Gimme Moore

Since his debut French Revolutions in 2001, Tim Moore has become one of cycling's biggest selling, most critically acclaimed and captivating travel writers. Here the author opens up about his latest misadventure, a 4,409km Vuelta recreation on a bike from 1975. What could go wrong?

- Matt Baird

Daddy, are you going to dress up like Tim Moore for World Book Day?" I've spent much of the year reading and re-reading the many tales of one of cycling's most popular writers, so much so that my children (and partner) think it's time I sport a daft period outfit, apply some Savlon and board a battered bike for a European cycling odyssey.

From my sofa, I've been transported to a Pro Plusadd-led Tour de France route in the London writer's cycling debut French Revolutions, looked on with awe and fear as Moore attempts to ride the infamous 1914 Giro d'Italia on a bike with wooden wheels and prosecco cork brake pads in Gironimo!, and erased my fingernails as he tackles a Finnish midwinter, carefree Russian drivers and the 9,000km Iron Curtain on a MIFA East German shopping bike in The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold.

I'm now in the more welcoming surroundings of Tim's Chiswick dining room as he finishes penning a feature on the mysterious Havana Syndrome ("pretty implausible!") for a broadsheet newspaper. Once submitted, we hit the 58-year-old's local Thames cycle path (naturally on the aforementioned MIFA communist bike) to discuss his European travails on two wheels and his latest tome, Vuelta Skelter, which is out this July in paperback in the UK.

Happily, Vuelta Skelter rivals his Iron Curtain misadventure as his best cycling book yet. The mixture of the hilarious and the harrowing really shouldn't work but, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Moore, it deftly combines his trademark mischievous wit and a love of cycling as a mode of exploration with brutal tales of Francoist death squads and a shrink-wrapped Spain of Perspex screens and terrified locals during the early days of the Covid pandemic.