Self-confessed loafer Tim Moore, seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, sets out to cycle the Tour de France. All 3,630km of it.
A few weeks before the actual Tour de France, British writer Tim Moore sets out to cycle the course and offers a laugh-out-loud funny and highly entertaining account of how the great ride would feel when embarked on by an amateur. Racing old men on butchers bikes and being chased by cows, Moore soon resorts to standard race tactics — cheating and drugs — in a hilarious and moving tale of true adventure.
Once or twice a generation, an athlete transcends his sport — at last, heres Seve Ballesteros in his own words
There are golfers, and there are golfers. And then theres Seve.
Severiano Ballesteros was perhaps the most naturally gifted golfer ever to have walked a fairway. From the moment his brother Manuel gave him his first club he was unstoppable. A few weeks before his seventeenth birthday he turned pro. Five years later he won the Open. A genius had arrived.
For the best part of two decades Seve dominated the golfing landscape. He played shots others could only dream of. With 94 wins as a professional (including 5 majors) he was a phenomenon, an athlete who transcended his sport.
But Seve stood for more than simple excellence. Almost single-handedly, Seve gave European golf credibility; almost single-handedly, he made the Ryder Cup one of the greatest contests in world sport. And when, as captain, he finally lifted the trophy on home soil in 1997, a whole continent rejoiced. His pride and passion have inspired millions, and we have taken him to our hearts.
Here, for the first time, Seve tells his own story. From his humble beginnings right up to the present day, here at last is the man behind the magic in his own words. Seve is utterly entertaining, blazingly charismatic and unique.
Severiano «Seve» Ballesteros Sota was a Spanish professional golfer and a leading sports figure. He won more than 90 international tournaments in an illustrious career. He first caught the attention of the sporting world in 1976, when at the age of 19 he finished second at The Open. He played a leading role in the re-emergence of European golf, helping the European Ryder Cup team to five wins both as a player and captain. He won the World Match Play Championship a record-tying five times. He is generally regarded as the greatest Continental European golfer of all time and won a record 50 times on the European Tour.
Paris, 4 July 2003: My first Tour de France. I had never seen a bike race. I had only vaguely heard of Lance Armstrong. I had no idea what I was doing there. Yet, that day I was broadcasting live on television. I fumbled my way through a few platitudes, before summing up with the words, "...Dave Millar just missing out on the Yellow Jumper. " Yes, the Yellow Jumper.
Follow Ned Boultings (occasionally excruciating) experiences covering the worlds most famous cycling race. His story offers an insiders view of what really goes on behind the scenes of the Tour. From up-close-and-personal encounters with Lance Armstrong to bewildered mishaps with the local cuisine, Neds been there, done that and got the crumpled-looking t-shirt.
Eight Tours on from Neds humbling debut, he has grown to respect, mock, adore and crave the race in equal measure. Whats more, he has even started to understand it.
Includes How Cav Won the Green Jersey: Short Dispatches from the 2011 Tour de France
As a teenager, Cox dreamed of sporting immortality. For four years he devoted himself to the game of golf. And then, one day, he walked away. But as he got older, those dreams kept coming back. Perhaps it was turning thirty, perhaps it was having his first hole in one, but he decided it was time to start again, to live the dream for real.
So he switched off his computer, grabbed his checked trouser and headed for the golf course. To turn pro. The Open Championship was only five of the best rounds of his life away, and given a few warm-up tournaments, how hard could it be?
A social history of 1980s Britain, told through the sport of the time.
Travel back to the 1980s — to Bothams Ashes and the Brixton riots; the Moscow Olympics and the miners strike; the Crucible Theatre and the Falklands — to explore how we got to where we are now. Discover how sport became fully entwined in our national story; how sporting heroes were made, and destroyed; how wars were fought on the pitch; and how sport responded to — and drove cultural change in — our society.
From Sebastian Coe to Margaret Thatcher, John Barnes to the ZX Spectrum, Martina Navratilova to Section 28, Everybody Wants to Rule the World speaks to our treasured memories of eighties sports while also throwing light on where things went deeply wrong. In so doing it tells nothing less than the story of how British sport came into the modern era.
Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each others black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, it is an essential expression of the Japanese sensibility. And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and invincible Master and a younger, more progressive challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the twentieth century.
The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otakй, is waged over several months and layered in ceremony. But beneath the games decorum lie tensions that consume not only the players themselves but their families and friends — tensions that turn this particular contest into a duel that can only end in one mans death. Luminous in its detail, both suspenseful and serene, The Master of Go is an elegy for an entire society, written with the poetic economy and psychological acumen that brought Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The definitive biography of Jurgen Klopp.
Jurgen Klopp was confirmed as manager of Liverpool FC in October 2015 to a rapturous reception. His super-sized personality and all-or-nothing style of football and management made him the perfect choice to pump up the volume at Anfield and lift Liverpool out of a slump.
Fans and club officials were delighted to get the coach theyd long admired from afar and eager to see the impact he would have on the club and the Premier League.
Klopp is the manager to turn players into winners. Hes authentic, approachable and funny, charming media and fans alike. Hes also merciless and exceptionally driven, his quick temper bubbling away barely under the surface. Klopps pitch-side passion has enthralled fans, leading to 2019s triumphant Champions League win and culminating in 2020 Premier League victory
With exclusive access to Klopps friends, family, colleagues and players, Raphael Honigstein goes behind-the-scenes at Liverpool to tell the definitive story of Klopps career and how he brought Liverpool to victory.
The Fall of the House of Fifa is the definitive story of Fifas rise and the most spectacular fall sport has ever seen.
For forty years Joao Havelange and then Sepp Blatter presided over a Fifa now plagued with scandal — dawn raids, FBI investigations, allegations of money laundering, industrial-scale bribery, racketeering, tax evasion, vote-buying and theft. Now David Conn, footballs most respected investigative journalist, chronicles the extraordinary history and staggering scale of corruption. He paints revealing portraits of the men at the centre of Fifa — the power brokers, the indicted, the legends like Franz Beckenbauer and Michel Platini — and puts the allegations to Blatter himself in an extended interview.
The definitive biography of one of the greatest, most extraordinary runners and Olympic heroes of all time, from the author of running classic Feet in the Clouds.
Emil Zatopek won five Olympic medals, set 18 world records, and went undefeated over 10,000 metres for six years. He redefined the boundaries of endurance, training in Army boots, in snow, in sand, in darkness. But his toughness was matched by a spirit of friendship and a joie de vivre that transcended the darkest days of the Cold War.
His triumphs put his country on the map, yet when Soviet tanks moved in to crush Czechoslovakias new freedoms in 1968, Zatopek paid a heavy personal price for his brave defence of socialism with a human face. Rehabilitated two decades later, he was a shadow of the man he had been — and the world had all but forgotten him.
Today We Die A Little strips away the myths to tell the complex and deeply moving story of the most inspiring Olympic hero of them all.
Richard Askwith wanted more. Not convinced running had to be all about pounding pavements, buying fancy kit and racking up extreme challenges, he looked for ways to liberate himself. His solution: running through muddy fields and up rocky fells, running with his dog at dawn, running because hes being (voluntarily) chased by a pack of bloodhounds, running to get hopelessly, enjoyably lost, running fast for the sheer thrill of it. Running as nature intended.
Part diary of a year running through the Northamptonshire countryside, part exploration of why we love to run without limits, Running Free is an eloquent and inspiring account of running in a forgotten, rural way, observing wildlife and celebrating the joys of nature.
An opponent of the commercialisation of running, Askwith offers a welcome alternative, with practical tips (learned the hard way) on how to both start and keep running naturally — from thawing frozen toes to avoiding a stampede when crossing a field of cows. Running Free is about getting back to the basics of why we love to run.
Do you believe some people are born athletes?
Is sporting talent innate or something that can be achieved through endurance and practise?
In this ground-breaking and entertaining exploration of athletic success, award-winning writer David Epstein gets to the heart of the great nature vs. nurture debate, and explodes myths about how and why humans excel.
Along the way, Epstein:
— Exposes the flaws in the so-called 10,000-hour rule that states that rigorous practice from a young age is the only route to success.
— Shows why some skills that we imagine are innate are not — like the bullet-fast reactions of a baseball player.
— Uncovers why other characteristics that we assume are entirely voluntary, like the motivation to practice, might in fact have important genetic components.
Throughout, The Sports Gene forces us to rethink the very nature of success.
What makes a man the greatest of all time? Eddy Merckx is to cycling what Muhammad Ali is to boxing or Pele to football: quite simply, the best there has ever been.
Merckx was a machine. It wasnt just the number of victories (445); it was his remorseless domination that created the legend. He didnt just beat his opponents, he crushed them. But his triumphs only tell half a story that includes horrific injury, a doping controversy and tragedy. He was nicknamed The Cannibal for his insatiable appetite for victory, but the moniker did scant justice to a man who was handsome, sensitive and surprisingly anxious. Britains leading cycling writer, William Fotheringham, goes back to speak to those who were there at the time and those who knew Merckx best to find out what made Eddy Merckx so invincible.
In the state of Texas American football is a religion. And nowhere is more fanatical about its football than the small town of Odessa. There, every Friday night from September to November, a bunch of seventeen-year-old kids play their hearts out for the honour of their high school. In front of 20,000 people.
In 1988 H.G. Bissinger spent a season in Odessa discovering just what makes a town pin its hopes on eleven boys on a football field. He lived with the students, coaches and townspeople who dedicate their lives to their team, sharing their joys and triumphs, their pains, injuries and bitter disappointments. He returned with a compassionate but hard-eyed story of a town riven by money, race and class, where a high school can spend more on medical supplies for its athletic program than on its English department.
Friday Night Lights is one of the best books about sport ever written. It is the story of how dreams and reality collide, at once glorious and immensely sad. Because for the 30-odd boys of the Permian Panthers, these days will have been the best of their lives.