While watching Tour de France commentaries this year on YouTube, I discovered that there were short daily summaries from the UK’s ITV, featuring Ned Boulting and David Millar. This was very timely as Ned Boulting’s latest book is about his life as a cycling commentator, a job that came to an end after this year’s 21st stage as ITV will no longer broadcast the Tour. Although not shy of comedy, there is a bittersweet element as Boulting looks back on more than two decades of involvement with the greatest of bike races.
Ned Boulting is familiar to us as the author of a number of interesting cycling book. We have reviewed his “Boulting’s Vélosaurus,” a compendium of cycling terms here and “1923,” on of the most interesting and original books about cycling we have come across and discussed here. In addition to acting as editor of the massive annual Road Book almanac, he has written previously about his entry into the world of cycling journalism and live commentary in a book, “How I Won the Yellow Jumper” back in 2011 and this newest publication brings the reader up to the present day while allowing Boulting to draw on his impressive comedic skills to go back to those earlier days.
From his account, to a large extent he really was an “accidental Tour-ist” as he was drawn into coverage for ITV from his job as a football reporter. It seems that the broadcaster hit upon Ned as a likely candidate in spite of knowing nothing about cycling and his account of being a reporter and interviewing pro racers must have been a pretty painful experience for all involved. But he persevered and eventually found himself as a commentator, paired up with ex-pro racer David Millar. Although he only mentions it in passing, he and Millar were off to a difficult start as they were replacing the very popular team of Phil Liggett and the late Paul Sherwen, although it seems that Boulting and Liggett remain on very good terms personally.
Who wouldn’t want to be on good terms with Ned Boulting? “The Accidental Tour-ist” is full of stories in which the author looks a bit foolish. He describes his stints of theatrical touring to talk about cycling in such a self-deprecating way that the reader almost assumes it must have been a disaster when, in fact, he sold out theatres. We cycling enthusiasts would not find it surprising that his road manager, with some astonishment, thought that Boulting’s audience was similar to Star Trek convention cultists.
Each chapter of the book is full of such nuggets, whether describing in detail the oddity of being a cycling commentator in that in other sports commentators see directly in front of them on the playing field what action is taking place while in his profession one is miles away from the race and trying to convey what is happening without actually being there. In his account of the Tour of Langkawi the camerawork was so terrible that nobody could follow what the riders were doing, which certainly made for awkward coverage.
In addition to his time squashed together with David Millar at the Tour in ITV’s budget-constricted booth, he also had occasion to act as the English-language “world feed” for other races, including the Giro, providing coverage for countries too small or with limited interest in cycling to send their own commentators. He also came early into the world of podcasting and his account of doing a live podcast from inside of the hire car with David and guests that included Cadel Evans, Marcel Kittle, Lizzie Deignan and Marianne Vos is hilarious. Not to mention the ITV TdF podcast in which the words of Egan Bernal, whose English is limited, were transmuted into a Liverpudlian dialect.
Part of the fun is the juicy insider stuff, of course. There is an excellent account of Mark Cavendish’s resurrection as a sprinter, culminating in his record-breaking 35th stage win in the 2024 Tour. There is consideration of Chris Froome, a man that Boulting does not really feel is knowable, a winner of all three Grand Tours yet who grew up, unlike his European counterparts, with no attachment to the culture and traditions of road racing. There is a very funny but extremely awkward account of Froome sitting with Boulting and Eddy Merckx and asking Merckx: “So you’ve won the Tour then?” Then: “More than once?”
The book includes thoughtful portraits of today’s big stars. Showing up with Millar as fans at the Tour of Flanders, he writes: “I had never seen anything like a Mathieu van der Poel attack before the Dutchman came along. There is a Tysonesque violence to it, which almost removes it from the sport of cycling entirely. He is a disconcertingly feral presence at the front of a race, effectively winning the contest before his disheartened and disorderly opponents have realised what is happening; an animal pouncing, both savage and sudden.”
Everyone is here: Wout van Aert, Remco Evenepoel, and of course Tadej Pogačar, who comes across pretty much as one would expect, described at one point in the Giro as “a boy in a pink onesie.” And while the author does not dwell too much on Primož Roglič or Jonas Vingegaard, he does have a field day with Peter Sagan, certainly a unique character in the world of pro racing and a subject for impersonation in Boulting’s stage show.
“The Accidental Tour-ist” is a very entertaining book and there are sections that will make you laugh out loud. There are surprising things here, such as the fact that the same day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in July 1969, Eddy Merckx won his first Tour de France. Whether describing his first trip to Belgium, a country he loves, as a student actor in an Oxford production of “King Lear,” or riding up Category 1 climbs at the Tour on a Brompton, dropping an out-of-shape David Millar or relating the story of the Grande Torino football team tragedy whose 75th anniversary was marked at the 2024 Giro, Boulting is an accomplished storyteller. For those of us outside the UK, our chance to see him in action for ITV seems to have been limited to this year’s YouTube snippets. From the comments below those videos he and Millar will be sorely missed. The Tour in Britain will no longer be available for free but Boulting, who clearly has loved the 23 years of his relationship with the Tour, has plans to continue to be a part of the bike racing scene and while the subtitle of this book is “(Final) Dispatches from the Road” one hopes that this will not be the case.
“The Accidental Tour-ist: (Final) Dispatches from the Road”
by Ned Boulting
280 pp., hardcover
Bloomsbury Sport, London, 2025
ISBN 978-1-3994-1982-6
Recommended price: US$30/UK 20/GBP/C$40
### Available from AMAZON.COM at: www.amazon.com. ###
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