined with his personal journey through the Covid pandemic.