Born in Yorkshire to a bicycling enthusiast father, Gordon Neale soon grew to love cycling himself. Though he retained a typical life as an insurance salesman back in the UK, Neale was constantly on the continent pursuing his career as a professional cyclist—touring much of the Low Countries, France, and farther afield into Spain, Austria, even Russia. In this memoir, he reflects on a bygone age of simpler hardware, fewer rules, and big personalities.
CYCLING 70 YEARS ONCE WORLD CHAMPION unfolds its material in a casual, confident tone, rattling off the names of cyclists and little towns with obvious fluency. To an interested party, there is great store here for an in-depth investigation of these regional tours and the cyclists who rode them; to the general reader, the volume of names still contributes to the overall impression of command. Unfortunately, the text drops a lot of names without stopping to flesh out the personalities themselves; quite a few small European towns, or particular riders, pass by without being much differentiated from one another, thus falling quickly out of memory.
The main problem is structural: there isn’t a clear narrative through-line to CYCLING 70 YEARS, and as a result, no amount of specificity can successfully create one. At the most basic level, the text tends to hop back and forth in time—preventing any sense of chronological development. Without a real narrative, the text also loses focus. Too many words are spent on Neale’s time as an insurance salesman and the setup of his offices, not enough on his actual experiences of riding. The very final words of the text are opinions on Brexit, nothing to do with cycling at all. As a result, the overall reading experience is somewhat staccato, never really landing, hopping constantly from one moment to another.
The prose can be charming at times, but it’s marred by frequent spelling and grammar errors. There is an occasional, almost vocal quality to the prose—as though the writer is recalling aloud to a friend—but this tends to hit the page as run-on sentences lacking commas. At times, end punctuation (periods especially) are missing. There are more than a few outright spelling errors, as well as some homophone substitution errors. The grammar also gets awkward at times, in strange locutions (“Before not very long”) or unusual phrase order (“After the adventures on the cushion of my dad’s bike to the races”).
It may be of interest to die-hard cycling enthusiasts, but CYCLING 70 YEARS currently needs both line-editing and some high-level restructuring to best showcase its subject matter.
Though the underlying material is of historic interest, Gordon Neale’s CYCLING 70 YEARS ONCE WORLD CHAMPION lacks a strong central narrative to elevate it from a collection of facts and anecdotes to a compelling memoir.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader