Peter Cossins – författare

Random House presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Butcher, Blacksmith, Acrobat, Sweep by Peter Cossins, read by Joseph Kloska.Full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating, the first Tour de France in 1903 was a colourful affair. Its riders included characters like Maurice “The White Bulldog” Garin, an Italian-born Frenchman whose parents were said to have swapped him for a round of cheese in order to smuggle him into France as a 14 year old, Hippolyte Aucouturier, who with his jersey of horizontal stripes and handlebar moustache looked like the villain from a Buster Keaton movie and amateurs like Jean Dargassies, a blacksmith who had no idea what he was letting himself in for. Dreamed up to revive a struggling newspaper, cyclists of the time weren''t enthusiastic about this ''heroic'' race through roads more suited to hooves than wheels, with bikes weighing up to twenty kilos, on a single fixed gear, for three full weeks. Assembling enough riders for the race meant paying unemployed amateurs from the suburbs of Paris, including a butcher, a chimney sweep and a circus acrobat. There was no indication that this ramshackle cycling pack would draw crowds to throng France''s rutted roads and cheer the first Tour heroes. But they did, and all thanks to a marketing ruse, cycling would never be the same again. Acclaimed cycling writer Peter Cossins takes us through the inaugural Tour de France stage by stage to see where the greatest sporting event of all began.

When, during the Pyrenean stages of the 1998 Tour de France, a journalist asked Marco Pantani why he rode so fast in the mountains, the elfin Italian, unmistakeable in the bandanna and hooped ear-rings that played up to his "Pirate" nickname, replied: "To shorten my agony."Drawing on the fervour for these men of the mountains, Climbers looks at what sets these athletes apart within the world of bike racing, about why we love and cherish them, how they make cycling beautiful, and how they see themselves and the feats they achieve.Working chronologically, Peter Cossins explores the evolution of mountain-climbing. He offers a comprehensive view of the sport, combining contemporary reports with fresh one-to-one interviews with high-profile riders from the last 50 years, such as Cyrille Guimard, Hennie Kuiper and Andy Schleck. And, unlike many other cycling books, Climbers also includes the stories of female racers across the world, from Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio and Annemiek van Vleuten to Fabiana Luperini and Amanda Spratt.Climbers analyses the personalities of these racers, highlighting the individuality of climbing as an exercise and the fundamental fact that it''s a solitary challenge undertaken in relentlessly unforgiving terrain that requires unremitting effort.Captivating and iconic, Climbers is the ultimate cycling book to understand what it takes both physically and mentally to take on the sport''s hardest stages.