THE BEAUTY WITHIN THE DETAIL
NED BOULTING WHY THE YEAR’S STATS AND DATA TELL THE TRUE STORY OF CYCLING
Years ago, I used to collect airline timetables. I was well known among the high street travel agents in the town in which I grew up. I would walk into their shops and ask them if they had any spare timetables. At the peak of my collection, I must have had the details of tens of thousands of flights. I used to read them, for fun. Sometimes I used to copy them out. Somewhere in the attic, I have a notebook into which I transcribed the entire Olympic airlines domestic flight timetable for 1981, day by day, hour by hour, destination by destination.
What mattered to me during this obsessive period of my life was not the raw data. It did not greatly matter to me to know that the first flight from Thessaloniki to Athens on a February Wednesday was at 07.25. After all, I lived in a semi-detached house in Bedford and had never once been abroad.
It was the hidden meaning of all these facts which stirred me. It was the aggregation of their splintered code; the totality of their presence on the page, en masse, in black and white. It was their collective heft, that spoke of distance, of adventure, of heat and palm trees and blue skies, altitude, kerosene, risk, goldbraided epaulettes and dark glasses.
Perhaps that yearning was the reason that cycling discovered me. I say that it discovered me, and not vice versa, because the sport was foisted on me by a random turn of events. But once it had found me, it realised very quickly that here was a body and mind that it could readily and easily inhabit. I was like a petri dish filled with a cultivating gel on which a single cycling bacterium landed in 2003 and flourished. I fell for it.
In 2017, when I was first approached about the possibility of creating a cycling almanack, I didn’t hesitate. That small boy who used to collect airline timetables, who had lain dormant in the body of a middle-aged man, came back to life. A Wisden for cycling! The Olympic Airlines Timetable of Road Racing! Why doesn’t such a thing already exist?
There are, of course, obvious and at times almost insurmountable technical reasons why no one has attempted such a thing before (at least not in the manner that we have chosen). The time scale between the final race and the first book landing with a 2kg thump on the doorstep is two weeks. This is a technical and organisational feat which is bewildering to understand and thrilling to achieve.
But the big red book is more than just a book.
It’s a brick of meaning. Over its 900 pages it traces human racing endeavour in tiny detail, breakaway by breakaway, race by race, team by team, rider by rider, country by country, come rain or shine. All this is supported by carefully curated photographic plates, fascinating infographics, unconventionally commissioned essays, beautifully composed obituaries, race reviews and first-person accounts from the stars of the year, both women and men. This is a collection that is designed to last. Each volume represents a calendar year so vast that only a book the size of TheRoadBook can hope to encompass it all.
It is not designed to be read, as such. It is designed to be picked up, in search perhaps of a single halfremembered or disputed fact, only to find yourself distracted by another detail and embarking on a random journey across continents and months. To leaf through its pages, especially as the years pass by and the memories bleach out, is to call back to life the heat of the Adelaide Hills, the snow of the Dolomites, the wind turbines of Galicia and the iceflocked heather of the North York Moors.
Context is all. Only the sum total of all these hundreds of pages can hope to do road racing justice. Only when surrounded by everything does the any one thing make sense.