Book review: The Shattered Peloton

At around 3 a.m. the morning the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were shot in Sarajevo,145 riders left a suburb of Paris at the start of the 12th Tour de France. The race ended July 26, after 15 stages and 5,405 km, with Belgian Philippe Thys winning his second Tour in a row. A little more than a week later, German troops invaded Belgium and France. By the end of the war, many professional cyclists were dead, including three previous Tour de France winners.

With The Shattered Peloton (Breakaway Books), released to coincide with the centenary of the First World War, Graham Healy chronicles the lives and the fates of many cyclists who were involved in the fighting. The 1909 Tour de France winner, François Faber, joined the French Foreign Legion and later disappeared during a battle. Octave Lapize, who won the 1910 Tour and famously called race officials “assassins” for making the peloton ride up the Tourmalet, became a fighter pilot. He was shot down by a German plane and died soon after. The Tour’s first two-time winner, Lucien Petit-Breton, died in a senseless non-combat accident in December 1917. Healy tells the stories of these riders and more by recounting the battles and bike races in which they featured.

Healy’s work is a good survey of the riders and of cycling at the beginning of the 1900s. However, it doesn’t have the same level of storytelling as, say, Road to Valour, a fairly recent book on Gino Bartali and the Second World War. It’s probably unfair to look for that level of narrative in The Shattered Peloton. It covers a lot of ground in a little more than 200 pages and is jammed with great facts. You’ll finish the book armed with many poignant details from a tragic time in world, and cycling, history.