From the Library, 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession
Two minutes thirty seconds worth of old black and white film. What do you do with a piece of old nitrate film only two and a half minutes in length, barely a heartbeats length of a typical Tour de France. Well, if you're Ned Boulting, you turn it into a book. When Boulting won this small bit of film at auction, the only thing he knew of it was from the very brief description:
Lot 212. A rare film reel from the Tour de France in the 1930s? Condition unknown.
Winning this bit of unknown cycling history would send Boulting on a journey across decades, leading him to not only discover the exact date of the race, but to the weaving of a tale of the times in which that race took place, a weaving that includes national resentments at the conclusion of the Great War, murder, the bombing of a bridge, theaters and actors, politicians and scientists, rival newspapers, and of course, the racers and race organizers themselves. There is Henri Desgrange and his right-hand man, Robert Desmarets, there are the Pelissier brothers, Henri and Francis, Gars Jean, and there is Ottavio Bottecchia. Most of all though, there is the one man who history seemed to have left behind, completely forgotten even by his hometown - Théophile Beeckman.
1923 reads as a great mystery story in which clues are uncovered bit by bit, secrets revealed through research and painstaking examination. Now, you might be disappointed if you were expecting a book that sticks strictly to the story of the 1923 Tour de France, how it unfolded stage by stage is not this book. This book is more like a puzzle in which the Tour is but a handful of pieces in a complex mix of events happening in the world through which the Tour passes. There is something in that, of course; however big the Tour may seem to cycling-obsessives like us, it is but one happening in a world of events happening at the same time. That the Tour, and in particular the unraveling of the mystery of those two minutes and twenty seconds of it, unfolds as part of those events, this reader found out, makes for a compelling story.
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