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As requested by @rkoreis and @senorerikv, a little bit about the building blocks of Sprinting Through No Man’s Land, the research, and what sources I used to retell the story of the 1919 Tour de France. 1/x
With each project of this length, the writer faces a glut of sources, the bounds of which they can’t hope to examine, or a scarcity of the same. I don’t think there’s any happy middle ground. 2/x
Both situations bring about problems for the writer. For Sprinting, the latter was the one I faced. The Tour’s sponsor at the time, L’Auto, saw a shameful end after charges of collaboration at the end of WWII. It didn’t help many records were also lost in the war. 3/x
This meant internal papers and notes weren’t easily on hand. Fortunately, I was always interested in how the Tour intersected with the outside world, more than their private operations. 4/x
For the race scenes–the cyclists’ positions at any moment, their standings, which roads they took–I looked to l’Auto’s digitized pages, which Gallica at the BnF keeps available. 5/x
As the race sponsor, l’Auto dominated coverage. I’m wary of that relationship to the underlying material, and felt most comfortable using them for times, race itinerary, some imperfect, immediate impressions of the cyclists, and day-to-day administration (prizes, etc.) 6/x
Which is all great, but wasn’t enough for the larger narrative backbone of the project which involved the cyclists’ histories and the broader project of rebuilding. 7/x
For the former, I expanded my search for contemporary records. Gallica came in handy again, with La Vie au grand air, Le Miroir des sports, etc. More or less any paper that covered cycling. Since the war was of obvious interest, I looked to their gov't and mil records, too. 8/x
Slowly, I began to build a composite picture of the cyclists. It was rare that any one source contained more than a fragment of information which needed to be confirmed with another. Their private lives were the most difficult to construct, unsurprisingly. 9/x
Jacques Seray and Lablaine collected a store of materials for their own French language works on many of the subjects, which Seray helped guide me through. 10/x
For this particular story, and in a lot of my work, I’m also thinking about the new ways in which to connect existing material, and using logical inference in order to bring about new understandings…. 11/x
…Something as simple as finding an a starting and ending address in Paris, looking at road conditions and bicycles at the time, and seeing what a cyclist’s average morning commute might have looked like. 12/x
Of course, locations and routes played a big role in this story. I did my best to drive along much of the 1919 Tour route. I looked at contemporaneous maps and spent more time than I’d care to admit in Google Earth’s first-person perspective 13/x
That, plus photographs from the time and race coverage helped me create a more intimate, moment-by-moment world than l’Auto’s sport-focused coverage. Or at least I hope. 14/x
For those even deeper understandings, I spent time at Columbia looking through research on the host of political science, international relations, feminist, labor movement, racial topics that came up based on characters and locations. 15/x
And I arrived with some of my own understanding of the war itself, but continued to buttress that. 16/x
With a complete-ish timeline, I started drafting. I knew what was happening and had an overall sense of my thesis, but I regularly went back to sources. I tried to expand that timeline with development of the theme, scenic impressions, + individual and collective histories… 17/x
…primarily through the lens of time and location. For instance, as I wrote, I thought about what battlefield they might be passing by in that moment? Did any cyclists fight there? What was the state of the war when that fighting occurred? What was morale like? 18/x
As far as my favorite source goes, it’s a tough question. One that I didn’t use much, but which I was fascinated by were the war damage maps drawn by the French Army’s cartographic service. 19/x
I don’t have a picture on hand, but Michelin maps at the time also included information on the state of the roads after the war, which was useful to know given that wear on the bicycles defined this race in many ways. 20/x
Oh, and my French is okay. I can read and write in it if you force me to (like this project did), but I can’t hold a conversation in French with a native speaker. Célia Abele, my brilliant translator, really helped my workflow in those early days. 21/x
I hope to keep doing these as I think up topics. And if you're just joining us, you can order the book discussed ^ on one of these sites, or wherever you buy books!
https://bookshop.org/books/sprinting-through-no-man-s-land-endurance-tragedy-and-rebirth-in-the-1919-tour-de-france/9781542018821
https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/book/9781542018821
https://www.amazon.com/Sprinting-Through-Mans-Land-Endurance/dp/154201882X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
22/22
https://bookshop.org/books/sprinting-through-no-man-s-land-endurance-tragedy-and-rebirth-in-the-1919-tour-de-france/9781542018821
https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/book/9781542018821
https://www.amazon.com/Sprinting-Through-Mans-Land-Endurance/dp/154201882X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
22/22
