9 Books to Read Before 2025’s Tour de France
Cycling fans around the world are getting ready for the Tour de France and it’s coming up fast. Are you gearing up for three weeks of cycling action? Why not dive into some awesome books about the race, too?
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Here are nine picks that each offer a different look at cycling alongside the Tour’s history, challenges, and controversies. Whether you’re already a cycling superfan or just digging into what makes this event so interesting, these books can really help you get a handle on the before, now, and after of this year’s edition of Le Tour… and what makes it such a big deal in sports.
Eight Books to Get Ready for the Tour de France
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle
The Secret Race is an inside look at doping in pro cycling, especially during the Lance Armstrong years. Tyler Hamilton, a former cyclist and Olympic gold medalist, is a co-author of this book along with Daniel Coyle, a professional author. The book that results from the co-authorship between these two gentlemen addresses all the pressure inherent in cycling, the myriad ways doping happened at the WorldTour level during the Lance Armstrong years, and how these things were covered up in the sport. The narrative really gets into Hamilton’s own stories and his complicated time with Armstrong, showing what he describes as a “shadowy, fascinating, and surreal world.”
This book is an honest read that will give you an authentic peek into why athletes took such risks to win. Take it with a grain of salt and you’ll find yourself coming into this year’s Tour de France a bit more clear-eyed. It’s a well-paced story (likely thanks to Coyle’s expertise) that really pulls back the curtain on elite cycling. This book was super important for revealing the doping culture in the early 2010s, coming from someone who was right in the midst of it. It was a New York Times bestseller!
Read more: The Tour de France — The Greatest Show on Earth?
A Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage
Ready for A Rough Ride? Paul Kimmage’s book will give you a straight-up look at the life of a professional cyclist, focusing on the super tough demands and tricky ethical choices rider have faced… and continue to face in the present day. Kimmage was a domestique in the pro peloton and shares his personal journey as an athlete back in the 1980s.
The book talks about how much physical and mental effort it takes to compete and even touches on how doping started showing up early in the sport. It does an excellent job explaining some of the crazy pressures on riders who weren’t the biggest stars, like Kimmage was. Instead of focusing on the standouts like Armstrong in the previous recommendation, this read will show the sport from the view of an average rider. This book has also been well-received over time, including for its honesty surrounding doping culture. Read it to have a better sense of what the rest of the peloton goes through over the three weeks of this year’s Tour, rather than focusing on the big names!
The Domestique: The True Story of an English Pro Cyclist and the Tour de France by Charly Wegelius
Another great book about the domestique life. Ever wonder what it’s like to be an unsung hero of cycling? Charly Wegelius will tell all in The Domestique. During his 11 years as a pro, he always worked for others and never won a race himself. How unlucky is that? But for many pros, including some of those lining up for the Grand Depart this year, it’s a reality.
This book gives you the raw, honest truth about what that life is like: brutal training, tricky team dynamics, constant pain, and the mix of letdown and victory that comes with each race or stage. Among the recommendations here, it’s one of the most brutally honest and doesn’t pull punches. Are you ready to learn about the intense physical demands and the hard work behind the glamour of Le Tour? You’ll definitely get that perspective on the pros after reading this!
Read more: An Ode To the Domestique
Blazing Saddles: The Cruel & Unusual History of the Tour de France by Matt Rendell
Let’s pivot and look at something a little more upbeat. Ready for some wild stories from the Tour’s past? Then Blazing Saddles is your next read!
This book is a no-holds-barred look at the Tour’s history. What does that mean? Well, it covers a little bit of everything related to rivalries, controversies, crazy forgotten moments, and what the author describes as “blind passions and filthy suspicions.” Some of the legends are squeaky clean, but the author does a fantastic job really capturing both sides, along with the crazy spirit of the Tour. You’ll enjoy the anecdotes and characters as you learn how the race started and how it changed over the years. Along the way, get a feel for just how crazy it was in the early days. Do you think we might see anything just as wild this year?! Probably not, but this book will spark your imagination.
French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France by Tim Moore
French Revolutions is a different kind of Tour de France story — one that ends up being a lot more comedic than the one we see play out on TV.
Tim Moore, an amateur cyclist, tries to cycle the whole Tour de France route mere weeks before the pros do it. Will he make it? Well, this book is all about his experience trying his darndest to do so. Follow his struggles, his weird ways of coping, and the funny stuff that happens along the way in this short read.
Moore’s humor makes it easy to relate to an everyday person trying something huge. This might be one of the funnier books about sport out there, but especially about Le Tour. It’s lighthearted but insightful, and will leave you with an intimate understanding of just how massive the Tour’s physical demands and landscape are. What is it like to ride through rural France every day? Well, for Moore and his charming honesty about his shortcomings and lack of preparedness, it can be laugh-out-loud funny! We can’t help but think that if this book were written post-2003, it would be a massively successful vlog series instead.
Read more: 6 YouTube Cycling Documentaries That Will Satisfy Your Wanderlust
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike by William Fotheringham
Who better to discuss before Le Tour than the man himself? Eddy Merckx, one of the greatest cyclists of all time.
William Fotheringham’s book, Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike, tells his story. They called Merckx “the Cannibal” because he just wanted to win, win, win, and he managed five Tour de France victories across the course of his career, among many others. The book covers his triumphs, but also his injuries, the scandals, and his own worries — Fotheringham characterizes him as “handsome, sensitive, and surprisingly anxious,” and the detailed research that went into this story really makes Merckx’s races come alive on the page. Here, you’ll learn a little about everything, from his early days in Belgium to his big Tour de France debuts.
If you’re looking for a deep dive into Merckx’s training and racing that’s well-written, well-researched, and also engaging, this is a perfect read for you. Some of Merckx’s achievements feel nigh miraculous looking back at them in hindsight. If you read this before this year’s edition of Le Tour, you’ll be perfectly primed to see even more history-making racing playing out before your eyes this year.
Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson by William Fotheringham
Here’s another great one by William Fotheringham. Put Me Back on My Bike tells the sad story of Tom Simpson, a British cycling legend whose career ended tragically during the 1967 Tour de France on Mont Ventoux, which also features in the 2025 Tour de France. The book looks into Simpson’s life, his wins, and what happened when he died. This incident shone a light on the prevalence of doping worldwide, which looked a lot different than it might today, but nonetheless holds important lessons.
Simpson was a complicated guy, a “man of contradictions.” Notably, he was one of the first riders to admit to using banned drugs. In his research and narrative for this book, Fotheringham revisits many places and people connected to Simpson to bring his full story to life. The book is rich with historical context, helping readers understand the times that Simpson competed in and giving a strong background that leads right into current-day cycling. It becomes both personal and wide-reaching, detailing some of the earliest PED use and what it meant in the history of the sport — and to Simpson and his legacy.
The Rider by Tim Krabbé
Okay, so: you have to check out The Rider by Tim Krabbé. You might not be totally sold on the idea of a fictional story about bike racing. But this book is a real classic and it’s very short, so you can zip through it and will be better for doing so.
The story throws you right into the perspective of a single cyclist during one intense 150-kilometer race in France. You’ll feel every pedal (and every mental battle) as the narrator races through the mountains. It’s wonderfully written and really gets into the mental side of bike racing. Don’t worry, it’s not a dry history book or biography at all; it’s really an odyssey all its own that will leave you imaginative for this year’s Tour de France!
If you want to know what it’s really like to compete, this one’s for you.
Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell
For our last recommendation, let’s return to the often-problematic history of cycling — and the important lessons it holds for the future. Wheelmen is a deep investigative report into the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. It’s written by Wall Street Journal reporters Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell. This book goes beyond just Armstrong’s personal story and digs deep into the massive conspiracy, which involved many different people in professional cycling.
Over the course of the book, the authors explain how the doping operation was set up and kept secret, and all the folks who helped bring it down, from team managers to officials. Wheelmen, the product of years of investigative reporting, paints a larger-than-life picture of a huge conspiracy, and it will have you hooked until the end with big questions. Why did people do it? How did so many institutions fail to catch it? This book closes the door on the Armstrong years and reminds us: that history is not too far in the past. We should all be aware of this to appreciate cycling for what it is: a complicated, sometimes problematic, historic, and undoubtedly beautiful sport that will have us all gripped this July!
There you have it! These eight books give you a ton of different views on the Tour de France. History, rider stories, deep dives, and fictional (and not-so-fictional) accounts of competition, each one can offer you a special perspective to appreciate the race even more.
Whether you’ve been a cycling fan forever or this is your first year watching, these titles can get you amped up for this year’s Tour de France. Go ahead, pick one (or a few!) and connect with the incredible stories that make this event what it is!
Have you read any of these books? Which one would you like to check out first? Let us know in the comments or on social media! ★
