The Rider

Hovering ambiguously somewhere between memoir and fiction, The Rider is a purported account of a single bicycle race, the Tour de Mont Aigoual, set in the Cevennes region of south-west France.

The Rider

Hovering ambiguously somewhere between memoir and fiction, The Rider is a purported account of a single bicycle race, the Tour de Mont Aigoual, set in the Cevennes region of south-west France. First published in its original Dutch edition in 1978, it was not translated into English for nearly a quarter of a century and then on the back of the novel of mystery and suspense for which Tim Krabbé is perhaps best known, The Vanishing — twice adapted for the big screen.

The Rider, though, is Krabbé’s bestselling book back in his native Holland, and deservedly so. While his other fiction shows a superb command of narrative — few can match him for the virtuosity of his plot twists and tautness of his prose — there is a discursive, meditative quality to The Rider that makes it not just an account of a bike race but a metaphysical adventure. It is an existentialist novel in the grand European tradition of Camus and Beckett. Even the looming vistas of the Causses, the high plateaus through which the Tour winds, seem to echo the bleak landscape of the narrator’s inner journey of exploration.

The Rider is peppered with anecdote and lore from the world of cycling, not drawn from recent history, of course, but concerning the heroes of the sixties, fifties and beyond. Stories that are not intended to be morally edifying or spiritually uplifting but that illustrate both the cruelty and strange camaraderie of cycle-racing. All of the key protagonists in The Rider — Barthélemy, Reilhan, Kléber, Lebusque, "the rider from Cycles Goff" and, above all, "Krabbé" himself — are tested in the crucible of this brutal bike race. The physical extremity of their privation and suffering as they battle it out in the mountains of the Cevennes can only be compared to men’s experience of war. With typical economy, Krabbé composes an epic in less than 150 pages. It is a hymn to the human body, the realm of pure self-experience that only the true athlete knows.

‘Kilometer 75-78. The fields are a dry yellow and light green. Endless fences lean crookedly across the landscape. To keep something out of the wind? The road is narrow and rolling. Uphill or down, you can’t sort it out, it drives you crazy. We shift, we stand on the pedals when we get too lazy to shift again. The sky up ahead is black. No one is watching us. More than two hours to go.

One by one they slide past me, on their way to work up front, and then back through the lee to the rear. A sentence for my racing logbook formulates itself: ‘Pace line worked together passably well.’ That’s laying it on thick. The pulls are irregular and the steering’s bad; they’re better at this back in Holland.

I think they’re all still going strong, but of course that’s because I don’t know what to look for. Ab Geldermans tells about how, when he was Jan Janssen’s team director in the Tour de France, he was able to signal to Jan, during climbs for instance, that one of his rivals was scraping bottom. Jan would pick up the pace a little and have one less rival. Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilisation. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what’s your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death.’

The Rider is particularly acute at observing the grim tactical calculus that is a constant of any race: who has the best legs, which wheel to follow, when to attack? But out of that ruthless evolutionary struggle - literally, a survival of the fittest - something beautiful emerges. Like Roland Barthes, the French philosopher who wrote about the Tour de France as the perfect modern myth, Krabbé realised that the bicycle race has a natural narrative structure. If you have ever watched Jørgen Leth’s classic film of the same era, A Sunday in Hell, a documentary about the Paris-Roubaix, you will appreciate the point. But better still, Krabbé dramatises the bike race and brings it to life. He gives his characters a subjectivity that film can only hint at or hope for.

When you watch the Tour de France, so much is seen from the helicopter’s point of view or, at best, from the back of a motorbike. Krabbé’s haunting novella provides what no technology can: the intimacy of what it actually feels like to race. And more than that: what it really means.

Find out why The Rider matters to Rapha

Matt Seaton has written for numerous newspapers and magazines including The Guardian and Esquire. He is the author of The Escape Artist (Fourth Estate, 2002) and co-edited and contributed to Ruth Picardie’s Before I Say Goodbye (Penguin 1998).