William Fotheringham: 11 books

Few British schoolchildren of the seventies can have been as obsessed with the Tour de France as William Fotheringham, who smuggled copies of Miroir du Cyclisme into lessons to read inside his books. He saw the Tour for the first time in 1984, avidly following that year's race on television in the...

Voted the most popular Italian sportsman of the twentieth century, Fausto Angelo Coppi was the campionissimo - champion of champions. The greatest cyclist of the immediate post-war years, he was the first man to win cycling's great double, the Tour de France and Tour of Italy in the same year - and...

Tom Simpson was an Olympic medallist, world champion and the first Briton to wear the fabled yellow jersey of the Tour de France. He died a tragic early death on the barren moonscape of the Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour. A man of contradictions, Simpson was one of the first cyclists to admit to...

The thrilling life of France’s finest cyclist   Bernard Hinault is one of the greatest cyclists of all time. He is a five-time winner of the Tour de France and the only man to have won each of the Grand Tours on more than one occasion. Three decades after his retirement, Hinault remains the last...

How did Great Britain conquer the Tour de France? In 2012 Bradley Wiggins made history by becoming the first Briton ever to win the Tour de France. Since that moment the UK has been living through the golden era in the world's greatest bike race, with four overall titles for Chris Froome, Geraint...

Eddy Merckx est au cyclisme ce que Mohamed Ali est à la boxe, Pelé au football, et Michael Jordan au basket. Le Belge a écrasé le cyclisme de la fin des années 1960 au milieu des « seventies ».  Les surnoms en disent parfois long. Pour Eddy Merckx, ce fut le « Cannibale », qui traduisait...

The essential A-Z compendium of everything there is to know about the bicycle, this sports reference is full of amazing facts and enthralling anecdotes. A world of death-defying feats and obscure mechanical oddities, the nature of cycling is both heroic and geeky, and the perils of vicious dogs are...

Eddy Merckx is to cycling what Muhammad Ali is to boxing or Pele to soccer: simply the best there has ever been. Merckx amassed an astonishing 445 victories. Lance Armstrong, by comparison, managed fewer than 100. Merckx didn’t just beat his opponents; he crushed them.            ...

If Mark Cavendish did not exist, what mind could invent him? In a world of homogenized sportspeople, he is a welcome one-off. Volatile, demanding, unwilling to hide his emotions, desperate to establish himself as one of cycling's alltime greats, disinclined to suffer fools but keen to exploit every opportunity...

The Paris-Roubaix Classic. 273 kilometres of torment across the bone-crunching pavé of northern France. In 1976 the celebrated Danish film director, Jørgen Leth, embarked on an ambitious project to capture the spirit of this spectacular and cruel one-day race. The resulting film, A Sunday in Hell,...

A path through cycling-specific information: slang, cycling stars, equipment, and nicknames   The essential A-to-Z compendium of everything there is to know about the bicycle, this sports reference is full of amazing facts and enthralling anecdotes. Numerous entries have been updated for this paperback...