Les Woodland has been writing about cycling (“the only thing he ever stuck at,” according to his mother) since 1968. Three years later it became a full-time job when he joined the staff of the British magazine Cycling.
Since then he has written two dozen books about the sport, published in several languages and on four continents. The most recent is the encyclopedia, The Yellow Jersey Guide to the Tour de France.
Les lives now in southwestern France. Never one to trouble the judges as a racer, he rides with his local club and has toured by bike in the U.S. and many European countries. On one trip he and his wife Steph cycle-camped their way the width of Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea coast of Romania.
Here in Morocco, a smiling nation on the north-west tip of Africa, folk speak Arabic. They also speak French and, for other tourists, a fait bit of English. What they speak among themselves, however, is none of these. They speak Berber. Why? Because the people of Morocco are Arabs by inclination, but culturally and linguistically,…
You know, there are times I think professional cycling has the honesty of Bulgarian weightlifting. You remember that? A stocky little man with a belt would turn up and lift some improbable weight, and the crowd would cheer, and a week later he’d be done for steroids. I don’t know it actually was Bulgarians who…
It wasn’t the crash that moved me. The cameras weren’t there when it happened. It was the riders’ faces next day. We’re talking here about the Giro, of course, and an everyday fall that killed one of the riders. To tell you the truth, I’d barely heard of Wout Weylandt. You can’t know them all….
There exist in this world famous people of whom you have never heard. Willie Hume is one of them, although in his case it’s existed rather than exist. For old Willie died 70 years ago this fall. And why should we care? Because he was the first man in the world to buy a pair of pump-up…
