Cycling is also politics

The appearance of the bicycle with pedals revolutionized the world. It was in the mid-19th century and it transformed the way people—especially the most popular classes—moved around. It also changed the dynamics of human relationships. The new vehicle allowed us to go further. To the next town, for example. It gave a new feeling of independence and freedom to those who used it. It didn’t take long for it to become a sport. With the creation of the Tour de France in 1903, cycling began its particular rise towards the global status it enjoys today. And the bicycle began to sneak into some of the most important moments of the last 100 years.

A century uphill (Altamarea) is the book in which the doctor in History Ramon Usall covers the most recent popular and political history of cycling. He does it in 40 didactic chapters that range from the Dreyfus case —which was indirectly at the origins of the French grand round— until the failed tribute to the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht. The famous bicycle of IRA intelligence chief Michael Collins; Gino Bartali and Palmiro Togliatti helping to lower the decibels in Italy in 1948 and scaring off a possible revolution; the competition between American and Soviet cyclists in the middle of the Cold War and a Tour de France starting at the foot of the Berlin Wall in 1987, just two years before its fall; the streets of France full of velocipedes in May 1968; Perico Delgado entering with him jersey yellow on the Champs Elysées in 1988, with Spanish-French relations at a minimum; Governments of all political stripes have used different cycling rounds to draw their borders – there was the Tour entering Alsace and Lorraine, to the annoyance of Germany – and send the messages that best suited them. A fun book, full of information and details, that places cycling in its deserved place in History.

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