It’s the taking part that counts

Étape: The Untold Stories of the Tour de France’s Defining Stages. By Richard Moore. Velo Press; 344 pages; $18.95. HarperSport; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Shadows on the Road: Life at the Heart of the Peloton, from US Postal to Team Sky. By Michael Barry. Faber & Faber; 257 pages; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Lanterne Rouge: The Last Man in the Tour de France.By Max Leonard.Yellow Jersey Press; 264 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“FOR the majority, the Tour de France is not about winning,” argues Richard Moore, in “Étape”, his account of the cycling race’s classic stages. “The great myth of the Tour is that the riders are all engaged in the main narrative, the battle for yellow.” The Tour, which starts this year on July 5th, is unique in the sporting calendar for the way it blurs the distinction between individual and team competition. Some may see Bradley Wiggins’s triumph in 2012, the first by a Briton, as one of the supreme solo performances in the country’s sporting history, but it was only possible because of the dedication of his director, mechanics and, above all, teammates.

Only a select few of the 200-odd riders who start the Tour harbour realistic ambitions of riding through Paris on the final stage, wearing the winner’s yellow jersey. Among the rest are specialist climbers, chasing the title of “King of the Mountains”; sprinters, who come alive only at certain points in a stage; and domestiques (“servants”), who do whatever is required to support their team leader.

The name of this last group was coined pejoratively by Henri Desgrange, the occasionally sadistic founder of the race. Desgrange believed that the perfect Tour was one that was so punishing that only a single rider would finish. The idea of a cyclist sacrificing himself to help another was abhorrent. Yet in pursuing his vision, Desgrange made the Tour so difficult that he ended up creating a culture of co-operation. In “Shadows on the Road”, Michael Barry, a domestique in the 1990s and 2000s, describes how “Once a rider is no longer a factor in a race…he forms a truce with his rivals…On a daily basis, [they] will share water, food, clothing and effort just to make it to the finish to ride another day.” Once, Mr Barry was knocked off his bike during a race by a motorcycle manned by a television crew. The crew, whose pictures were integral to the race’s coverage, went unpunished. As a “mere domestique”, Mr Barry was expendable.

Occasionally a domestique has his day; one of Mr Moore’s most engaging essays relates to a French rider, Joël Pelier, who led the second-longest solo breakaway in Tour history in 1989. More typical is the relationship Mr Moore describes between Mark Cavendish, a British sprinter, and his teammate, Bernhard Eisel. On a mountain stage in 2010 Mr Cavendish was ill and desperate to quit. Mr Eisel stuck with him, exhorting him to continue, carrying Mr Cavendish’s sunglasses and radio, all the while calculating the pace needed for the pair to finish inside the cut-off time. A good domestique takes his pleasure vicariously.

Many a domestique has won the tongue-in-cheek prize for the rider who finishes the Tour last. Max Leonard’s “Lanterne Rouge” is an investigation of these men, whose trophy was inspired by the red lamp that once hung off the back of trains to indicate that the line was free. In the stories of these riders, Mr Leonard finds an “antidote to the driven, sometimes clinical approach to sport” seen at the front of the peloton (the main group of cyclists). He dispels the notion that the winners of the lanterne are the worst riders in the race. Those, he believes, are the riders who fail to finish. No man who completes the Tour (and only men compete) is a loser.

Mr Leonard’s conceit works because the stories of the lanternes are the story of the Tour in microcosm. There are the meritorious: Pierre Matignon, a Frenchman who brought up the rear in 1969 but still won a stage by beating the legendary Eddy Merckx up the fearsome Puy de Dôme; and the only three-time lanterne, Wim Vansevenant of Belgium, a dour domestique who eventually came to see his prize as recognition of his self-sacrifice. There are the opportunists who saw the commercial benefits of coming last. In 1979 an Austrian rider, Gerhard Schönbacher, infuriated race officials by walking the last 100 metres down the Champs-Élysées, engulfed by journalists and photographers. And then there are the cheats: the lanterne in 1997, Philippe Gaumont, was so in thrall to drugs that he rubbed his scrotum raw with salt to simulate saddle problems and get cortisone from a sympathetic doctor.

Doping engulfed the back of the peloton just as much as it did the leaders. Mr Barry, who was banned in 2012 for six months, gives a depressingly familiar list of reasons why he succumbed: “Everyone was doing it. It was healthier. It restored our natural levels of hormones…I had to dope to keep my job.” The saddest aspect of cycling’s drug-dependency is that it broke the trust that had held the peloton together. In 2001 Christophe Bassons, a French cyclist who had spoken out about doping, retired from the sport after rivals tried to shove him off the road into a ditch.

A recent sequence of wins by riders who have never tested positive for drugs has helped return some sense of wonder to the Tour. But these three books show how there is rather more to watch out for each year than the battle for first prize.