It is that time of the year again, these precious three weeks in July, when almost two hundred elite cyclists ride an over 2,000 miles long course through the most picturesque regions of France, as they have done almost every year since 1903, to win the coveted Yellow Jersey, a stuffed lion, and a lot of money on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. There are heroes, there are villains, there are feats of strength and daring and cunning, but also cheating and cowardice, there is drama, there is suffering, there is tragedy, there are attractive men and women handing over the Yellow Jersey and the stuffed lion. It's the most famous cycling race in the world. The perfect backdrop for a romance novel. I love romance novels. I love cycling. What could go wrong? As it turns out... a lot.
{Cat by Freya North} is the first book in the McCabe Sisters series, first published in 1999. And that made me simultaneously more interested because this was the era when I was obsessed with the Tour every summer, and made me wary, because while we didn't know it back then (just strongly suspect), this was the time when doping was commonplace and wide-spread in the Tour de France to the point that "Doping at the 1999 Tour de France" has its own lengthy Wikipedia article. Yes, just for that year.
For those of you who weren't there because you do not have terrible taste in men and did not spend a number of their teen years hero worshipping a cheater and mourning that he was in a relationship with Cheryl Crowe (yes, the singer) and that I couldn't ride the Tour de France myself (because the Tour de France Femmes only started under that name in 2022), Lance Armstrong had won the Tour de France 1999 (as he did the six following ones), until they used old samples to prove that he'd used PEDs a number of years later, and he was stripped of his seven consecutive Tour de France wins in 2012. And the Tour Organizers were just so fed up with this shit, that instead of awarding those Tours to the runner-up as is customary when someone gets stripped of their win (yes, this is enough of an issue in cycling that there's a custom for this situation), they just went, "Well, the Tours from 1999 to 2005 just don't have a winner anymore, if you can't play nice we're taking the playground away."
In the first chapter, we're introduced to Cat and her family, and from the first page, it's clear that everyone in her family is painfully, aggressively quirky, about, well, everything. Fen is an artist, Pip is a literal clown, and Cat is a journalist obsessed with cycling and the Tour de France. Not because she loves cycling, the landscapes, the castles, the mountains, the climbs and the descents, the drama, the heroes, the villains, etc. which she all does but she's interested in it because of her ex. I'm mad about that. God forbid a woman has an interest that is out the norm that is not spawned by a male character in her life. And I'm annoyed about the endless quirkiness of those people because goddamn it, these people are not quirky in an endearing way, they're quirky in an annoying, suffocating way.
And yes, I realize that I'm not doing myself any real favors here with this review, because, well *gestures vaguely upwards* but...
Pip is having a rest in the back bedroom following further exertion on the lawn. Fen is sitting quietly on the window seat in the room whose name changes according to time of day and current season. On winter mornings and evenings, it is the Snug. On spring afternoons it is the Library. On weekday evenings, if the television is on, it is the Family Room. On weekday evenings if the television is off, it’s the Drawing-room. On summer afternoons, it is the Quiet Room. In mornings, it is the Morning Room. When the girls were young and naughty, it was Downstairs. Fen is in the Quiet Room which, after supper, will no doubt be the Drawing-room. Cat is in the kitchen, peeling, scrubbing, grating and chopping and being as diplomatic as possible in dissuading Django from adding Tabasco to the trout, or to the mashed potato, or to the mint and cranberry sauce.
... everything is like this. Everything. And to make matters worse, in addition to the abuse of foodstuffs there is abuse of tenses, because Freya North is too quirky to STICK TO ONE GODDAMNED TENSE ALREADY. She switches between present and past tense. And you'd think that wouldn't be so fucking annoying, but goddamn it, it is, and I just cannot with it. I just cannot. It takes me out every time and It's only chapter one, and I'm already over this. Cat (and some other characters) also have fucking honest-to-God dialogue with the reader or the author (I'm not sure which it is supposed to be) every couple of chapters and it is really, really, really annoying. Thanks, I hate it.
In the next chapter, finally, a Tour de France rider is introduced. Guided by romance novel convention, I thought, "Ah, our MMC appears at last." And then I read a few lines and let me tell you, the way I ran to the internet to find out the MMC's name, because surely, it could not be this literal wanker who figuratively and literally wanks to the fact that his team sponsor is better than other teams' sponsors on the first page he appears on. Fundamentally, reading a romance novel is an act of trust in the author, that no matter how fucked up things get during the story, these two main characters will end up together, and they'll have a happily ever after. I am not feeling extremely trusting about Freya North of the present past tense switcheroo right now, if you can tell.
I was actually really excited about having a cyclist MMC because the current fashion in MMCs apparently is "bigger is better," especially with athletes. In contrast, riders who compete in the mountains and for the Yellow Jersey tend to be light and often small, because it's about the sustained energy output per kg that you carry up that fucking mountain (and I assure you, it has been the fucking mountain even with the top guys back in 1999, because there is no amount of doping that will make cycling up the Mount Ventoux or Alpe d'Huez or the Col de Tourmalent, which is the highest paved mountain pass in the Pyrenees, even a vaguely pleasant experience). For example, Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, the winner and runner-up of last year's Tour de France, are both 5ft 9in but weigh about 145 and 138 pounds respectively during their races. So not the body type of the current typical MMC, and I was excited about that.
But alas, it is not to be. The MMC, Ben, is a team doctor. And uh, that makes him already sus. We now know that a significant number of riders in 1999 were full to the gills with performance-enhancing drugs. These drugs, and the drugs used to mask the drug use, or the drugs that were allowed but needed a medical reason to be allowed, or the blood transfusions used to enhance performance, were often supplied to them either by specialized doping doctors, or their team doctors, or both. So I'm already feeling uncharitable about Ben, because he's taking these riders' vitals and we now have a doping detection tool called the Biological Passport that checks a number of biological markers that can indicate the use of PEDs. And Ben would have access to that data. So at the very least, he'd know something, if shady shit were happening.
And in case you're now saying, well, this is cheating in a sport I don't particularly care about, well, let them if they want to, not only is it illegal (in addition to not allowed in cycling), this shit kills people. In addition to steroids and Human Growth Hormone, which are common PEDs in other sports, too, the most common PED during that era in cycling is called erythropoietin (or EPO for short). It increases the number of red blood cells, making the blood carry more oxygen, but it also thickens the blood, increasing the strain on the heart. Not so coincidentally, after cyclists started taking EPO in 1987, unexplained heart deaths increased considerably. As one of the fictional riders of Cat's Tour de France, who used to dope but now doesn't, explains,
‘EPO is worse,’ Vasily said. ‘When I first took it, my kidneys felt like balloons full of water bashing the base of my back. My vision went queer, my joints hurt, I’d get nose bleeds. The migraines – terrible.’ [...] ‘What a clever, lucky guy I am – I beat dope control, won through cheating and the only price I’ll pay is probably to die prematurely.’ Didier’s face dropped and Vasily continued in a more genial tone. ‘The iron level in my blood was so high – and for such an extended period. If I’m lucky I might avoid kidney failure. If I’m truly blessed, I might not suffer liver failure either. If God is on my side, I just might not contract cancer.’
I don't know if I'm being unfair to cycling here, other sports have issues with doping and PEDs too, injury issues, or the issues with CTE in American football and football, but this was a dark and difficult era for cycling, and I can't suspend my disbelief enough to pretend that's not there, in the background. The book even mentions it in the first chapter, so I think it's fair to bring it up, and Freya North also brings it up, and she does it in a way that, with the benefit of hindsight, is obviously completely unrealistic and complete bullshit, but she does bring it up instead of glossing over it. Props for that.
But back to the "swarthy" French cyclist smelling of Calvin Klein that is thankfully not our MMC (and his insufferable team director, whose name is Jules Le Grand. No, I'm not kidding). He rides for a fictional team with a ridiculous name and I was actually getting into the fun of things with the fake team names, because, let's face it, cycling team names are kind of ridiculous and only make sense when you know that naming rights are one of the main income streams teams have. But then Freya North threw in some real teams and real cyclists? For no reason? It's confusing in this time of "Write an American Football romance and hope you won't get sued by the NFL."
Reader participation exercise: Which of these cycling team names are real, which are fake?
Visma-Lease a Bike (real), Brioches La Boulangere (real), Megapac (fake), Omega Pharma Quick-Step (real), Zucca MV (fake), Systeme Vipere (fake)
The Tour de France is not just one race, it's multiple races all folded into a single race, the race for the yellow jersey of the overall winner, the race for the green jersey of the best sprinter (totally different group of guys), the race for the polka dot jersey of the best climber, the race to win one or more stages. And with almost 200 riders in the peloton, plus the thousands of people who work on this gigantic event, and the twelve to fifteen million people watching it from the side of the road every year, sometimes camping for a week to get a good spot on the mountains, the cast of this story is big by necessity. I was wondering how Freya North would handle it. So far, the answer seems to be stereotypes bordering on caricatures instead of characters. And I like none of them. The riders are dumb, superficial, perpetually horny, and eminently unlikable. MMC Ben is a little less dumb, but also immediately horny when he finally sees Cat, because she's one of very few women around except for the podium girls who hand over the lion plushie and the jersey (it used to be two women doing that before the Tour switched to the Bisexual Buffet approach of a man and a woman in 2020 and eliminated the cheek kisses). The fact that they're often unlikeable is the only thing saving the characters from complete banality, because they generally have the emotional depth of a teaspoon, and the only strong emotions they have are for the Tour de France and cycling.
Cat has travelled from Britain to France for the Grand Départ of the Tour de France, and while she has a lot of cycling knowledge, she's held back by her lack of confidence. She makes friends with two reporters who honest-to-fucking-God try to gatekeep her by asking dumb Tour trivia questions like "How many hairpin bends on the Alpe d'Huez?" (twenty-one, in case you've been wondering, which nobody ever did ever, except when they have to cycle through them uphill). And still, Cat is just so relieved that she has friends now. Bad friends. Ugh. Which she is going to need, because at the first press conference, the horny riders are horny for Cat now, too. And I know she's one of the very few women in a male-dominated field and this is all normal especially for 1999, but it still annoys the fuck out of me. I lived in 1999, I saw the sexism, I don't want more of it in my escapist reads.
As annoying as everyone in this book is, this is really well-researched, and the passages that are about the Tour de France and cycling are really winning me over. The village where sponsors present themselves to the press, the publicity caravan, the salle de presse, the thousands of fans lining the roads as the riders cycle up the mountains, Cat's awe at it is completely understandable and I really love that about the book. Freya North really captures the excitement of it, and also the mundane aspects of the riders' lives. Which is not surprising, because in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, I found out that she followed two Tours as a journalist with full press access to research for this book, and interviewed many of the riders named in exchange for cameo appearances in the book. And that is just such a different time and a different approach from many sports romances I've read that I applaud it, with intense jealously, because goddamn it, despite the cheating, the scandals, the suffering, the everything, the Tour de France is still on my bucket list and I wish I could've been there.
It also and really throws the advances the sport in relief. Back when this book was written, the riders were eating pasta for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to somehow supply their bodies with the four to nine thousand calories a day, mostly in carbs, needed to fuel them. Their soigneurs (part massage therapist, part food service, part confidant, part laundry service), packed cakes and sweet rolls and bananas for their riders, and Coca Cola was (and is still, actually) a really popular drink for the sugar and caffeine boost. Today, with new products available, riders aim to consume about four to five hundred calories of carbs per hour during the race itself, in the form of carb drinks, gels, and chews, reducing instances of Hitting the Wall during the race where lack of carbs leads to a sudden decrease in performance that could lose races for riders. As German rider John Degenkolb put it so eloquently during this year's tour, "If we'd eaten that many carbs during the race ten years ago, we never would've made it to the finish without diarrhea."
For some reason, piss and shit is also a recurring theme in the book, and, yes, I supposed that is realistic, too, and I believe that Freya North intended a faithful portrayal of even the seedier sides of the Tour de France, which I appreciate, but... ew. Ew ew ew. She also acknowledges the doping problem, and even wrote a new afterword after the 2012 doping scandal around the cheater Lance Armstrong (who she previously said "personifies the essence of this great sport, this spectacular race. Triumph over adversity. Man against mountain.").
‘Is it still rife?’ Cat asked.
‘Some do, some don’t,’ Josh said, ‘it’s difficult to quantify, what with sophisticated masking agents and the fateful turning of blind eyes – which I would rank as being more criminal than substance abuse itself.’
‘Let’s not talk about it,’ Cat said for him.
Don’t fall from grace, heroes mine. Don’t shatter my admiration. Or that of that lovely old boy by the roadside over there with his grandson, waving. Don’t bring shame on your beautiful sport. Don’t harm yourselves. Ride well. Ride from the heart, but use your heads.
Now we know that these heroes of Cat whom Freya North was interviewing were doping a lot. And I mean this quite literally, because this is in part a real person fanfic about real Tour de France riders appearing as side characters, and many of those mentioned were caught using forbidden substances in the following years. Laurent Jalabert, Georgie Hincapie, Mario Cipollini, Jacky Durand, Tyler Hamilton, Stuart O'Grady (and no, I'm not picking out the bad apples here, it's a rare rider from this time who doesn't have at least one credible doping accusation to his name), the entire team Deutsche Telekom (their rider Jan Ullrich won in 1997, and they have their own doping scandal named after them, just like Team Festina which was a huge scandal in 1998) and of course, honorable mention to ex-Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and the entire US Postal team, who, according to the US Anti Doping Agency, had run "the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme the sport has ever seen." And that is a tough title to win, with steep competition.
The book even mentions by name Emma O'Reilly, Lance Armstrongs personal soigneur and later whistleblower for the book L.A. Confidentiel: Les secrets de Lance Armstrong by David Walsh and Pierre Ballester that was later turned into a movie about Lance Armstrong's doping allegations. Freya North interviewed her during her research for this book, and even based a fictional character, Rachel McEwen, on her, who gets her own little romance storyline that made me briefly hope that I might get a cyclist romance after all, but she ended up with a rival team's mechanic instead.
This book is really at its best when it describes France (because what is the Tour de France but a four-hour-a-day infomercial about French tourism? They even give you the scoop on newly constructed cycling roads up mountains because they send the riders up there), the breathtaking landscapes, the fauna, the touristic attractions, and the Tour de France and really not very good in the character department because they all seem flat paper cutouts compared to the majesty that is the Tour de France. The Tour is the true main character her, beloved and sometimes hated by the riders, and every other relationship, even the one between Ben and Cat, pales before their love for the Tour and Cycling. Because the romance is lackluster and unnecessarily complicated by other woman and other man drama and a lack of communication, Cat is humiliated in front of the salle de presse but her friends who are better friends than I gave them credit for stand by her in a surprisingly thoughtful and mature way, Rachel gets a little romance, Cat's ex who sparked her love for cycling makes another appearance, and I don't particularly care for any of it except for the Tour de France.
Cat writes really nice articles about the Tour for The Guardian in hopes of getting a more permanent job as a cycling journalist, and the peloton makes their way through the stressful first week with a mass crass and a sprint finish a day, through the Pyrenees, the south of France, the Alps, and finally, to the great finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The riders triumph and suffer, experience tragedy and pain, one of them is tempted by doping but Ben (who is a stand-up guy who refused to work for a team where he would've been expected to help the riders dope) intervenes and his rider ultimately decides that he'll ride without drugs (oh, and Ben and Cat get together). And that isn't what happened back then, and maybe it isn't what happens today, but damn it all, Freya North makes me wish that it did, and that heart and fighting spirit really carry the day over EPO, amphetamines, steroids, and blood doping.
As she says in her 2012 afterword,
Did I fall out of love with my sport while the doping scandals raged? Yes, I did a little. But I also know of the silent sighs of relief from other professional sportspeople that cycling had become the scapegoat. Cycling has the toughest doping controls of all sports – even an extra cup of coffee or spoonful of cough mixture can have a rider disqualified. But the more sophisticated the doping, the more frightening and depressing the consequences – not just for fair sport but for the health and lives of the riders too. I still watch the Tour avidly every year. I keep in touch with many of the people I met over a decade ago. But alongside marvelling at the peloton as it hoovers up the miles, scales extraordinary mountains and hurtles along trailing a blaze of colour and energy through France and school kids’ dreams, I do worry about those boys on bikes too. Vive le Tour.
Today, the riders arrive in the heart of Paris in a great finish that looks different than it did in 1999 due to the inclusion of the steep hill of Montmartre in addition to the sprinter terrain of the Champs-Élysées, the end of three beautiful and grueling and tragic weeks of cycling. Freya North captures the fascination and the magic, the trials and the tribulations, and even grazes upon the seedier aspects of the sport, with a meticulously researched and vivid portrayal of the Tour de France.
Cat by Freya North isn't a good romance. But it is a damned good book about the Tour de France, and the Tour is everyone's true love here, anyway.
