About Chasing the Lanterne Rouge
From the Prologue…
“Chasing the Lanterne Rouge is about the last place riders to finish the world’s greatest bike race each year, Le Tour de France. While the term is applied to other races, even one day races, it belongs solely to the Tour. Pros will tell you it’s like no other grand tour, everything is hyped, the intensity turned up, it’s cycling in a media fishbowl, everything magnified ten times. Over its history it has weathered a thousand political, economic and social storms to define the meaning of Grand Tour. There are many other great races and they in their turn have been watched, written about, and recapped, they have their heroes and rivalries, but the Tour de France is what we gather each July for, put our cycling lives on hold for, and for 20 odd days imagine all of our cycling adventures to be on the roads of France regardless of where we ride. To finish on those bumpy pave bricks of the Champs-Elysee is our dream – even if we finished Chasing the Lanterne Rouge – dead last.”
All text from Chasing the Lanterne Rouge by Gerry Ellis, Copyright 2011. Not to be reprinted without permission.
