1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession

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The juxtaposition of the two worlds a century apart, and the tying together of assorted historical loose threads makes for an entertaining read, not just for cycling enthusiasts. As ever, I wish I could see the photos better on my kindle and hardcopies of the book arent an option for me as I have run out of room. This book could be considered a dedication to the obsession that Boulting soon had to find out as much information as he could about the people in the film clip and the events surrounding that race. I cannot recommend it more highly, especially since I have the same palpable feeling of loss once the tale has been concluded. It starts about 150 kilometres and six hours into the stage, still another 260 or so kilometres and more than nine hours of racing to go.

The other photograph, that one actually was taken in the Parc des Princes, where the Petit Tour de France was being held, a post-Tour track-meet Desgrange organised annually and which forms an early step on the road to today’s post-Tour critérium circuit.Beginning with a fragment of a century-old race, Ned has written a 'biography of the unknown rider'. I felt transported back with him to the very origins of bike racing and the world that created it ― David Millar. Jump forward to July 8 and across France Boulting finds news of a four-year-old boy killed in Argenteuil, a plane crashing and killing its pilot in Le Havre, and a woman committing suicide in Nantes. Boulting spends the years of the Covid shut down tracking down information about the 1923 Tour but also the identity of the riders who are on the film.

As the pandemic struck in 2020, Boulting acquired a fragile, two-and-a-half-minute fragment of century-old newsreel showing snatches of the 1923 Tour de France. And then there are the many, many characters, some scarcely believable, whose extraordinary lives brush up in unexpected ways against this fragment of history, preserved from oblivion by nothing more providential than pure coincidence. In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathé news film from a London auction house. Beeckman was a solid if ­unremarkable member of his cohort; his attack captured on film a rare occasion in which he especially troubled the limelight.There is the unsettling background of the covid pandemic distorting our sense of distance and connection. The isolating circumstances in which Boulting acquired the film were the catalyst, rather than the drama of the film itself. It’s that rich, because if you stare hard enough at any moment of recorded time, it will reveal shards of both the past and the future. Resurrecting the forgotten, remembering the overlooked, reinstating those airbrushed from history, it’s what keeps the publishing industry alive. It’s that, just because Boulting doesn’t understand it, the explanation is “lost to time, unreported and now unknowable.