Locker Room: This column is a slave of the seasons when it comes to reading.
Last week, knowing that the great obscenity that is the Tour de France was looming, we went to the bookshop there to see what literary works might deliver us from ignorance and provide padding for a column the core philosophy of which could be summed up in one short sentence: The Tour de France is about as genuine a sporting endeavour as pro wrestling.
The bookshelves were heaving with hagiographies of Lance Armstrong. The canonisation business hinges on faith, and when it comes to St Lance I am a devout atheist, a slightly uncomfortable position to be in because I notice the sports people off whom I parasitically leech to make my living increasingly hold Lance in the highest esteem and are becoming more and more prone to quoting inspirational little Lance-isms the very recitation of which drives them to higher levels of abstinence and dedication. My response generally extends no further than, "Yeah, he was something else all right."
Between all the happy-clappy Lance-loving bumf and the breathless treatises on what a wonderful, life-affirming thing the Tour de France is, two more sober books were clinging together shoulder to shoulder: Matt Seaton's The Escape Artistand Paul Kimmage's Rough Ride.
Kimmage first, because to see the third edition of his classic, all freshly gussied up and fitted out with a new and extensive afterword, is especially sickening to those of us who write rather more perishable sports books.
Bad cess to him, we said, noting that if we could take performance-enhancing drugs to produce a book as valuable, as honest and as timeless we would willingly do so and then go away and live off Lance-isms alone for the rest of our days.
The odd thing about Rough Rideis its persistent freshness. As a tale of love and disillusionment it is timeless. When Rough Ridewas written back in the late 1980s the Tour de France still existed as a shimmering illusion of what man is capable of. Those lingering shots of the peloton snaking through backdrops of sunflowers or maize; the epic days in the mountains; the breathless time trials - there seemed to be a simple purity to cycling and the demands it made of its practitioners which elevated the Tour to the status of a religious rite.
I remember when Kimmage got off his bike, wrote his book - spitting in the soup, as they saw it in France - and began a career in journalism, there were those who felt he should be denied an NUJ card on the grounds he was just a "failed cyclist".
This was an uncomfortable time for those of us who were entering the business, because we were failures at a range of rather less taxing endeavours than pro cycling. But it also told us something odd. The barrier for entry into our trade should always be low in order to attract people who bring the perspective of interesting lives, but Kimmage had already performed a more significant act of journalism than any of us will ever do. He had ridden in three Tours and had written his experiences without hubris or dishonesty. He was scary.
For the 2006 edition Kimmage went back to the Tour de France and his experiences, appended now to the original text, almost mirrored the structure of Rough Ride. For a period he was seduced by the grand theatre of the Tour and the beautiful monasticism of its main actors. Then cycling betrayed him again. Floyd Landis!
One element of Kimmage's experience fascinates more than any other on last year's Tour: journalism has given up! The press rooms of the Tour are filled with the gullible and the fanatical and the worshipful.
Even after Festina, Willie Voet, Marco Pantani, Operacion Puerto, David Millar, Jesus Manzano, Bjarne Riis and an endless list of shames and scandals, they refuse to believe that what they are covering is essentially a crock and the men they are godding up are largely frauds. By and large they have become the PR flacks for a debauched industry, and the sport they all fell in love with no longer exists.
It's nine years since the Tour de France rolled around these particular parts and we allowed ourselves to forget about Kimmage and to hang out the bunting and pat ourselves on the backs and say what a great little nation we were that we should be part of such a grand spectacle.
Our ability to fool ourselves served nicely as a symbol of the 1998 Tour, which of course turned into a running epic of farce and cheating over the following weeks, leaving us looking foolish and used.
This year the Grand Depart for the Grand Illusion takes place in London, a city whoring its newly minted Olympian reputation for a chance to bed down with the most debauched sport in the world. Time passes. We learn nothing.
My own first-hand experiences of cycling are limited to having covered one Nissan Tour and riding to school a few times on the three fine days of weather we enjoyed in the 1970s. The attraction of saddle sores, lycra shorts and aching limbs was a mystery to me until the summer of 1987, when in the space of three weeks I metamorphosed into an instant expert on the politics and nuances of life within the peleton.
Matt Seaton's poignant book deepened my understanding of what makes people love cycling and made me marginally more forgiving of those timeservers in the Tour's press tents. Somewhere along the way, one imagines, they shared Seaton's obsession.
As are all books involving an obsessional love of a sport, Seaton's book has been compared to Fever Pitch, but that fails to do it justice.
Seaton's book is more heart-wrenchingly grown up. He talks about cycling in a way that rekindles something boyish in any of us who were obsessed with a sport at a time when school books seemed to be the work of the devil.
The part of the book where Seaton talks in loving detail about bike and body, the eternal commitment to the maintenance of both, and the hypnotic descriptions of his own races reminded me in a strange way of that wonderful movie Breaking Away.
The Escape Artisttakes a sharp turn into the real world. Seaton was married to the writer and journalist Ruth Picardie, and her terminal illness and shockingly premature death floods his world with grief and perspective.
The book is about putting away boyish things. He mentions reading Rough Rideand the overwhelming disillusionment that came with following cycling in the years after that being so comprehensive as to make Paul Kimmage's experiences look almost quaint.
There's a line in The Escape Artistwhich stays with you (there are many in fact).
"Sometimes," says Seaton, "the peleton lets the lone escapist, the rider who slips the bunch, have his day."
That's what the Tour de France should be like, a dreamworld for those with the dedication and talent to slip life's irresistible gravity. Instead it is a besmirched facsimile of life itself, a tattered reminder of our essential weaknesses, a betrayal of its own romance.
When Le Tour pushes off I won't be studying the peloton. All in all I'd rather be watching the Dublin minor hurlers. Yesterday they reminded me of romance and obsession, and watching them do their lap of honour in Croke Park I wasn't wondering about what tawdry revelations of EPO, growth hormone or good, old-fashioned stimulants would later stain the sepia of the memory.