Book Review: Climbers, by Peter Cossins

Title: Climbers – How the Kings of the Mountains conquered cycling
Author: Peter Cossins
Publisher: Cassell
Year: 2022
Pages: 328
Order: Hachette
What it is: Another book about mountains and the men who race up them
Strengths: It’s full of familiar favourites you never tire of rereading
Weaknesses: The usual slipshod research and duff history

“While a little irritating when viewed from the Anglo-Saxon journalistic perspective, where an emphasis has always been placed on accuracy, these discrepancies for the sake of colour and drama were and still are an accepted element of the lead story on the previous day’s racing in what was L’Auto and is now L’Equipe.”
~ Peter Cossins, Climbers

Climbers are, apparently, a breed apart. “Always vulnerable to falls, crashes in form, to the sudden and unexpected, theirs is a precarious highwire act – one that everyone who watches a bike race is captivated by.” You’re probably thinking that sprinters are also a breed apart [insert exceptionalist blather here]. Maybe next year Peter Cossins will be back with a book about them. Doubtlessly to be followed by books about rouleurs, baroudeurs, puncheurs and all those other types of cyclists you’ll find listed in back-of-book glossaries you rarely ever read. For now, sit back and let’s give the climbers yet another outing.

Mountains and the men who climb them – and it is usually only men in these books though Cossins does give the women a whole chapter to themselves – have been the subjects of many books over the last few decades, from the sublime (Daniel Friebe’s Mountain High, Max Leonard’s Higher Calling) to the instantly forgettable (I’ve forgotten so many at this stage I can’t even begin to list them). Star climbers get whole books to themselves (Pantani, Bahamontes, Ocaña). Star mountains get whole books to themselves, from Bert Wagendorp’s godawful novel, Ventoux, to Jean-Paul Vespini’s classic ‘biography’ of Alpe d’Huez. They get tick-list guide books, they get coffee table books, they get poster books. Mountains and the men who climb them, they get a hell of a lot of attention when it comes to the world of books. Finding something new to say, well that requires an inventive author.

Cycling’s first step towards the mountains, Peter Cossins tells us early into…