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riding through the storm - geoff thomas. orion books 269pp illus. paperback. £7.99
geoff thomas rode this year's london to paris ride, and much as i'd love to say we spent many a happy kilometre chatting about those things you chat about as you wend your merry way to the eiffel tower, i can't. mainly because he was about three groups further up than me (that means he was a lot faster), and i think the only time i saw geoff was when we were amalagamating into the largest peloton ever to ride the champs elysees. and i didn't say anything then.
on 3rd july 2003, geoff thomas, a former professional football player discovered he had chronic myeloid leukaemia - effectively, cancer of the blood. while the word fortunate is not one that can generally be used anywhere near the word cancer, thomas was marginally so, in that the disease had been caught in its early stages. what was even more fortunate (that word again) was that his sister turned out to be a matching donor for stem cells, allowing doctors to replace thomas's bone marrow with that of his sister. while such transplants are not always successful, due to occasional rejection by the new host of somebody elses stem cells, it worked for geoff thomas.
as is the caustic side of any cancer, chemotherapy left a formerly fit footballer in a considerably reduced state. most of us would thank our lucky stars that all was as well as could be hoped for, and make plans for the best recovery possible. geoff thomas, however, felt the need to repay the doctors and nurses who cared for him, and the thousands of other leukaemia sufferers throughout the uk. so how would you go about raising a shed load of money for just such a charitable concern? ride the tour de france? i thought not, but that's exactly what thomas and his hearty band of supporters and fellow cyclists decided to do in july 2005, the same year another former cancer sufferer won his seventh tour in a row.
naturally enough, you can't just tag along at the back of the professional peloton, particularly when you're likely to be one heck of a lot slower than they are, so the geoff thomas foundation peloton set off several days before the real tour de france and cycled every single stage; all 21 of them. admittedly this is not the first time just such an undertaking has been attempted. in fact riding through the storm mentions one other, that of paul howard, who rode the tour several hours ahead, rather than several days. however, such an undertaking by all those concerned is rarely done with so little real preparation.
aside from the fact that thomas had only just come out the other side of probably one of the most devastating illnesses to affect anyone's life, he was only told he was in remission in january of 2005. this gave a confessed non-cyclist only six months to train for a ride of over 3000km; almost exactly the same amount of time i spent on training for london-paris, and not only is that a mere 600km, i'm perfectly healthy. i doubt many of us would have seen that as the first thing to try after a major illness.
seated on bianchi bikes supplied by the famous italian marque for the duration, and supported by a small band of assistants in landrovers also supplied for the occasion, everyone made it through the pyrenees and the alps and all the way to the arc de triomphe by way of the champs elysees. under the circumstances, pedalling such a distance is hard enough, but this was not on closed roads such as enjoyed by the pros, and since the tour de france does not provide exact directions to other than the skoda lead cars in the real event, thomas and co. actually cycled the equivalent of one extra stage if you take into account the extra kilometres covered while getting lost.
riding through the storm is based on the 2005 tour de france; each chapter heading refers to the daily stages of that year's event, but the narrative following doesn't always follow the same pattern. this is more of an autobiography, quite cleverly woven around the charity ride (nomenclature which almost sounds demeaning to such a daunting cycle), so some chapters concern thomas's previous life as a professional footballer. despite the fact that geoff doesn't know me from erik, i do hope he'll forgive that i pretty much skipped all the football stuff; it's a sport i have no time for at all, and the intricacies of which leave me cold.
the latter exception aside, it's a well written book which should hold the interest of any intelligent reader, and a story that is well worth the telling. if one absolutely has to criticise, there are one two many repetitions regarding significant events in thomas's life, not least of which his diagnosis of leukaemia, and the eurosport commentator and champion of ireland is most definitely not sean yates. (i'm surprised this latter error made it from hardback to paperback).
as a sort of postscript to this, geoff's fundraising continues apace; on november 2 this year, geoff will run the new york marathon, however, you may be interested in the unfortunates he has managed to recruit to join him, some of whom are going to need a lot of training time between now and novermber: sven thiele (london-paris), brian smith, anthony mccrossan, david harmon and allegedly, stephen roche.
thankfully, when all this was arranged in the bar at the paris novotel, i had gone to bed.
posted on saturday 23rd august
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