Book Review: The Medal Factory, by Kenny Pryde (paperback edition)

Title: The Medal Factory – British Cycling and the Cost of Gold
Author: Kenny Pryde
Publisher: Pursuit Books
Year: 2022 (paperback edition – originally published in hardback in 2020)
Pages: 291 (was originally 308)
Order: Profile Books
What it is: The paperback edition of a look-back-with-Pryde account of British cycling’s transformation in the years since Lottery funding came along
Strengths: Offers a veneer of balance
Weaknesses: Beneath its surface sheen this is a wildly unbalanced account of British cycling’s recent history, made worse by changes forced on the publisher for this paperback edition

Time was when cycling books would grow in size as they moved from their initial hardback editions to the paperback editions produced the following year for the paupers in the cheap seats too poor to shell out for a book at its inflated hardback price. Autobiographies, biographies, assorted histories, they’d get new chapters tacked on at the back as the book moved from one edition to the next. Some publishers even went so far as to try and hawk these new tacked-on chapters as books in themselves.

Rarely, if ever, did these new chapters fit with what had gone before. The original book had been shaped to come to a particular ending, only for a new ending to replace it a year later. Unlike in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where you get 15 minutes of credits scrolling before the film starts again with a new final scene, in books you can’t really put such a forced pause between chapters and the reader barely halts for breath on finishing the original ending before starting the new one.

Most of the time these new endings were, to borrow Charlie Windsor’s coinage, a carbuncle on the face of a friend.

Sometimes, these tacked-on chapters went further than just a granny flat being thrown up at the back, some books grew and grew and grew with each passing year. As time passed they began to resemble the sprawling mess of Gormenghast castle, their original design lost in the shadow of ungainly extensions, many of which were poorly planned, some of which were badly executed.

So chapeau, then, to Kenny Pryde’s The Medal Factory – British Cycling and the…