The Observer Sports Monthly recently unveiled its Top 50 Sports Books, and its choice to write up the only endurance sport title to make it into the top 10 (Tour de France multi-winner Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike*) was sports journalist Matt Rendell. Reading between the lines, one suspects that Rendell, while happy to recount the virtues of both Armstrong and the book, would not place this title in his own personal top 10 (OSM’s judging panel took reader votes into account). He points out that Armstrong employed a nonspecialist ghostwriter who made some unfortunate mistakes. As Rendell says, ‘it really isn’t about the bike, it aims at… a nonsports readership’ and as such reads more like a pitch to become a ‘Hollywood biopic’.

But that doesn’t make it a bad book and its sales have taken cycling to an entirely new audience. What I did not realise at the time of the publication of the OSM Top 50 is that Rendell should have been in it, not commenting on it. His A Significant Other also invokes the name of the Great One (it’s subtitled ‘Riding the Centenary Tour de France with Lance Armstrong’) but this time Armstrong is not the hero.

Published in hardback last year, the book is now out in paperback, enabling us to justify its inclusion here, for it would be a crime to miss what is quite simply a tour de force.

The eponymous ‘significant other’ is, on one reading, Victor Hugo Peña, a Colombian teammate of Armstrong; on another it is the team itself, or more specifically the domestiques, the fetchers and carriers who protect and project Armstrong, the US Postal Service team’s star turn. If, like me, you have been fascinated but baffled by coverage of the Tour de France in the past, you will tune in this summer with a different perspective after reading this spellbinding account of just one stage of the 2003 Tour – the 159.5k from Bagnères-de-Bigorre to Luz- Ardiden.

It was, according to the author, ‘the greatest stage in the closest Tour in a hundred years’ and Rendell packs history, drama and science into this single stage. I was gripped from the start by his dissection of what he calls this ‘anomalous’ sport: ‘It imports aerospace and Formula One technology only to make physical demands that drive body and mind to breaking point… it obliges most of its players to renounce personal ambition for a tiny handful of leaders… yet disposes them in global rankings based on individual results.’ It is a hybrid between team and individual sport which ‘measures performance to the thousandth of a second, then lumps a hundred athletes or more into the same time as they swarm across the line’.

While most readers will simply relish the drama, the scientists among you will also appreciate the specialist insights. Did you know that the rider at the head of a single file riding at 60kph must generate a near-superhuman 607 watts of power, while the riders at three, four and beyond can coast along at just 64% of the leader’s output? But the science is only half as fascinating as Rendell’s insights into the life of a domestique; his raison d’etre, he tells us, ‘is to transfer energy from his muscles into the surrounding atmosphere – to tunnel through the still air and create a moving stream in his wake. In normal life, the petty turbulence that fills the spaces we vacate… melts inconsequentially. Cycling adopts it as a founding principle, exercising the minds of scientists for whom the sport is essentially a venerable experiment in applied fluid mechanics’. I happened to be reading that passage in a café and was suddenly aware of a brief, refreshing air movement as, right on cue, somebody walked past with their coffee; for one split second I knew what it was like inside that peloton.

Andy Etchells

* For the record, It’s Not About the Bike ranked ninth in The Observer’s Top 50. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch pipped Norman Mailer’s The Fight for the no 1 spot, with CLR James’ sixties cricketing classic Beyond a Boundary third. The top 10 featured three boxing titles, two cricket, and one each for football (spectating, that is) horseracing, rugby league, cycling and baseball.

A Significant Other by Matt Rendell (Phoenix, £7.99)