In celebrating its 20th year in business, clothing purveyor/cycling lifestyle enterprise Rapha not only published the superb “The Extra Mile,” recounting the firm’s history, but also has issued a second book, “Kings of Pain.” This title harks back to the earliest days of Rapha, when it hosted an exhibition of the same name celebrating the Golden Age of bike racing with posters, memorabilia and its own first clothing samples. This beautiful new book is both a retelling of that age of racing, but now extends it backwards to early days (the era of Bottechia & Co.) before moving into the 1950s and then ultimately reaching to the 1990s, by dipping into some of Rapha Editions’ previous books while also including new material.
In our recent review of “The Extra Mile”, that book revealed how Rapha founder Simon Mottram was entranced by the aesthetics of pro bike racing from the past, notably inspired by the black-and-white images from Phillipe Brunel’s seminal 1997 photo book “An Intimate Portrait of the Tour de France: Masters and Slaves of the Road.” “Kings of Pain” certainly echoes that earlier work and features many of the fabulous pictures that captured racing back in the day. These are surprisingly beautiful considering that they often show the exhaustion, the pain, the hunger of racers back then. We saw them trying to clean up in shabby hotel rooms after a grimy stage but also exuding glamour and power in snappy civilian clothes, hair immaculate.
The book is divided into four chronologically-arranged chapters, each starting with a general piece about the era before giving way to short profiles of the star riders, who truly were “Kings of Pain,” followed by photographs showing how they endured. For those new to bike racing history, this is a treasury of great images that capture each very distinctive epoch of competition.
As noted, some of the essays are from previous Rapha books but this does not make them less compelling on rereading. For example, in describing Gino Bartali in his book about a different racer (Franco Balmamion), author Herbie Sykes writes of Italian cycling:
“Before the Coppi-Bartali era, all but the very best cyclists had subsisted in penury by today’s standards. They rode inhuman distances from March to October, and were by and large fed, watered and feted for their suffering. Though poorly paid, the better ones could be reasonably certain of continuous employment for a few years, assuming they remained capable of the Herculean efforts required of them by their sponsors and public alike…..Though it seems barely credible today, the fine detail of bike races was an intrinsic element of daily life. The Italian peloton consisted of no more than 120 riders, and the minutiae of their performances was pored over by a rapacious public.”
Of course, both Bartali and Fausto Coppi are featured in the book, protagonists in arguably cycling’s greatest rivalry, along with others from those decades gone by whose exploits are perhaps not as well-remembered. Raphaël Géminiani, nicknamed “le Grand Fusil,” or “the Big Gun,” was part of an heroic cycling age that began in 1947 and after a noteworthy career as a rider went on to an impressive one as a team manager, leaving us only this past July aged 99. His colleagues on the road included a range of other unique characters, including: Charly Gaul, “the Angel of the Mountains,” an unpredictable Luxembourger who became a kind of forest hermit after his retirement; the hyper-senstive Louison Bobet, the first to win the Tour de France three times; Federico Bahomontes, perhaps cycling’s greatest climber if not descender; and the “Pedaler of Charm,” the Swiss rider Hugo Koblet.
Koblet’s story is one of a meteoric rise and dramatic collapse and here again Herbie Sykes relates this dramatic tale with compassion. Koblet, unlike his gawky countryman Ferdi Kübler of that golden generation, was a rider of infinite style and his ride on Stage 11 of the 1951 Tour may be one of the greatest of all time. He attacked after just 40 kms and held his lead for the next 135 kms, pursued by a group populated by names that are considered among the best ever of the era: Coppi, Bartali, Robic, Bobet, Magni. They could not catch him and he won the Tour that year, having won the Giro in 1950 as well. But he was never again to show the brilliant form of 1951 and although coming second in the Giro in 1953 and 1954 he was washed up at 30, retiring at 33. Six years later, penniless, overweight and depressed, he drove his Alfa-Romeo into a tree. Sykes writes: “Like that of his idol Coppi, his life was truncated in tragic circumstances, and the two of them remain the most enigmatic champions in cycling history…Hugo Koblet is largely forgotten even in his homeland, but his greatness (sporting and human) remains a matter of fact. Fleetingly and otherwise, he was every bit the equal of Fausto Coppi, and Coppi was the greatest road cyclist who ever lived.”
Moving into the 1960s and 1970s the next generation of riders featured in the book include those duelling Frenchmen, Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor, so different in temperament and public acclaim. There are racers of superb accomplishment, like Rik Van Looy, the first man to win all five Monuments (only two others, also Belgians, have ever managed this) and Tom Simpson, the outsider from England, as superb racer mainly remembered for his dramatic end at the Tour in July 1967 on Mont Ventoux. The chapter also includes the inescapable Eddy Merckx of course, but also his interesting teammate, Italo Zilioli, whose own accomplishments have been overshadowed by his ending up in the Yellow Jersey for six days during the 1970 Tour when he could conceivably have beaten Merckx but it was not to be. “It was only a matter of time before Eddy took the jersey anyway. Zilioli isn’t much given to nostalgia and, aged 82, he still prefers cycling to talking about cycling. The bike he rides is an Eddy Merckx, because what’s an extra day in yellow between friends?”
The book’s final section looks back four decades with names more familiar: Hinault, Fignon, Lemond, Pantani, all of whom were not unused to suffering. Hinault, with his frozen hands at L-B-L in 1980; Fignon losing the 1989 Tour to Lemond by 8 seconds on the final stage; Lemond’s own dice with death after being accidentally shot in 1987; and Pantani, ah, Marco: winner of both the Tour and the Giro in 1998 in spite of life-threatening injuries over his career. He was to end alone in hotel room, dead of a cocaine overdose twenty years ago, aged 34. But the other riders featured here have happier tales: the apparently indestructible Sean Kelly, King of the Classics, and one my all-time favourite riders, Eros Poli.
Eros Poli, riding for Mercatone Uno as a domestique for Mario Cipollini in 1994, did the unexpected by winning Stage 15 of the Tour up Mont Ventoux. Cipollini had already dropped out of the Tour so with no sprinter to protect Poli, a very good time triallist, figured if he went early on the attack he might do the impossible. Given his size (85 kg and 6 feet 5 inches tall) none of the climbers considered him a threat but on that glorious day and he certainly suffered in the final uphill kilometers. “Every ascent of the Ventoux is a story, every climb a novel, every stage a movie.” And so Eros Poli got to the top, “launched himself downhill, to win the stage, to enter history, to forever more be known as “Mister Ventoux.” So true—when I met this jovial giant in 2012, he shook my hand and introduced himself by saying: “I’m Eros Poli. I won the stage up Mont Ventoux.”
For those of us who love cycling history and beautiful books, “Kings of Pain” make us all winners.
“Kings of Pain” by Guy Andrews, Isabel Best, Paul Fournel, Andy McGrath, Colin O’Brien, Marco
Pastonesi and Herbie Sykes
240 pp., profusely illustrated, hardcover
Rapha Editions, London, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-912164-17-2
- Available through the Rapha Bookstore at: www.rapha.cc
We have previously reviewed other Rapha Editions books with sections featured in “Kings of Pain” and three of these are still available at the Rapha Bookstore. Here are our original reviews, going back several years!
PEZ Bookshelf: Balmamion
https://pezcyclingnews.com/features/pez-bookshelf-balmamion/
PEZ Bookshelf: Raincoats are for Tourists the Racing Secrets of Raphael Geminiani
https://pezcyclingnews.com/features/pez-bookshelf-raincoats-are-for-tourists-the-racing-secrets-of-raphael-geminiani/
PEZ Bookshelf: Marco Pantani was a God
https://pezcyclingnews.com/features/marco-pantani-was-a-god-book-review/
The post PEZ Bookshelf: “Kings of Pain” appeared first on PezCycling News.
