John's Book Review: Chasing Lance by Martin Dugard
Rating: 2.5 water bottles (out of 4)
In Chasing Lance, Martin Dugard chases Lance across France during the 2005 Tour but doesn't quite capture him.
I first noticed Dugard last summer when I stumbled across his Tour blog, which would serve as the basis for this book. At the time I thought he was a talented writer for a blogger. I still think that, but in this book he doesn't quite put his blog posts together to form a cohesive whole. The book reads like a French travelogue peppered with some basic cycling commentary.
Dugard brings an endurance athlete's mindset, an obvious passion for cycling, a love of traveling through France, and a press credential. Though he seems to want to establish journalistic credibility by emphasizing that he's able to hang with well-known writers like Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly and Austin Murphy, that credential doesn't gain Dugard much access to the riders. His interaction with Lance is mainly limited to a post-Tour phone call in which the seven-time Tour winner tells him what it feels like to be a retired cyclist: "I don't like to lie still and I don't like to be bored. A body at rest stays at rest." Yawn. If you want true insight into cycling and Lance, try Daniel Coyle's Lance Armstrong's War.
Though it felt shoehorned into the book, I liked Dugard's conclusion:
In Chasing Lance, Martin Dugard chases Lance across France during the 2005 Tour but doesn't quite capture him.
I first noticed Dugard last summer when I stumbled across his Tour blog, which would serve as the basis for this book. At the time I thought he was a talented writer for a blogger. I still think that, but in this book he doesn't quite put his blog posts together to form a cohesive whole. The book reads like a French travelogue peppered with some basic cycling commentary.
Dugard brings an endurance athlete's mindset, an obvious passion for cycling, a love of traveling through France, and a press credential. Though he seems to want to establish journalistic credibility by emphasizing that he's able to hang with well-known writers like Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly and Austin Murphy, that credential doesn't gain Dugard much access to the riders. His interaction with Lance is mainly limited to a post-Tour phone call in which the seven-time Tour winner tells him what it feels like to be a retired cyclist: "I don't like to lie still and I don't like to be bored. A body at rest stays at rest." Yawn. If you want true insight into cycling and Lance, try Daniel Coyle's Lance Armstrong's War.
Though it felt shoehorned into the book, I liked Dugard's conclusion:
- "What my pursuit of Lance had shown me was that life was to be lived to its fullest; that daily process of pushing forward, always forward, constantly exploring and expanding one's capabilities, was the great mandate."
posted by John at Thursday, February 16, 2006
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