Just finished Paul Fournel’s book Need for the Bike, which arrived through the post this morning. A philosophical musing on the bicycle, along with lots of practical and moving tales of experience in the saddle, I plan to dip into it as frequently as possible. Fournel, who is a writer and publisher based in Paris, is also the president of the OuLiPo group of writers, of which Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino were members. Here is a particularly good passage from Fournel’s book:
Some of the guys who raced in my area were in the habit of going to obscure dispensaries to improve their performance. One day I went along with two friends who were supposed to race in a time trial on the Forez plain. The race was on a circuit of about forty kilometers, and the starting line also served as the finish line. So it was a perfect circle, and they were hoping that the best riders could do it in less than an hour.
An oddball that we knew, who had no other goal in life than to ride faster than his local friends, took off like a shot and crossed the line going the other way barely ten minutes later.
Everyone was waving his arms around, trying to get him to show some common sense, but he didn’t see any problems. He came over to me, got off his bike, and told me: ‘I think my time was good.’
We had to hide him for a few hours in the back seat of a Citroen to keep official eyes from seeing the foam dripping from his lips and to give him a chance to calm down.
As they used to say, ‘he’d even swallowed the box.’