In his book 1923: The Mystery Of Lot 212 And A Tour de France Obsession, broadcaster and writer Ned Boulting turned a 100-year-old, two-minute film reel from the Tour into an adventure in history, geography, politics and family
Me and my book
I ended up here accidentally. I started life as a football reporter and was sent by ITV to cover the 2003 Tour de France as a reporter.
Twenty one years later I’m still here, and with each passing year cycling has taken on a bigger part of my life. I’ve now written half a dozen books about cycling but everything I’ve done has been written, at least in part, with the intention of amusing and entertaining people and occasionally making them laugh about the sport, which I find intrinsically funny and chaotic anyway. Those stories have been very much by my own design, but the story behind my book 1923: The Mystery Of Lot 212 And A Tour de France Obsession was almost out of my control in the sense that it’s a thing that happened to me, so very quickly it took on a life of its own and I had to guide my own way through it.
It all started in the second round of lockdown during the pandemic in 2020.
A friend of mine, who I work with on the darts, sent me a link to a huge online auction of sports memorabilia which had more than 600 lots but just one related to cycling: lot 212, an old reel of film. I’d never bought anything at auction before and the auction house didn’t know anything about it other than it might be of the Tour de France and it might be quite old. Fortunately I appeared to be the only person on the planet interested in it.
I realised that it was potentially of great significance, although it took a while to find someone who could digitise it and restore it because it’s nitrate film, which predates celluloid and is actually extremely dangerous as a substance – it can spontaneously combust, which I didn’t realise at the time and clearly nor did the auction house because they just stuffed it in a jiffy bag, ironically enough.
The clip is only two and a half minutes long and is incomplete, but it came to me just as the world was shutting down and the final Grand Tour of the year – the Giro – was finishing, so I was looking for an escape route and this one presented itself with a degree of clarity. From the minute I held it up to the light and saw it was indeed from the Tour de France and that it contained all this wealth of mystery, I knew it would become an obsession. I didn’t know how the mystery would end up but I knew it was something I wanted to dive into.
