37. The cycling writing show

November 17 | This week’s Telegraph Cycling Podcast has a literary theme.

With Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe at the London Sports Writing Festival at Lord’s, they introduce interviews with Brendan Gallagher and Edward Pickering, author of The Yellow Jersey Club, which features interviews with many of the surviving members of cycling’s most exclusive club: those who have won the Tour de France’s yellow jersey.

Gallagher wrote a chapter about Ernest Hemingway for the newly published sixth volume of The Cycling Anthology and asks whether there might be a lost Hemingway manuscript on cycling. He loved the sport but felt unable to write about it, believing French was the only language that could do it justice.

Yet, says Gallagher, it “seemed to offer up everything Hemingway loved in sport and life: men in extremis, rugged topography and weather, grace under pressure, messianic devotion to an almost religious higher cause, suffering for the common good, an enclosed, self-perpetuating ‘in-crowd’… the cheating born of economic necessity, the cunning of low people in high places, the dodgy promoters and team managers, and the greedy pilot fish feeding off the peloton.”

Friebe, meanwhile, is back from Berlin to rejoin Richard and Lionel for their event at the London Sports Writing Festival, which was recorded and will be released as a forthcoming Friends Special.

The Telegraph Cycling Podcast is sponsored by Trainer Road.