To shorten my agony: that is what Marco Pantani told a journalist during the Pyrenean stages of the 1998 Tour de France when asked why he rode so fast in the mountains. Peter Cossins opens Climbers with the line because it contains the argument of the entire book. The audiobook stretches to ten hours and fifty-one minutes, credited to Richard Trinder, and what it sets out to explain is not how climbing works but why a certain kind of rider chooses the part of the race that hurts most and then rides it harder.
How Climbers Holds Up
Cossins works chronologically, which sounds like the obvious decision and turns out to be the one that shapes everything else. The book begins at the beginning of climbing on bikes and moves forward, setting contemporary reports beside fresh one-to-one interviews conducted for the project, so each era gets described twice: once as it was written down at the time, once as the riders who lived it remember it now. Cyrille Guimard, Hennie Kuiper and Andy Schleck are named among those interviewed, covering roughly half a century of racing between them. Holding it together is an argument about temperament. Climbing is presented as a solitary challenge in relentlessly unforgiving terrain, demanding unremitting effort, and the book keeps circling back to the question of who volunteers for that.
Interviews are where the length gets earned. A five-star filed from the United Kingdom in July 2022 describes exactly what the access produces: a captivating insight into the battles, personalities and eccentricities of the riders who shine when the road goes up, full of detail about the figures who supplied color to the sport across the decades. That is an accurate account of the method. Cossins is not writing tactical analysis. He is writing character studies of people whose characters were formed by choosing the hardest part of the race, and the first-hand material is what keeps the portraits from being assembled secondhand.
Women riders belong to the history here rather than to an appendix, which is not standard practice in cycling books. Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio, Annemiek van Vleuten, Fabiana Luperini and Amanda Spratt occupy the same chronological spine as the men, and that changes what the book can say: climbing becomes a discipline rather than a men's specialism with a separate chapter attached. The build has its own payoff too. A five-star from January 2025 puts it well, describing bygone eras and stages brought to life for readers too young to have seen them, and calling the ascent from the earliest bike climbing up into the modern peloton a climb of its own.
Pronunciation is the quiet workload in a book like this. The copy alone puts Pantani, Guimard, Kuiper, Schleck, Moolman-Pasio, van Vleuten, Luperini and Spratt on the page, drawn from several language traditions, and ten hours and fifty-one minutes of racing history means names arriving in clusters as each era turns over. Richard Trinder carries the whole recording. The demand here is steadiness rather than drama: a reader who keeps the roll call clean, lets the interview excerpts sound like speech rather than quotation, and resists the urge to commentate. Sports writing read aloud usually fails by getting excited on the listener's behalf, and this book does its own persuading.
Weak Spots in Climbers
Where the pool splits is on what the book actually covers, and the disagreement is not a small one. A three-star from December 2022 objects that the recent history of 2000 to 2019 was left out, assumes doping is the reason, and argues that the so-called legends of the sixties through the nineties doped in their own ways, so the selection amounts to hero-choosing rather than journalism. A five-star filed from the United Kingdom in May 2024 describes a different book entirely: an interesting history of the best climbers right up to the present day world tour riders, well researched and written. Both accounts cannot be true of the same ten and a half hours, and the copy's own promise of interviews spanning the last fifty years does not settle it.
Nobody who has written on this page has described the recording. Five signed responses, and each one grades the book: the research, the selection, the coverage, the pleasure of the prose. Two of the five arrive under the storefront's default account names rather than chosen handles, and two were filed from the United Kingdom beneath a listing sold in the United States, which matters if regional editions do. The three-star from August 2022 flags the thing a newcomer to cycling books should weigh: quite a thorough recounting of the great climbers, a bit too in-depth for that reader, with interest hard to maintain, and the excerpts of interviews singled out as a great addition even so.
The Right Listener for Climbers
Choose Climbers if the mountains are the reason you watch bike races at all. It suits listeners who want the interviews rather than the results, who enjoy an evening on why a rider in a bandanna and hooped earrings decided that shortening the agony meant riding further into it, and who can hold a dozen surnames in their head without a start list. Anyone assembling a picture of women's racing history alongside the men's will find the work done here in one place, which is rarer than it ought to be.
Pass on it if you came for the 2000s and 2010s in detail, because coverage of that window is the one thing this page cannot settle for you. Pass as well if you want tactics, watts and training science: this is a book about temperament, culture and memory, and it treats climbing as a psychological question rather than a physiological one. Ten hours and fifty-one minutes is a genuine commitment for a subject this specialized, so if you are not already invested in the sport, sample the opening before you buy and judge the density by ear.
In Brief
- Performance: One credited reader, Richard Trinder, across ten hours and fifty-one minutes of interviews and race reporting.
- What it covers: Suffering as a discipline, climbing culture, women's racing history, memory set against contemporary reporting
- Feel: Absorbed, granular, quietly reverent
- Our call: Excellent for committed cycling listeners, too dense to serve as anyone's first sports book.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much cycling knowledge does the Climbers audiobook assume?
More than a beginner has. The opening lands on the Pyrenean stages of the 1998 Tour de France and expects you to know what that means, riders arrive by surname, and eras get referenced rather than explained. A general sports listener will follow the human stories, but the texture rewards someone who already watches races.
Does the audiobook include any climb profiles, maps or photographs?
Nothing on the listing mentions a companion document of any kind. A book about specific mountain roads is precisely the sort of title where gradient profiles and photographs would sit in the printed edition, so if route diagrams matter to you, check the print version before choosing audio.
Is it a useful listen for someone who rides rather than watches?
Yes, with one caveat: the subject is racing at the highest level, not training or technique. What a club rider gets from it is the psychology of suffering uphill, described by people who did it for a living. No plans, no numbers and no coaching advice appear.
How long is the Climbers audiobook, and does it work in short sessions?
Ten hours and fifty-one minutes. It works well in short sessions because the chronological structure means chapters correspond to eras and riders, so the breaks land at natural boundaries rather than in the middle of an argument you have to reassemble later.
