Sunday in Hell

William Fotheringham

Yellow Jersey, £16.99

review by Hugh MacDonald

PROFESSIONAL cycling is an exercise in obsession. It drives its competitors to early deaths from mysterious heart diseases, surrounds them in awe as they cycle for 21 days with a broken collarbone, reducing their teeth to stumps (good job, Tyler Hamilton), lures them into a world of syringes and transfusions and takes them on a journey that contains fleeting glory but regular, sometimes fatal, pain. All this and much else has made cycling a wonderful, profound seam for writers.

It is a sport that has produced some of the best literature, not just in biography but in reportage and even novels, with Tim Crabbe’s The Rider a credible contender for best sporting fiction book.

Yellow Jersey, the sporting imprint, has forged a path of publishing excellence by looking at form and then being prepared to take a punt. Sunday in Hell is steered by William Fotheringham, a practised, experienced and knowledgeable chronicler of cycling. His best book was his account of the death of Tom Simpson, the British cyclist, on Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France but he has written more than a dozen others. These, in cycling publishing terms, are the safest of hands.

Sunday in Hell, though, is a gamble. It is an intoxicating, sometimes enervating, oft-times stimulating, distillation of a cycling film. This is a book about a film about a race. It is an account of Danish director Jorgen Leth’s documentary on the Paris-Roubaix one-day race of 1976.

Leth’s film was also entitled Sunday in Hell and has attracted a faithful cycling audience over the decades. It is a fine sports documentary.

Aficionados will enjoy Fotheringham’s deliberate deconstruction of it, almost frame by frame. It is safe to say that any obsessive fan of Leth’s film is not

short-changed in matters of detail. There is, though, much for the general readership of Sunday in Hell, the book. It and the film’s premise is to show the fundamental madness of professional road racing. Both succeed although the book may require patience from those whose lives are not defined by road racing. Paris-Roubaix has gained its lustre through its ability to produce pain and extract blood. It is a beast of a race. It started in 1896 and has only taken a pause to accommodate two world wars. The pave sections – stretches of cobbles – make huge demands on the cyclists. Their handlebars shudder as if they were holding pneumatic drills, the wheels slip and slide on the slick, uneven surface. In the 1970s, it was traditional for more than 100 competitors to start and about 30 to 50 to finish.

Yet the great cyclists not only compete in the race but are determined to do so. Sir Bradley Wiggins, a cycling aristocrat now embroiled in the grubby matters of what drugs he used and when in his Tour de France triumph, grew up in London dreaming of competing in Paris-Roubaix. It was his last race for Team Sky 2015. “It is something to tell the kids,’’ said the man who also won an Olympic gold medal. The perennial winner had just finished 18th.

The race, then, has its dark attractions that Leth and Fotheringham both grasp in film and word. Their obsession is more than matched by those who climbed on to their bikes on that dusty day in 1976.

The details of the race, the vagaries of fortune, the disintegrating plans of men in the face of nature or punctured tyres, are all covered with an energy by Leth. Fotheringham follows faithfully, inviting tedium by digressions into the specifics of individual cameras.

My gratitude to Fotheringham’s fastidiousness can be limited; witness: “Within cycling, the generic term for a helicopter-mounted gyroscopically controlled camera is Wescam, but this in fact is only one of a number of such devices on the market…”

This quibble points to the greatest truth. It is not the bikes, the weather, the cobbles or the cameras that create the fascination. They are merely gathered to celebrate and briefly surround and capture the men, those ferocious, flawed and obsessed turners of wheels.

Leth and Fotheringham are at their best when these begrimed, fusty but glorious creatures come into focus, in lens or in paragraph. Paris-Roubaix 1976 had a stellar roster of enduring greatness: Merckx, Roger de Vlaeminck, Francesco Moser, Raymond Poulidor, Joop Zootemelk. In 1976, they all finished behind Marc Demeyer. The Belgian died five years later, aged 31, of a heart attack. It was the fate of many of his generation of road cyclists.

Obsession on two wheels produces great art and premature death. It is prissy to insist otherwise. It is almost impossible, too, to look away.