Gironimo! Riding the very terrible 1914 Tour of Italy

There are many sensible reasons the British travel writer and humorist Tim Moore cycled the 1914 route of the Giro d'ltalia (the Tour of Italy) wearing antique woolen biking shorts held up by a safety pin, on a bike with wine corks for brakes, wooden rims, no gears and 100-year-old parts. To truly understand those reasons, though, it helps to be a cyclist. Because, after writing about the sport for the past decade, I've learned that cyclists know a thing or two about tackling daunting physical feats just to prove a point. (Like going out for a six-hour training ride because a five-hour ride simply won't do.) And to understand Moore's motivation, it might also help if you're in the throes of a midlife crisis, as he was. You don't, however, have to be into cycling to reap the benefits of "Gironimo! Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy" - which can be considered a follow-up to Moore's 2002 book, "French Revolutions," his account of riding the 2000 Tour de France route. In this new book, Moore mixes a narrative about one of cycling's toughest races ever (81 riders started, only eight finished) with an entertaining and jauntily written travelogue that at times made me laugh out loud. Moore starts slowly, as if he were cycling up a steep incline, describing how he gathered the parts to build his soon-to-be-beloved 100-year-old Hirondelle No. 7 bicycle. But then there's an entertaining glide all the way to the book's end. Moore's effort to retrace the 1914 Giro is rife with calamity, as it should be on a bike that is falling apart, mile by bumpy, dusty and occasionally frightfully steep Italian mile. Early in a 1,965-mile Milan-to-Milan journey that will take him through several picturesque and historic parts of Italy, the nose of his ancient leather bike seat breaks off, leaving nothing but a protruding rod of metal where padding is surely needed. Later, Moore himself begins to deteriorate. He is 48 years old and must deal with a bum right knee and another very unfortunate ailment: "All men of my age and above have a duty to carry at least one chronic, long-term malaise, and mine is syphilis." He continues: "No, hang on - it's kidney stones." It's that kind of levity that is missing from Max Leonard's "Lanterne Rouge: The Last Man in the Tour de France." While Moore's book can be read by people who don't know the first thing about cycling, Leonard's seems aimed more toward the kind of person who can name the last rider to win both the Giro and the Tour in the same year. (Marco Pantani in 1998.) "Lanterne Rouge" has a promising premise: It's a book about the men who have finished last in the Tour de France, the three-week race that is cycling's crown jewel. The idea offered Leonard, the author of the City Cycling Europe guides, the chance to delve into the psyches of the cyclists who, for one reason or another, pedal on and on and on, sometimes with miles between them and the next cyclist at the Tour, struggling to keep going so they don't miss the cut. Leonard says he wants to ask them: "What keeps you - keeps us all - going?" In the end, though, I don't think he found a deep enough answer. In its place, he gives us a meticulously researched history chock-full of names, names and more names, and race information, featuring mini-profiles of several men who have been last-place finishers in the race and are called lanternes rouges. To be sure, many of the last-place cyclists are fascinating eccentrics: There's the Algerian Muslim rider accused of drinking too much wine and passing out under a tree - he didn't knowingly imbibe, he swears! - and the French star who continued the Tour even after his leg was run over by a car. There's also the serial lanterne rouge from Belgium, who was too busy dealing with his real life to be worried about a huge doping scandal surrounding the 2006 Tour because, as he told Leonard, "I was buying my farm on the telephone!" To which Leonard writes, "Talk about down to earth." But those portraits must compete with parts of the book that will fly over the heads of readers not familiar with cycling. Leonard uses phrases like, "As anyone who has ever done intervals on a turbo trainer will understand." He quotes a rider saying, "At that time, we'd climb in a 41x23 or 41x22, while today riders want a 39x25." (A footnote explains that those numbers refer to the teeth on a bike's chain ring and the teeth "on the biggest cog on the cassette at the back.") By contrast, when Moore uses inside cycling talk - which is not often - he takes the time to explain it. Mostly, he writes in easily accessible language. What's it like to ride into a headwind? Moore says: "There's an insufferable impertinence about a headwind, shoving you rudely in the chest like some bouncer's massive hand: And where d'you think you're going, sunshine?" His explanation of the challenge of the 1914 Giro is one any reader can grasp. It was so difficult, Moore says, that it forced him to channel "the spirit of every famously unflappable character I could think of," including Mr. Spock and Angela Merkel. Moore admits he cried during the harder legs of the race. After some long days, he was so tired he could barely speak. "I must have looked like Frankenstein's monster gazing in wonder at his first daisy, just before he drowns that little girl," he says. Along the way, one hilltop town bustled with song, as well as "happy people" eating gelato while "The Lion King's" "Circle of Life" blasted from a car. Another stop included a tourist walk through the military cemetery at Monte Cassino, the bloody World War II battleground. With Moore as your guide, you may want to hurry over to Italy on the next flight out. Despite the upsides of his trip, however, the feeling a reader will probably take away from Moore's Giro is one of pain, and unnecessary pain at that. Moore blames Lance Armstrong. If not for Armstrong, he says, he would never have ridden the Giro in the first place. Moore, you see, was incensed that Armstrong made riding the 2000 Tour look so easy. (Because Armstrong, you see, was doping.) Just a month before the 2000 Tour, Moore had ridden on those same roads, and suffered like a child conscripted into forced labor. So, in a sense, Armstrong had belittled Moore's personal Tour feat, and thus became "Horrid Lance" and "the cheatingest cheat in Cheatsville." Moore says, "I had pushed myself to the vomity edge of my capabilities riding the Tour route, and now people would look at these focused cyclobots pedaling calmly around it and think: Meh." In riding the 1914 course, he was attempting to stick it to Armstrong, and to the riders of Armstrong's drug generation, who had made a mockery of a sport built by unbreakable men. That 1914 edition of the Giro was, as Moore puts it, "a hard race for proper heroes, which you could win on guts alone without looking the part, which was everything Lance Armstrong wasn't." (Though not really guts alone: Sorry, Mr. Moore, but guts together with rat poison, among other products, used to dull pain.) Armstrong raced the Giro only once, in 2009, and finished 12th on a high-tech bike with a team to support him. But Moore? He did it on an old-timey bike, without carbon fiber, teammates or drugs. Just will. And kidney stones. One French star continued the Tour de France even after his leg was run over by a car. JULIET MACUR is a sports columnist for The Times. Her book, "Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong," was recently published in paperback.

*Starred Review* Disgusted by the Lance Armstrong scandal and disappointed in the dispassionate, technology-driven cycling world, British humorist Moore challenges himself to ride the route of the 1914 Giro d'Italia, a grueling 3,000-­kilometer race that many consider the most harrowing contest in cycling history. Moore's desire for authenticity begins with a box of century-old bicycle parts and gear wooden rims, wine-cork brake pads, and period clothing among them from which he will outfit his bike and himself as closely as possible to the original racers. Luckily for Moore, Italians revere cycling, and as he trundles his way through the route, residents applaud and shout old style to encourage him onward. Moore's journey is peppered with self-deprecating humor, and his interactions with the people he encounters and charming towns he visits are very entertaining. Readers may tire of the repeated references to the state of his intimate parts, but, as in his previous cycling book, French Revolutions (2002), Moore's patented combination of humor and travelogue proves thoroughly engaging.--Clark, Craig Copyright 2015 Booklist