Tim Krabbe The Rider Pdf Download
Jemima Torguson
I second that. I must have read this one 6 or 7 years ago and it was indeed a nice and captivating read. One thing I clearly remember that Tim refers to a well known rider all the time, without giving his name. It drove me nuts to no end at the time! I bet I am not alone in my curiosity for who he is or was, fiction or not.
Over the past six months, in which I've tried to write about current and classic cycling books, there's a few I've been avoiding. Sometimes you like something too much to be in any way objective about it. So whatever I'm about to tell you about why The Rider is so good, you can't trust me. I won't even pretend to be objective when it comes to this book.
To counter that, let me point you at The Complete Review, where you'll find a round-up of reviews, as well their own take on The Rider. While describing it as "a great example of what a sports-book can be" they do find it has one major flaw: "given that it is now hard to believe that any world-class road-racer of the past decades didn't rely heavily on performance-enhancing products the purity of the sport as described by Krabb does look a bit too idyllic to be believable."
I'll confess another reason for shying away from The Rider: there's an awful lot of pretentious shite been written about this book. Try this: "He could have been a wheel, and how hath execration come to mimic a vitamin deficiency slaked? Advanced velocity is a choir of exultation that resides in the veins and arteries. Perfect pitch, hissing tires and air disturbed chorally by spokes, calling out to one's receptive mind like a loon on a dark lake." If I ever meet the man who wrote that I'm going to whack him upside the head with a rolled up copy of l'Equipe. Hopefully what follows here won't give you cause to want to do the same to me.
Before looking at the book itself, a quick word about the author. The usual biographical sketch of Krabb tells of his chess playing and a couple of his other novels, one of which birthed a cult art house film and its crass American remake. If you want more, read Jane Sullivan's profile-cum-interview for the The Age, from back in 2006. One point from that interview worth noting is Krabb's liking for Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster. Murakami might come to your mind for his What I Think About When I Think About Running. The Rider is things Krabb thinks about when he thinks about riding.
Auster is relevant, for the way he sometimes places himself inside his own novels. Krabb's narrator is called Tim Krabb and shares many traits with the author himself. So you'll often see The Rider described as being either autobiographical or a memoir masquerading as a novel. Most novelists I've met hate when you do that and point out how such a reductive description is an insult to the power of the imagination. Novel writing courses are, after all, called creative writing courses. There is nothing creative in writing non-fiction, or certainly that seems to be the suggestion. And because that pisses me off, normally I'll happily wind a novelist up by asking about a story's basis in reality, suggesting the novel is more an act of memory than imagination.
The Rider though is an act of the imagination and not of memory. It shouldn't be confused with memoir or autobiography. William Fotheringham, commenting on the way Krabb's rider lets his mind wander this way and that over the course of the novel, makes the observation that "if any cyclist actually thought that much he'd be too distracted to compete." But the point for most of us who love The Rider is that Krabb's wandering imagination feels real. Most of us, I think, will identify with moments from the narrative. What Krabb has done is render reality the way we wish it were, not necessarily the way it is.
So what's The Rider about then? It's a fictionalised account of the 1977 Tour de Mont Aigoual, a one-hundred-and-thirty-seven kilometre club race through the Cvennes, down in the South of France. Four-and-a-half hours' racing for its fifty-three amateur competitors. Mont Aigoual is real, a fifteen-hundred metre bump that occasionally features in the Tour de France and other races. But 1977? Thirty-three years on, that feels unreal.
Back then brake-cables snaked up over your handlebars. Gear levers were mounted on your down-tube. Shifting was by feel, like finding the biting point between the clutch and the accelerator on a motorcar. Blocks had six cogs on them. Jerseys and shorts were woollen. You protected your head with a little cotton casquette. And your feet were held on the pedal by cleats in your shoe, little metal cages and those leather straps you sometimes use to hold your spare tube behind your saddle. It was a positively antediluvian time. How people coped with such antiquated equipment I don't know.
Foreign as all that may seem, all the real action in The Rider takes place in the head of Krabb's rider. Take away your own Oakleys and your hardshell and you'll recognise that head clearly, it hasn't changed much down through the years. It's the stuff that goes through the head of Krabb's rider that makes The Rider such a fun read. Stuff that goes through his head during the race, and stuff that goes through his head as he recounts the race. You've got bits of the race itself mixed with memories of earlier races. Bits of cycling lore sit side-by-side with observations on cycling, cyclists and roadside fans.
The bits of cycling lore I love. Cycling is all about story telling. All that stuff that happens on the road, that's just the basic raw material for the construction of cycling stories. We love the myths of our sport. Take a story Krabb tells of Jacques Anquetil. On a climb, Matre Jacques would take his bidon from its cage and place it in the pocket of his jersey. Eventually, a team-mate, Ab Geldermans, had to ask him why: "A rider, Anquetil said, is made up of two parts, a person and a bike. The bike, of course, is the instrument the person uses to go faster, but its weight also slows him down. That really counts when the going gets tough, and in climbing the thing is to make sure the bike is as light as possible. A good way to do that is: take the bidon out of its holder."
What really works - for me at least - is the elegance with which Krabb drops the lore into the tale. Take that Anquetil story. There's a purpose to it, it's not just a moment of light relief. It's a story about the power of belief: "What Anquetil needed was faith. And nothing is better for a firm and solid faith than being in the wrong. [...] If they'd forbidden Anquetil to put his bidon in his back pocket, he would never have won the Tour de France."
There's another part to that Anquetil story, offered more than a hundred pages on. Krabb had been told the tale by Geldermans. But when he started to pay attention to pictures of Anquetil climbing, he noticed the bidon was always in its cage, not Anquetil's back pocket: "Geldermans' story strikes to the soul of the rider, and is therefore true. Those pictures are inaccurate." Similarly, Krabb notes how the monument to Tom Simpson on the Ventoux is sited more than a kilometre further up the mountain from where the Briton died: "Rightly so. More tragic. The facts miss the heart of the matter; to give us a clear picture, the facts need a vehicle, an anecdote." And there you have one of the themes of The Rider. It's a story about story telling, told through telling stories.
Krabb squeezes in a lot of old cycling lore. But he does it by letting it grow organically out of the basic story, it's not lore just for the sake of lore. He retells the story of Oskar Egg, crawling around a vlodrome on his hands and knees with a yard stick, in order to measure the track's length. He drops that in when talking of his early days as a cyclist, in an age before speedometers held all the answers and he wanted to know how far he'd cycled. Or he tells the story of Bernard Hinault flying off the road in the 1977 Dauphin Libr, scrambling up out of a ravine, mounting a new bike and going on to win the stage and the race itself. That tale is told when he talks of his own fear of crashing on a descent. There's an elegance to the way Krabb delivers these stories, makes them fit his bigger story.
There's another part of Krabb's elegance I like. He talks about cycling the way a cyclist talks about cycling. Something I hate about a lot of cycling books - particularly a lot of the recent ones - is the way everything is explained for the non-cyclist. The word peloton is explained. The physics of drafting is explained. Everything is explained. Every time I pick up one of those books I feel like the author is treating me like an idiot. I understand that they're writing for a non-cycling audience, but I still hate the way everything is dumbed down to first principles. Krabb too is writing for non-cyclists. But when he explains the physics of drafting he does so by burying it in stories from his first races. His explanations come by the by. They're part of the tale.
Here I should also mention Sam Garret's translation. It goes without saying that I've never read the original Dutch novel, De Renner. Dutch is all Greek to me and I think I've previously demonstrated my incompetence with it. I don't know how true Garrett's translation is, but I do know it feels real. Garrett obviously has a feel for the sport. He doesn't translate bidon into water-bottle, or peloton into pack. And he doesn't even translate kilometres into miles. If you've ever read Richard Howard's translation of Roland Barthes' Tour de France essay, you'll know what a piss-poor effort a non-cyclist can make of rendering continental cycling-speak into English. Garrett does not fall into that trap.
Is The Rider about anything beyond being a story of a rider in a race, or a tale about telling tales? Yes, but don't let that put you off. If all you want is a novel about cycling laced with cycling lore, you don't have to take anything more from The Rider than that. If you're looking for more, take this passage, from midway or so through the race, when Krabb and another rider are suffering on a climb. Ahead of them is a group of fans:
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