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The real issue here isn’t that Boulting isn’t aware that Thomann was an Alcyon subsidiary (never mind that it’s even on a rather well-known digital encyclopedia). It’s that, just because Boulting doesn’t understand it, the explanation is “lost to time, unreported and now unknowable.” Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence – studying each frame, face and building – until he had squeezed the meaning from it. It sets him off in fascinating directions, encompassing travelogue, history, mystery story – to explain, to go deeper into this moment in time, captured on his little film. 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. Menmuir uses all the poetic storytelling techniques honed in his Booker-longlisted career to imbue the wonderful The Draw of the Sea with a keen sense of place and purpose. Meeting beachcombers, gig rowers, surfers and freedivers while pondering his own family’s place in this wild landscape, he explores why we are driven to the water’s edge. Boutling says: “Once I mined the actual cycling content in the film of all I possibly could, establishing which identifiable characters are in it, reading around their biographies, then my eye got distracted and I started to see what was going on in France and Europe on that day and over that summer and that’s when the project started to balloon out of all proportion. This is such a poignant book. Ned Boulting is conjuring ghosts. I don't know of many things more thrilling than this. A wonderfully imaginative and evocative work - Philippe Auclair.
Witty, discursive, and tons of fun, Ned Boulting has the Tour De France under his skin, and you will too by the time you read this”—Al Murray In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathé news film from a London auction house. All he knew was it was film from the Tour de France, a long time ago. Once restored it became clear it was a short sequence of shots from stage 4 of the 1923 Tour de France. No longer than 2.5 minutes long, it featured half a dozen sequences, including a lone rider crossing a bridge. What it is: The clown prince of cycling commentary wipes off the greasepaint after acquiring a Pathé newsreel from the 1923 Tour and sets off on a voyage of discoveryNow with the ability to examine the film minutely, the author displays impressive research skills as he launches into what is a truly obsessive pursuit. In a world so narrowed by the pandemic, his desk becomes the nerve centre of this project as he goes through the film second-by-second.
Cycling is full of half-remembered forgotten heroes. Take my good friend Teddy Hale, the Irishman who wasn’t. I and others have tried to research and write about his story, have buried ourselves in the archives and spoken to his descendants and still we know little about this Englishman who won the 1896 Madison Square Garden International Six Day Race while pretending to be an Irishman. Following on from the success of his Bikeology tour, in 2018 Ned announced his newly revamped 'Tour de Ned'. A one-man theatrical cycling roadshow that tours the UK in conjunction with the Tour de France from 28 September - 17 November. [9] Since April 2020 Boulting has co-presented the podcast Streets Ahead with Adam Tranter and Laura Laker. The podcast involves discussions of active travel infrastructure and often includes interviewing guests.Damnations: Dispatches from the 101st Tour de France ( Yellow Jersey Press, 2014) ISBN 978-0224099936 is an exceptional book, with a story that seems to have no boundaries as it expands from that short film clip of something that happened a century ago to our modern world. A unique approach, thoughtfully and sympathetically written, and highly recommended. It looks like he is a wearing a wedding band, so it must have been taken after February 1925 [when he married]. But he is wearing a Griffon jersey, a team he reportedly left at the end of 1924.” a b Marquand, Rupert (11 August 2013). "Winning over the cycling audience". Bedfordshire on Sunday. I entered that into Google and it gave the simple response 1923, stage 4, but that wasn’t the end of the story. I didn’t know this at the time but for five years after the end of the First World War the Tour de France route was identical – of course now it changes every year. So my next confusion was that the film could have been from any one of five years and I had to figure out which one – that was hard work.”
How I Won the Yellow Jumper: Dispatches from the Tour de France ( Yellow Jersey Press, 2011) ISBN 978-0224083362 [11] Jump forward to July 8 and across France Boulting finds news of a four-year-old boy killed in Argenteuil, a plane crashing and killing its pilot in Le Havre, and a woman committing suicide in Nantes. Beginning with a fragment of a century-old race, Ned has written a 'biography of the unknown rider'. And in honouring him he's told us more about bike racing, the Tour and about Europe in the years between the wars than we'd ever have learned from a book about a star * Michael Hutchinson, racing cyclist and writer * I have no idea how Boulting managed to get this so wrong, missed Gallica’s captions and somehow dated the pictures to 1925. But wrong he got it. And then he went and compounded the error by making a mystery out of it, with eagle-eyed Ned spotting something he thinks significant in the picture with the bouquet:
Of course, the main focus is the Tour de France and its origins, personalities, history. The winner of the race in 1923 was Henri Pélissier. 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. Wearing the Yellow Jersey on this stage in 1923 was his teammate, Italian Ottavio Bottechia, who would go on to win the Tour in 1924 and 1925 before dying in mysterious circumstances. There are mini biographies of Tour riders, who would be made immortal for a few moments because of their Tour participation and then vanish from history. one of the most intelligent sporting books i have come across…the writing is compulsive, eloquently conveying the twists and turns of the story as it unfolds…excellent”—thewashingmachinepost Boulting was born in Andover, Hampshire [2] but moved to Bedford as a child. He attended Bedford School, where he studied for A-levels in French, German and English, before reading modern languages at Jesus College, Cambridge. [3] He is the grandson of film director John Boulting [4] Career [ edit ]
Boulting was also in a strange situation of possessing what turned out to be the only copy of this news reel in existence but with intellectual rights belonging to Pathé Cinema France. A sensible trade-off was reached with Boulting taking on the rights but Pathé then having a copy for its archives. After several "completely directionless" years, [3] his television career began in 1997 when he joined Sky Sports' Soccer Saturday alongside Jeff Stelling. He joined ITV Sports in 2001, and has covered a range of football events including the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and the FA Cup. He became a reporter for ITV's Tour de France coverage in 2003 and has reported at every Tour since, as well as on other cycling events including the Tour of Britain and the Vuelta a España. He also covered the London 2012 Summer Paralympics for Channel 4. [2] He was awarded the Royal Television Society's Sports News Reporter of the Year Award in 2006. [5] Boulting branched out into commentating in 2015, providing commentary for ITV4's coverage of the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire [6] and the Vuelta a España alongside David Millar. [7] Boulting and Millar commentated for ITV4 on the 2016 Tour de France and subsequent ones. [8] Still image from the Pathé news film of the fourth stage of the 1923 Tour de France which inspired the new book by Ned Boulting. That was in itself not a foregone conclusion at all,” says Boulting. “The film from that era predates celluloid so it was made of nitrate. Not only is it very brittle with the passing of age but also highly combustible, something I didn’t realise at the time but subsequently was pointed out to me – that even having it in my house would have invalidated my buildings insurance. It has been known in a raised temperature to spontaneously combust.”The film’s condition meant two to three months of sourcing the right specialist help but a facility in east London proved up to the task.
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