hello,
I’m still loving the energy from the move to Substack and we’re now up to about 20 paid subscribers! I’m so grateful to those of you who have shelled out and amazed by how many have chosen to support as Founding Members. Thank you so much.
I’m going to continue the introductory offer on annual membership where you’ll get a year’s subscription for the price of 4 months. I’d love as many of you who have been here for the long haul to be able to get in before the offer ends so just push the button below to join us.
Paid subscribers have received a selection of my favourite sports books this week:
the books📖
In books, Endgame is garnering more interest and making connections for me which is gratifying. One of the best bits of publishing something is who might suddenly message you out of the blue.
The next one will be the long-gestating Superstrengths book I’ve collaborated on with my Our Race co-author Trystan Bevan. We’ve made some alterations to the cover design and are waiting on proofs before we press publish. We’ve had some more fantastic feedback on the book this week which is whetting my appetite to get it out there.
Not having a proper job means constantly chasing income around so anything you can rely on is just wonderful. You can see in the Substack backend (and from some of the examples I’ve seen) that it wouldn’t take an unrealistic number of paid subscribers to turn this into a very healthy or even a full-time income.
I actually had a call with Substack themselves about strategy this week and it’s great to feel supported as an independent creator. I’m off to the TikTok Book Awards tonight and they have always been great to me, supporting me from early on, and I’d love to foster something similar with Substack. We will see.
(Each week I’m sure I’ll discover something new and this week it’s Notes! I’ve pinned them to the newsletter front page.)
for your interest
champion in last, active rest and let them play
champion in last
I got into watching the Tour de France before moving to France but now I get to enjoy a bit of nostalgia while I’m captivated by the sheer scale and complexity of the challenge it poses and the spectacle it makes.
This year’s edition was one of the best I’ve seen, won with panache by the extraordinary Tadej Pogacar.
This year I loved the race even more because not only did Mark Cavendish win a record 35th stage win, he finished the race. That might seem strange, to praise someone for sticking it out, but given there was no more personal glory available to him, it would have been perfectly acceptable, even expected, for Cavendish to drop out. Sprinters are not conditioned for this year’s plentiful mountain climbs and that he didn’t quit says a lot about him.
Cavendish even spelled out what finishing the race means to him. He’s won 35 stages but he’s competed in around 250, half of which saw him struggle to make it in before the cut off when you’re automatically ejected from the race. Like Federer saying he lost about half of the pints he ever played, Cavendish said,
I have spent far more time suffering at the Tour, trying to make it to the next day, than I have winning. When you see my time at the race in this way, it makes you understand why the Tour means so much to me.
For Cavendish, finishing the race was an act of respect and in front of his children, perhaps too young to remember him in his sprinting prime, battling adversity to finish last in the Tour was a demonstration that ‘when you battle against adversity, that’s the thing that teaches you about life.’
It’s that mentality that even when he finishes last, makes him a champion.
active rest
This week, my friend and fellow le Tour enthusiast Robbie Thompson has noticed something in his newsletter.
He wrote about how the Tour contestants, covered in sweat and breathing heavily from their day’s exertions, immediately climb onto a static bike and pedal away for a short while immediately on finishing the stage. This seems counter-intuitive at first, because they’re tired, but there are well-understood physical benefits to warming down. What Robbie didn’t expect was to read from a performance director about how it’s also explicitly a mental practice:
In addition to the physical recovery, cooling down provides an opportunity to mentally relax from the stresses of racing and to personally reflect on the race.
Robbie calls it ‘preparing to rest’. I know what he means.
Work can now pervade all our time. People can schedule calls at odd times, all hours are opportunities for content and some of us keep an eye on email even while on holiday. Robbie has a variety of responsibilities so to delineate, he’s begun to go running on Friday evenings as a way to put the week down. I do the same on Saturday mornings. It’s more of a welcome to the weekend but the same vibe applies. After my run, I know it’s time to relax.
These liminal changes can still be performed by religion. Jewish Shabbat is an obvious example; a Day of Rest each week from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday where nothing happens; but many of us lack these weekly guidelines and have to make our own. I’m not religious but I have a lot of interest in the various roles it has performed for us down the years. As Donald Kingsbury says ‘Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems’ and if you’re absent tradition, you have to make up your own.
let them play
Almost 25 years ago, on a French exchange from my hometown of Bath to our French twin Aix-en-Provence, I played football in a dusty local stade. Looking around in between bouts, I couldn’t believe the athletics track, the gym, the basketball and tennis courts and these football goals were all here for us to just walk onto and play for free.
The reason I could play that day is rooted in Olympic failure that had far-reaching consequences.
In 1964, France put in a poor showing at the Tokyo Olympics, forced to wait until the very last day for a French gold medal. Given that the foundational document upon which the Olympic Charter is based was written around 1898 by Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, this was a source of national embarrassment.
No one felt this embarrassment more than General Charles de Gaulle and he resolved to do something about it. What he set in motion has turned France into a sporting nation.
From the mid-1960s, France poured public money into sport. From the World Cup victory of 1998 in a new national stadium, the results of that spending can be seen on the world stage but in the national spirit of egalité, the focus remains on the public rather than the professional athlete.
In the UK we fund the elite level competitor. In France, they fund the grassroots.
According to journalist Philippe Auclair, ‘French local authorities devote €12.5bn each year to sport, 12 times the contribution of their British equivalents’ and the results are clear when you look at participation. While the UK and France have similar sized populations, the numbers who participate in sport diverge wildly (see at the above link).
My own experiences saw rugby thriving in France, from the top division to the extremely healthy lower leagues, while the English Premiership has recently seen clubs cease to exist, relying on wealthy benefactors rather than creating a sustainable business or attracting state funding.
The burden of British sport falls elsewhere, whether it’s outside investment in our football clubs or the private schoolswhere 1/3 of this year’s Team GB Olympians were educated.
It will be instructive to see the medal tallies at the end of the Paris 2024 Games but sporting participation is also a factor in a healthy population. France’s obesity levels are among the lowest in Europe (the UK’s are among the highest) and French workers are about 17 per cent more productive than the UK’s, also working less and spending more time in education.
France’s story was one of sporting failure, of a country who set up competitions and watched other people beat them at their own game. By creating a new story, by making access to les stades something for everyone, even young British exchange students, they’ve become one of the world’s great sporting nations.
All this begs the question, who can tell us a new story? Where is our British Charles de Gaulle?
some books
I’ve been reading a load of different things recently and this week I finished The Artist’s Journey by Steven Pressfield, Anthem by Ayn Rand and Templar by Jordan Mechner.
The Artist’s Journey is decent but not up to The War of Art or Turning Pro’s standards, likening the life of an artist to the Hero’s Journey storytelling paradigm. I’d go with those other books first and take down this short one later if you still feel like it.
Anthem is ok as an introduction to Ayn Rand, which is how it was framed to me, dealing with what I believe to be her usual themes of the primacy of individual autonomy and freedom over all else. It’s short length make it worth a look if you’re new to her like I am.
Templar is a fun graphic novel based on the actual history of the Knights Templar, arrested en masse by the King of France who feared their increasing power and influence. In the book, a band of surviving Templars endeavour to steal a hidden Templar treasure from under the noses of the royalists. It’s a chucklesome heist story romp from the guy who created Prince of Persia and it’s cool to see someone creative in one domain try another one.
a watch
Adam Curtis is one of the most singular creatives working today. When you watch one of his films, you instantly know who it’s by. I finally finished watching his latest series Can’t Get You Out of My Head and it was fantastic, skipping from period to period and country to country to tell the viewer a story about the death of the grand narrative. There are so many powerful images, from ghosts of the past rising up to haunt us to AI taking patterns of behaviour and divorcing them from human stories, it’s left me with a lot to think about.
a quote
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
– Jean-Luc Godard
lastly
Thanks for reading! My work is made possible by you so if you’d like to support me you can buy my books, hire me to do something or you can become a paid subscriber with a 50% discount using the button below.
If you want to help me out for free, you can share this letter with someone who might enjoy it, either on social media or by directly sending it to them using the button.
I’ll see you next time.