Quick Take
- Narration: Ned Boulting reads his own book with infectious, self-deprecating enthusiasm – the whole experience feels like being cornered at a dinner party by someone whose obsession turns out to be contagious.
- Themes: Obsession and historical detective work, cycling and memory, post-WWI France
- Mood: Warm, digressive, and unexpectedly moving
- Verdict: One of the most original sports audiobooks in recent years – part travelogue, part history, entirely the product of a very particular and very appealing mind.
I was halfway through my Saturday morning run when I realized I had slowed to a near-walk, not from fatigue but because Ned Boulting was describing the second frame of a two-and-a-half-minute Pathé reel from 1923 and I couldn’t afford to miss a word. That particular kind of attention – the absorption of a listener who came for cycling history and found themselves inside something much stranger and richer – is exactly what this audiobook delivers from its first chapters.
The premise alone is worth dwelling on. In the autumn of 2020, during the depths of the COVID pandemic, Boulting – ITV’s head cycling commentator and one of British sports broadcasting’s most distinctive voices – bought a length of Pathé news film at a London auction house. He knew only that it showed a stage of the Tour de France from a long time ago. Once restored, it proved to be approximately two and a half minutes of footage from stage 4 of the 1923 Tour, featuring a lone rider crossing a bridge and a handful of other sequences. The film became an obsession. This book is what the obsession produced.
Our Take on 1923
Winner of the Sports Book Awards 2024 Cycling Book of the Year and nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, this is not what you expect from a cycling book. There’s very little in the way of race analysis, physiological detail, or athlete biography in the conventional sense. What Boulting offers instead is a sustained act of historical imagination – studying each frame of his little film, identifying faces and buildings, tracing the routes, and following the leads wherever they go, including deep into the political and social upheaval of France just five years after World War One.
One reviewer describes it as “an absorbing mix of historical sleuthing and travel writing,” which The Telegraph also landed on. That’s accurate but undersells the emotional register. Another listener who describes themselves as a Tour de France fan but not a cyclist says the book made them as interested in 1920s European politics as in the race itself. That’s the measure of what Boulting has done: he’s used two and a half minutes of grainy film as a portal into an entire world.
Why Listen to 1923
Boulting reads his own text, and this is one of those cases where the author’s voice is irreplaceable. He has the broadcaster’s gift for timing and warmth, and he reads with a self-deprecating humor that makes the obsession feel charming rather than solipsistic. When he describes sitting with a magnifying glass studying individual frames of the film, or making phone calls during lockdown to track down the descendants of riders who competed in that 1923 stage, the comedy and the earnestness coexist exactly as they do in his television work.
The audiobook format suits the material particularly well because the book is fundamentally about the experience of looking – at the film, at old photographs, at landscapes that have and haven’t changed since 1923. Boulting is describing visual evidence throughout, and his narration makes those descriptions vivid in a way that compensates for the absence of the images themselves. At just over ten hours, the runtime is generous but never felt padded in my listening.
What to Watch For in 1923
One reviewer notes the book “jumps all over the place,” and that is a fair structural observation. Boulting follows his research wherever it leads, which means the narrative moves between contemporary travelogue, archival research, biographical sketches of 1923 riders, WWI history, and reflections on the nature of obsession itself. If you want a linear argument or a conventional sports biography, this book will frustrate you. If you’re comfortable with digression as a form – if you read essays as well as narrative nonfiction – the associative structure is a feature rather than a flaw.
It’s also worth noting that this is emphatically not a technical cycling book. There’s no detailed race coverage, no breakdown of climbing strategies or stage tactics. Boulting loves the Tour de France deeply, and that love is present on every page, but the book is about history and obsession and the strange compulsion to know everything about a two-minute fragment of the past. Cycling is the context, not the subject.
Who Should Listen to 1923
This audiobook will find its most enthusiastic audience among Tour de France followers who want something beyond the annual race coverage, and among readers who enjoy literary historical detective work in the tradition of writers like Robert MacFarlane or Tim Robinson. If you have ever found yourself falling down a research rabbit hole for no practical reason, Boulting will feel like kindred spirit and guide.
It’s not the book for listeners who want sports statistics, training science, or race analysis. And non-cycling fans who picked this up on a general interest in post-WWI France or European history may find the cycling context occasionally heavy to wade through. But for the listener who sits somewhere in the intersection of cycling enthusiasm and historical curiosity, 1923 is genuinely exceptional – a book that earns its prizes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to be a cycling fan to appreciate 1923?
Not really, though it helps to have some passing familiarity with the Tour de France. Several reviewers who describe themselves as fans of the race but not cyclists found themselves equally absorbed by the political and social history of 1920s France. The book uses cycling as a frame for historical detective work, and that investigation has broad appeal beyond the sport.
What does Boulting’s self-narration add to the audiobook experience?
A great deal. Boulting is a professional broadcaster with natural timing and warmth, and reading his own text gives the narration an autobiographical intimacy that a different narrator couldn’t replicate. The moments of self-deprecation about his own obsession land particularly well in his voice, and his affection for the subject is audible throughout.
Is 1923 primarily a history book or a personal memoir?
It’s genuinely both. The book interweaves Boulting’s personal experience of acquiring and researching the film – including the peculiar context of doing archival work during COVID lockdowns – with substantive historical research into the 1923 Tour, the riders who competed, and the broader social world of France in the early 1920s. Neither strand dominates completely.
How much does the audiobook suffer from the absence of the film footage and archival images?
Less than you might expect. Boulting’s descriptions of individual frames of the film are vivid enough that the audio experience is compelling, and the narrative works as pure detective story even without visual reference. That said, listeners who want to see the actual film footage can find it online, and watching it before or after listening adds an additional dimension to the book’s argument.
