On Tour

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'There is me trailing home 131st and, for all I know, I might be a top 50 rider if we all started on a level playing field . . . Bollocks to you all. You are a bunch of cheating bastards. At least I can look myself in the mirror.' Bradley Wiggins contemplates Floyd Landis testing positive for testosterone in the 2006 Tour de France. This 2010 account was an instant book published in the autumn following the Tour. Part day-by-day diary, it includes wider, deeper reflections on the history of the Tour, its famous figures and what they mean to him and is also illustrated with Scott Mitchell's atmospheric, black and white photography. The Tour was featured in Wiggins's 2008 autobiography, In Pursuit of Glory, but really only in the light of a scandal he was caught up in at the time. The emphasis of his previous memoir was very much on his childhood, his father and track cycling at the Olympics; here, Wiggins' new found love of road racing, and its pinnacle, the Tour de France, take centre stage, particularly the gruelling 2010 race, which although played out somewhat in the shadow of his high finish in 2009, was nevertheless an exemplary exercise in true grit and fighting spirit against the odds.