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

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In fact, as he begins to identify certain figures on the film, he discovers that one of them was behind a mutiny, one year later, against the conditions. I recently completed reading Ned Boulting’s book “1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession”, and popped a review up on Kobo.

Mysterious beauty: the daymark on St Martin's, Isles of Scilly, whose coastline is explored in The Draw of the Sea. Ultimately, it’s the enthusiasm that proves most beguiling here, not only for doggedly uncovering facts with extremely limited clues, but for bringing back to the light a remote, unsung figure and honouring his life – and career – even though it wasn’t one of garlands or headlines. Side note: the word for this ‘sonder’ was coined about ten years ago and has since become about 5,000,000 brand names). A fascinating deep-dive into down a rabbit hole that does a good job of taking you on a journey to Tours around the World War I era. Meeting beachcombers, gig rowers, surfers and freedivers while pondering his own family’s place in this wild landscape, he explores why we are driven to the water’s edge.

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.

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. 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.

The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession is a brand new book by presenter, commentator, podcaster and author Ned Boulting. 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. A previously unseen film of an early Tour de France bought at auction inspires Ned Boulting to unearth the story behind the people, places and times captured on film.