Book Review: Dear Hugo, by Herbie Sykes

Title: Dear Hugo
Author: Herbie Sykes
Publisher: Rapha Editions in association with Bluetrain Publishing
Year: 2022
Pages: 127
Order: Rapha
What it is: A cycling novel, about Hugo Koblet, and being a cycling fan
Strengths: Elegantly captures an aspect of what it means to be a fan while offering one take on the life and career of Hugo Koblet
Weaknesses: It’s not your conventional cycling story

Herbie Sykes’s novel, Dear Hugo, opens with a found image, a photograph.

The text that follows tells us that the novel’s narrator – unnamed throughout – is one of the three children in the picture:

“Most people assume the three of us were together because we were in the same place and we were more or less the same age. However I’d never met the other 2 and still today I have no idea who they were. I assume they lived nearby, but maybe not. All I can tell you about them is they didn’t seem to know anything about bike racing. I found that disappointing at the time because for me it wasn’t like that at all. I knew quite a lot about bike racing and I was there because it was important.”

We may not be able to name the author but we are immediately able to identify him. He is a cycling fan. A committed cycling fan. And on one level, Dear Hugo is a novel about being a cycling fan.

Despite the bazillion or so fanboys and fangirls breathlessly gushing about the sport across multiple media platforms – online, print, podcasts, TV – cycling’s fandom feels underexplored to me, especially when you consider how the wider world of fandoms have been explored in TV shows, documentaries, novels etc. I can really only think of two books I’ve read that come at the sport from the point of view of the cycling fan: Charlie Woods’ Bikie and – to a lesser extent – Tim Hilton’s One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. While Nick bleedin’ Horby’s calorie-free knock-off of Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes – Fever Pitch – spawned an avalanche of books about being a football fan, cycling has stuck with regurgitating the hits and the myths and avoided any real self-examination.

Cycling’s fandom, however, is just a subtext in Dear Hugo – an important subtext but still beneath the surface – and the novel itself is a way of exploring the life and career of Hugo…