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The Chain
Bradley Wiggins, (HarperCollins)
The Tour de France winner’s autobiography begins with him sneaking into his walk-in wardrobe and doing a line of coke off his Olympic gold medal: the final emblematic descent from his crowning summer of 2012. And yet for all the personal lows chronicled here – addiction, self-harm, the collapse of his marriage, the haunting memories of his difficult father and of a coach who sexually abused him – this is not your classic misery memoir. Disarmingly honest and roguishly humorous, it is a journey of rediscovery: a man knocked sideways by the toxic winds of sport and celebrity, finally learning to stand straight again.
The Escape: The Tour, the Cyclist and Me
Pippa York and David Walsh (Mudlark)
In a previous life Robert Millar was one of this country’s greatest cyclists: a stern Glaswegian who won the King of the Mountains jersey at the 1984 Tour de France. Now known as Pippa York, she returns to the race in the company of the journalist David Walsh. It’s a freewheeling, fascinating read that defies genre: part travelogue and part memoir, it dances between present and past, sporting observation and self-reflection, drugs that help you cheat and drugs that help you live. And for all the pain and anguish that gets unlocked here, this is a book without a bitter or hateful bone in its body.
Fixed: My Secret Life As a Match Fixer
Moses Swaibu (Blink)
We know, on some bleak and buried level, that there are armies of fixers out there, trying to manipulate the sports we love. But we ignore it. We shrug it off. This book forces us to stare the devil straight in the eyes. A former professional footballer who after leaving Crystal Palace ended up as a kingpin organising fixes of lower-league games, Swaibu was a regular kid with a troubled upbringing who made a series of wrong but entirely logical choices. His true-crime tale is all the more visceral for its ordinariness. Above all, it serves as a parable for football at large: a game built on greed and envy, and shockingly complacent about the threat in its midst.
More Than a Shirt
Joey D’Urso (Seven Dials)
Once a cultural heirloom and piece of shared heritage, the football shirt is now a commercial opportunity, a political platform, a place for crypto sponsors and state actors to run riot. Football and politics is a genre that has been done to death in recent years, but here D’Urso’s simple conceit – examining the soiled modern game through the prism of the shirt – offers a sparklingly fresh snapshot as well as a powerful reminder of the incredible global scope of the sport.
Ultra Women
Lily Canter and Emma Wilkinson (Canbury)
Why do women sometimes manage to beat men in ultramarathon races? Why does the gender performance gap begin to shrink with longer distances? Spoiler alert: we don’t know for sure. But Ultra Women is as close as we’re getting for now: a meticulous and occasionally startling study of how modern sport is still shaped by a male perspective, from media coverage to bra design to scientific research. Most of all, though, it’s a celebration of female bodies, female pioneers and female endurance.
