A few
months ago I picked up a copy of A
Significant Other by Matt Rendell. As I discussed in my previous review, the book
turned out to be a great read although I had initially been a little wary,
unfairly making comparisons with many of the other Tour ‘journals’ of recent
years. I found it to be one of those books where every time I contemplated
closing the pages, I was drawn back into it through the excellent narrative of
Rendell and the eye witness accounts of US Postal’s Colombian domestique Victor
Hugo Peña. Last month I had a chance to catch up with Matt and discuss the
book.
Matt Rendell.
Matt
Rendell discovered cycling late. Growing up in a small English village, he
was a middle-distance runner whilst at school, following in the footsteps of his
Grandfather who excelled in the British scene of the 1930’s. It wasn’t
until he moved to Italy to study
that he first developed an interest in cycling. Time spent in the cities
of Rome,
Florence and
Trieste during
the 80’s fueled his new found passion.
After
returning to the UK to take
up a position as an academic historian and linguist in
London, Rendell
picked up a little casual work with the small production Company VTV that
produces the Tour de France for British viewers. “Just about the first thing I ever did for
VTV was to subtitle an interview with Chepe Gonzalez, stage winner at the 1996
Tour de France at Valence, and I remember thinking, ‘What’s your story?’”
explained Matt.
After a
time in the capital, office politics finally got the better of Rendell and in an
effort to “clear my head”; he set off
along the length of South
America on his
bike with a friend in tow. After crossing Patagonia and most
of Chile, Rendell
set out on his own, determined to make it to
Colombia.
“I contacted Radio Caracol and was
immediately welcomed into the community of Colombian cycling by the commentators
Marco Tulio, Alfredo Castro and RCN’s Hector Urrego. I made a low budget,
but extremely well received TV documentary about the spirituality of the
cyclists from the Colombian town of Sogamoso and
race-walkers from the Ecuadorian town of Cuenca.”
The film was so well received that a literary agent made contact and before long
the book ‘Kings of the
Mountains’ had hit the shelf and was awarded a national prize for sports
writing.
During a
spell writing for a leading cycling magazine in the
UK, Rendell
was again approached to write a book, but this time for a publisher looking to
release a series examining closely the life of an elite athlete. “I said, ‘I have this friend on US Postal
who has had to give up all his ambitions in order to help Lance Armstrong win
the Tour,’” explained Matt to David Luxton, the agent. “David’s face lit up; I dialed Victor Hugo
there and then on my mobile phone and he said, ‘Let’s do
it.’”
I
wondered why Victor Hugo was Matt’s choice of rider to work with. After a
period within the industry, I was sure that he would have had numerous contacts
with more widely recognized riders. “Victor Hugo is someone I’d wanted to write
about for a long time. I was already interested in Colombian cycling for a
number of reasons, not least, initially because I had found so much friendship
and warmth towards me.” Rendell continued to explain that he believed
that the success of Colombian cycling to be very much an anomaly and therefore,
a test case for global sport. “After all, does sport belong to the
athletes and communities that invest their resources, however meager, in
producing them, or does it belong to the Credit Card companies and Soft Drink
manufacturers that merely seek to associate themselves with the performance of
remarkable athletes? Sport is only partly meritocracy. Cycling, like
other sports, tends to want to benefit from the best manpower available while
privileging athletes of the same nationality as the team sponsors …. these are
the sorts of issues I’m interested in personally and professionally, and writing
about Colombian cycling in ‘Kings of the Mountains’ and about Victor Hugo in ‘A
Significant Other’ has allowed me to explore some of
them.”
In
hindsight, the selection of Victor Hugo was quite inspirational. Instead of his
expected build up to the Tour and the Prologue Time Trial in
Paris, the
Colombian experienced one drama after another and as Rendell explained, shortly
before the race began, he feared that US Postal would be lining up without the
former Giro stage winner. “Victor
Hugo was held up at gunpoint by thugs who stole his papers and left him with no
passport or racing license; he was unable to get a Spanish visa to return to his
home, car and brother in Spain - utterly unreasonable on the part of the
Spanish authorities. Because of his visa problems he missed the Tour of
Belgium, which was to have been his qualifying ride for the team, so he came
within a hair’s breadth of missing the Tour altogether. He finally started
the Tour on a French tourist visa, in flagrant violation of its terms and
conditions; and then he became the first Colombian to ever wear the yellow
jersey.”
On paper,
the idea of a Tour diary is a fascinating proposition and I know that I for
one
am always
keen to gain an insight into that magical world of the professional
peloton. “The cycling shelves are
full of dreadful cut and paste histories of the Tour that don’t contain one
original interview - despite the hundreds of ex-Tour riders out there - and
should never have been published. I wanted to position myself as far from
that genre as possible by allowing Victor Hugo to portray a domestique’s life in
his own words, and then to provide the sort of historical, sociological,
technical, but also philosophical context that athletes can hardly be expected
to describe insightfully; on the whole, they’re too busy being athletes to
undergo the sort of education that leads you to
thinkers.”
Rendell
explained that during the Tour, he was able to speak to Victor Hugo, “a few times but neither of us had time to
kill.” He added that, “a few
days after the Tour had finished, we watched together video footage of
Bagneres-de-Bigorre to Luz Ardiden stage, which forms the backbone of the
book.” For many athletes a book collaboration will usually entail a
professional writer interpreting their words but as Rendell explained,
refreshingly, this wasn’t the case. “Victor Hugo is acutely observant and
remarkably articulate, and his words are precisely that - his own.”
Such is the trust between Rendell and Pena that the Colombian did not even
request to review the book before going to print. As Matt explains, “I’m not interested in writing any sort of
authorized account of anything; I can’t see the point, and I can’t understand
anyone that does. I want to look with my own eyes and write down what I
see, within constraints that I, and no one else,
chooses.”
As we
finished our conversation, I asked Matt what the book meant to him. Is it simply
another step along the road to literary stardom? Talking to him, no, I
don’t believe so. Is it a personal thank-you to everybody who touched his
life in Colombia?
Maybe. Rather, as Matt explains himself, “during the medicals in the run-up to the
2004 Tour, we were in the same hotel as US Postal and I gave Lance a copy.
I inscribed it, ‘To Lance, A little book about cycling and friendship.’
That’s what the book means to me: cycling and
friendship.”
Click
here to read our review of the book or use the link below
to buy the book.
