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A masterful and hugely entertaining history of the Tour de France's first hundred years. When Henri Desgrange began a new bicycle road race in 1903, he saw it as little more than a temporary publicity stunt to promote his newspaper. The sixty cyclists who left Paris to ride through the night to Lyons that first July had little idea they were pioneers of the most famous of all bike races, which would reach its centenary as one of the greatest sporting events on earth. The races of the early twent...

From wooden bicycles and spoon brakes to recumbent bikes and carbon fiber rims, take a visual journey through the beautiful engineering history of the bicycle.Bicycle is an extraordinary celebration of the history of cycling, from BMX and mountain biking to track and road racing. Ride through the sport's history and discover classic and cutting-edge bicycles, following the evolution of cycling throughout the decades.Stunning photography gives you a detailed look at bicycles through the ages, wit...

One man, one bike, one hour. The inside story of Bradley Wiggins's record-breaking rideFor 60 minutes this summer, the British public stopped what they were doing, switched on their radios, their TVs, refreshed their Twitter feeds and followed Bradley Wiggins’s attempt to break one of sport’s most gruelling records: The Hour. The premise is simple enough: how far can you cycle in one hour. But it is thought to be one of the toughest events an athlete can endure, both physically and psychological...

Directly you are in motion you will feel quite helpless, and experience a sensation of being run away with, and it will seem as if the machine were trying to throw you off The first bicycle was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the 1890s that the craze really took off. This brought with it the fears, scaremongering, worries and uncertainties that inevitably accompany any new fashion. Women (often unchaperoned and oddly dressed) taking to 'velocipedes'; ove...

7-Eleven: America's Greatest Cycling Team is the first book to tell the full story of America's first and greatest pro cycling team. Founded in 1981 by Jim Ochowicz and Olympic medalist Eric Heiden and sponsored by the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, the team rounded up the best amateur cyclists in North America and formed them into a cohesive, European-style cycling team. As amateurs, they dominated the American race scene and won seven medals at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. A...

Bradley Wiggins is the son of a professional cyclist and he first competed at twelve, and immediately knew that this was what he wanted to do for his career. By the age of twenty, he won his first Olympic medal, in Sydney, before turning to professional road cycling in 2001. Since then he has developed into one of the UK's most successful cyclists of all time, winning a double gold in Bejing. However, it was when his team Cofidis was suspended from the 2007 Tour de France that he made his most...

Few sporting contests have roused such blind passions and filthy suspicions as the Tour de France. From Lance Armstrong's incredible comeback from cancer, to Tom Simpson's death on the slopes of Mont Ventoux, the Tour has been the stage for some of sport's most monumental triumphs and the scene of some of its darkest hours. Since Maurice Garin's inaugural victory in 1903, hundreds of thousands of kilometres have been covered in pursuit of the yellow jersey - cycling's holy grail - and few have b...