Book: Significant Other,Riding Tour de France in English

Cycling is an anomaly of modern sport and has often confounded the unfamiliar. Neither properly individual nor strictly for teams, it sits awkwardly on the gaps between the normal categories. It imports aerospace and formula 1 technology only to make physical demands that drive body and mind to breaking point. It measures performance to the thousandth of a second, than lumps a hundred athletes or more into the same time as the swarm across the line. It obliges most of its players to renounce personal ambition for a tiny handful of leaders, yet disposes them in global rankings based on individual results. A strange half-breed of a sport, then, form whose awkward obscurity looms a pokerfaced figure with an athlete`s nervous tension and an long list of household chores: the domestique."