Book review: Where There’s a Will, by Emily Chappell

Title: Where There’s a Will – Hope, Grief and Endurance in a Cycle Race Across a Continent
Author: Emily Chappell
Publisher: Pursuit
Year: 2019
Pages: 278
Order: Profile Books
What it is: Emily Chappell explores her experience of ultra-endurance riding – covering three Transcons, two Strathpuffers, and an Irish ride – along with her friendship with Mike Hall
Strengths: The final section where Chappell explores her friendship with Mike Hall is the book’s best bit
Weaknesses: It’s basically another cycling misery memoir, which is fine if you like that kind of thing

Ah me! alas, pain, pain, ever, for ever!
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
~ Shelley

In the late hours of the last Friday of June, 2015 – so late it was in fact the following day, the clock having just struck midnight – 172 riders set out from the Belgian city of Geraardsbergen bound initially for Mont Ventoux in France, with the ultimate aim of getting to Istanbul in Turkey, more than 4,000 kilometres away. The riders were participating in the third edition of the Transcontinental, an unsupported ultra-endurance ride that many have compared to early Tours de France, especially those jaded by the Tour today and in awe of the big buckle’s mythic origins.

The comparison with early Tours is largely based on ideas of authenticity and a mythical past. The reality is quite different. For all that we raise Henri Desgrange up as the cruellest of task masters, his Tours showed their riders a lot more respect that Transcons do. Early Tours alternated racing days with rest days. While riders in early Tours were not supposed to receive assistance from team-mates drafting was not banned, which it is in Transcons, turning them into very long time trials with coffee stops. And while early Tours banned support on the bike, off the bike riders could be assisted by their teams, with accommodation organised for them and soigneurs provided to help their bodies recover from one day and prepare for the next. Transcon’s rules, they make the Father of the Tour look soft for the paternal concern he showed for his riders.

In its structure Transcon is more like the Six Day races that, apocryphally, inspired Géo Lefèvre when he pitched the idea of the Tour to Desgrange. In those races – the American version, not the…