The man and his bike

The helicopter is hanging above our heads. A woman with a child waves up to the family watching at home.

Motorcycles tear past, sirens wailing. And here they come, the riders. Like a vast chameleon the peloton continually changes shape and colour.

Four hundred tyres sing to us. Music for a Sunday afternoon. Here they come. Here they are. There they go. It's all over, consigned to the past once more. We can still see the mud-spattered backside of a straggler, sitting crooked on his bike after a fall.

The skin of his elbow has been grazed raw, the dirt of the Tour ground into the wound.

But he must go on. The Tour waits for no man. Wilfried de Jong is a star of Dutch sports writing and broadcasting.

In this award-winning collection of cycling tales, his comic, melancholic, existential charm unlocks a sport that involves so much pain, punishment, isolation, and a high probability of failure.