The Rider - Tim Krabbe

The Rider
Tim Krabbe
1978
Bloomsbury Publishing


The Rider, by leading Dutch author Tim Krabbe, is one of the greatest sporting novels ever written. Do not worry that it concerns a sport you probably have little experience of, be assured instead that it gets to the very heart of why we all compete or feel admiration for those that compete themselves. This book stands up on its literary hind legs and barks, and not many sporting tomes can do that.

Published in 1978 but only recently translated into English, it captures a European sporting world of the late 1970s both starkly alien and vividly familiar at the same time. It is a fictional account by a rider in the Tour de Mont Aigoual, set in the Cevennes region of south-west France. Much of the prose is taken up with the narrator’s description of his day of racing but there is another voice, namely his inner mind, and the frantic, exhausted, defeated and triumphant lurches that it makes.

We’ve all heard it, whether cycling, running or playing football. The promises you make to never do this again as the pain sears through your heart and legs, or the commentary you conduct on yourself as you put your body through its rehearsed paces. Krabbe catches this tone perfectly but in taut, existential sentences that capture the rhythm of cycle racing. As he and the riders sweep past some spectators he notes “non-racers, the emptiness of their lives shocks me.” It is a line you can imagine most sportsmen thinking as they observe the braying crowds.

You will soon learn about the other leading riders in the race, some of whom have names, some of whom are identified by their build or the colour of their sweat-soaked jersey, while the story captures the changing landscape of the race, from the summer bustle of the town where the race starts, to the rainy plateau high in the Cevennes, to daring descents on deserted country roads. In a mere 150 or so pages you will go from having little idea who anyone in the race is, to a detailed mental picture of the shattered peloton spread over the hills and mountains of the tour.

More than anything, it is a novel of movement and brutal effort, and in that sense it is a metaphor for life. As the song goes: “I don’t care how you get there, just get there if you can”.

12.12.2007. 21:02

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