Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain by Tim Moore

Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain Reviews

• 
  Joe O'Donnell

  The arrival of a new Tim Moore travelogue is like being reacquainted with an old friend – albeit one with a penchant for herculean, monumentally difficult adventures that border on reckless stupidity. Having been a follower of Moore’s travel-writing for almost 20 years now, I believe “Vuelta Skelter” might just be his finest book to date.
  
  In 2020, seeking a respite from the lethargy of lockdown, Tim Moore set out to cycle the route of 1941 Vuelta a Espana. This is a not insignificant undertaking; not just because it involves traversing a 4,500km route in blistering mid-summer Iberian heat, but also because Moore is the wrong side of 50 and hadn’t been on the business end of a bicycle for many years. In doing so, he takes inspiration from Spanish cycling legend Julián Berrendero – who won the 1941 Vuelta only months after being released from a fascist-run concentration camp where he had been imprisoned for supporting the republican side during the Spanish Civil War. Berrendero’s heroics on the bike - and eccentricities off it – form a recurring motif throughout “Vuelta Skelter”, as does the incredibly bloody war between Spanish left and fascist right.
  
  Anybody familiar with his work will know that Tim Moore is a brilliantly funny writer. “Vuelta Skelter” is no deviation from that course, as during his journey we see the author having to haplessly navigate mechanical catastrophes, unbearably stifling weather conditions, forest fires, and the disapproval of small-town landladies who view Moore as a virus-ridden Covid-carrier – a one-man super-spreader event on wheels. There can be few travel journalists who write as vividly and hilariously about cycling across Extremadura in 45°C heat – subsisting on a paltry 2 energy gels across 200km of desert – or the unique challenges of having to slather Savlon all over the most intimate parts of your body in preparation for another tortuous stage.
  
  But as befits a book that details a journey against a backdrop of genocidal civil war and fascist dictatorship, “Vuelta Skelter” is often a more sombre affair than Tim Moore’s earlier works. Showing his increasing maturity as a writer, Moore describes how the horrors of the Civil War still cast a pall over modern-day Spain, where a conspiracy of silence persists about the unspeakable atrocities that were committed. It is Moore’s immense credit (and testament to his skill as a writer) that the transitions between the absurdities of his adventure and the dark past of the land he crosses never feel like an abrupt change of gears. “Vuelta Skelter” pulls off the achievement of writing sensitively about a murky history, while remaining hilariously irreverent about one’s own shortcomings and misadventures.
• 
  Rob McMinn

  I’ve been feeling tired all day, weak legs, stiff all over, aching feet. It’s warm, 29ºC, the kind of muggy heat that makes you feel a bit sick. All of this following a 26km bike ride this morning. I’d wanted to set off early, but insomniac daughter was slow to get going. I offered to go on my own, but she wanted to come, so it was gone 9 o’clock by the time we set off down the hill. And the cool air on the way down, in the shade of the trees, was the last cool air we’d feel – all day, but certainly until the last painful grind up our hill, on wobbly legs and with my right foot burning, as usual.
  
  And that’s my limit, an hour or so in the saddle and I’m done, and more or less useless for the rest of the day. Exercise! It’s good for you! It was the kind of ride that has you throwing your bib shorts in the bin as soon as you get undressed for the shower: those are too uncomfortable, you say, slamming the lid of the bin down.
  
  That being my limit: the weak legs, the burning feet, is why I like to read Tim Moore’s various books of cycling adventure. There was his hilarious Tour de France opus, French Revolutions, and more recently his vintage Giro d’Italia travails, Gironimo! And now comes Vuelta Skelter, his retracing of the route of the 1941 Vuelta d’Espagna on a 40-year-old bike sold by the shop run by that race’s winner, Julián Berrendero.
  
  Moore, as a man of a certain age, makes me feel better about my struggles on the bicycle, because he details his own struggles in such an entertaining way. It’s one of his great gifts as a writer that he can find 300 different ways to detail his pain and exhaustion without boring you. But whereas he is deliriously hungry and puking after 140km over mountains in the Spanish heat, I feel that way after 26km. He achieves feats of endurance that are really quite incredible, especially for a lone cyclist, and his various misadventures in hotels and bars and petrol stations around Spain are all part of the fun. A favourite passage:
  
  …I wobbled into the first petrol station in a state of some disarray. There, in the shadow of a refuelling tractor, I struggled to ingest four bags of cheese puffs. It was all the apologetic attendant could offer me to eat, and as I wanly crunched through smelly handfuls of air and yellow dust, it felt as if the process was expending more calories than it replaced.
  
  Moore’s refusal to take nutrition seriously is very funny, when you consider all the column inches dedicated to gels and electrolytes in the cycling press. He needs around 7000 calories a day, but these take the form of whole bottles of red wine, humungous sandwiches and unappetising chocolate pastries. He does have the odd gel, but what the (all right, this) reader envies is his ability to sit down of an evening and eat two whole pizzas – and still lose about 7 kilos over the 6 weeks of his ride.
  
  All of this was taking place against the backdrop of the pandemic, as he manages to arrive in Spain and complete his adventure in the brief hiatus between the first and second lockdowns. More seriously, the 1941 Vuelta was only the third in that race’s history, and the first after the devastation of the Spanish Civil War. This lends the book a different tone to the others, as it’s impossible to escape the grim, brutal history of that conflict – especially as the race’s winner spent the previous 18 months in a concentration camp. Only 32 riders started the race, and less than 20 finished, in an era when the race organisers would confiscate drink bottles because of their belief that real athletes didn’t need to hydrate and when half the country was starving.
  
  It still brings me up short to remember that Spain was a fascist dictatorship well into the 1970s, in the era during which many Brits experienced their first foreign summer holidays. So the darker sections of this book are a stark whiplashy counterpoint to Moore’s usual self-deprecating buffoonery.
• 
  Joe Maggs

  With the Tour and Giro now under his belt, the Vuelta is simply the next logical step for Tim Moore in this excellent chronology of his personal Vuelta, set against a haunting Covid backdrop that he writes of compellingly and with deep humanity. Moore’s experience means less writing about his own personal toil and more exploration of both the brilliant story of the 1941 Vuelta and this book’s real main character, Julian Berrendero, as well as intrinsically linked to that, the Spanish Civil War. Moore’s prowess as a journalist embodies itself here, as he expertly digs into its haunting and terrifying stories and how Spain today deals with its past. Highly recommended for fans of cycling but equally for those who want an excellent bit of historical exploration.
• 
  AshishB

  What a book. Tim Moore has to be the craziest cyclist (of his age :)) to do such crazy race route in the midst of worst pandemic world has ever seen.
  Most fab thing abt this book is the description of the time when race was held in Spain under rule of Franco. How things were and how world denounced spanish cyclists just coz they were under the rule of a dictator.
  Its a must read book for any cyclist or history buff or anyone who loves travelog /history lesson / crazy incidents. Brilliant book.
  I think I'll be buying all of his books.
• 
  Graham Burns

  Another triumph from my favourite travel writer. I knew next to nothing about Spain’s civil war before picking up this book but Tim’s journey through the country brought the terrible events of this period of Spains history to life. Don’t be put off by the rather harrowing subject matter because Tim ensures there are plenty of laughs along the way.
• 
  Anthony Frobisher

  Brutal, tortured and insane. A bike ride and a civil war.
  
  I opened the first pages of Vuelta Skelter in excited anticipation. Tim Moore, a man in his 50's a couple of years older than I, about to embark on another epic cycle adventure, aboard a vintage bicycle. A 4,500km lap of Spain following the 1941 route of La Vuelta. In interminable heat, up tortuous, endless mountain climbs, and in an all too brief window when Coronavirus had relented before resuming with avengence. Tim Moore's books are a delight. Each travelogue is written with humour (and Vuelta Skelter is hilarious), self deprecation, and insight. In the case of Vuelta Skelter, Tim's own struggles with route planning, weather, age and a recalcitrant bicycle of advanced years, are juxtaposed with those of Julian Berrendero, winner of the 1941 Vuelta, incarcerated in a concentration camp during the Spanish Civil war and a man of fierce, unstinting sheer bloody-mindedness. He had few friends on the road, made enemies easily, but delighted in crushing them on his bike.
  
  What was a stark and sobering contrast to the humour, travails and journey Tim Moore undertakes is the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Episodes of brutality, a bloodlust and vengeance, the murdering of innocents, refugees, reflects a terrible period of European history, and indeed was a precursor to the rise of the atrocities inflicted by the Nazis.
  It would have been a great book without the history, but it is a superb book because of it.
  A brutal, tortured and insane challenge for a brilliant writer who I have enjoyed ever since Frost on My Moustache. A brutal, tortured and insane period of history that needs to be more understood - especially as there is an (understandable) reluctance to discuss it in Spain as Tim Moore discovers. Add Vuelta Skelter to French Revolutions (following the 2,000 Tour de France route) and Gironimo (following the 1914 Giro de Italia on a 100 year old bicycle) and you have a Grand Tour triptych.
  As with all Tim Moore's travel books, highly recommended. I can however still smell his cycling gloves....some things never leave you.
• 
  Popup-ch

  [b]Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain [/b]- Tim Moore
  
  
  Tim Moore goes out on yet another of his epically stupid long-distance bike rides, trying to recreate the 1941 Tour of Spain. It was the first major Spanish bike race after Franco had won the civil war and in the rest of Europe WWII was raging. The only other country that sent any riders was Switzerland, but only one of the four Swiss riders finished the race.
  
  Moore completed the tour in the summer of 2022 between major waves of covid restrictions, and in the blazing Spanish heat. It took him six weeks to finish the 4500km, which (considering that he had several rest days) means that he averaged well above 100km per day, and often with onerous climbs. And he did it all on a fifty-year old bike, originally branded by a certain Julián Barrenero.
  
  
  The winner of the 1941 Vuelta was Julián Berrendero, who had spent 18 months in a Spanish concentration camp for voicing his opinion on the Franco coup during the earlier days of the civil war. He was an incredibly unfriendly character by all accounts, and never seemed to be happy, unless he was riding solo up a steep hill.
  
  He follows two different threads - most obviously the 1941 Vuelta, but also the Spanish civil war, which was very fresh back then. The Nationalists were still consolidating their grasp on power, and Spain would never be the same again. The civil war saw some unparalleled brutality (and this was in the same century as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot) and the Spanish never came to terms with it. In Germany, the post-war decades were marked by an intense 'denazification' and especially the 1968-generation took pride in distancing themselves from their forebears. That never happened in Spain, where former Francoist ministers and officials kept their jobs well into the 21st century.
  
  Moore writes in his trademark mixture of erudite research and puerile self-mocking commentary. He makes some remarkably stupid mistakes, such as setting his GPS route finder to 'hiking' rather than cycling and ends up having to carry the bike, but also describes the cruelty of the Franco regime in appalling detail.
  
  Five stars, not so much because it's any Great Literature, but because I was in a good mood when I read it.
• 
  Malcolm

  I have a PhD student whose project started out focusing on men who follow cycle race routes: they’re an odd group and my student eventually found the project going in other directions. So when I sat down to read Tim Moore’s slightly obsessive tale of following the route of the first fascist era vuelta I had, I thought a sense of what I was getting into. While the tale is intriguing – a middle aged bloke on a 40 year old bike following a race route from 70 years beforehand – it’s hard to see who it is aimed at. That’s not to say it’s a bad book: it is well written, if in a chatty break to fourth wall kind of way that I sometimes find tiresome. More to point, I’m struggling to see how the personal narrative of the ride, the biographical and other material on key cyclists, and the interspersed story of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Franco’s fascist regime and the all too often refusal in post-Franco Spain to confront the era weaves together convincingly. Probably one for the liberal-leftish cyclist in your world…..
• 
  Mike Collins

  Tim Moore finishes off his tour of Tours, by cycling the 1941 Vuelta a España and does it on a vintage bike, just to make things more difficult/interesting/authentic! If you've read any of his other books, you'll expect a mix of hustirical perspective - both social and cycling - disasters & triumphs and hilarious anecdotes, all delivered in an amiable, informal writing style. If so, you won't be disappointed by this tale of one man and his bike! If you've not read any of Tim Moore's books before, then... why haven't you? Start now!
  A really interesting, funny book.
• 
  Dmitry

  This is another masterpiece by Tim Moore, that resulted not just as a result artistic agony, but as a result of many painful hours behind a handlebar of a 50-years old bicycle, riding all across Spain, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, while remembering one of the greatest Spanish cyclists of all times - Julian Berrendero. All this takes place while Tim witnesses all around him the scars left by the Civil War - on the land, the cities and the people inhabiting it. A truly touching, engaging, and of course histerically funny tale, masterfully told.
• 
  Kenn Coates

  Vuelta Skelter
  
  This was the story of a phenomenal feat of endurance, itself based on the cycling exploits of phenomenal heroic professional cyclist. It also related flashes of history about the Spanish Civil War and the Franco purges. That Moore completed his tour during the Covid 19 pandemic, when services and hospitality were severely limited, only adds to my admiration. If you are any kind of cyclist i urge you to read this book.
• 
  andrew

  Exhausting ride, enjoyable read.
  
  Tim Moore achieves the extraordinary again. Gruelling ride, retracing the 1941 Vuelta. Past and present mingle nicely throughout the narrative. Humorous anecdotes and personal reflections keep the pace up throughout the read/ride. Still miss the mule though!
  
• 
  Ipswichblade

  The best book I have read this year. I have read every Tim Moore book and he gets better with age. This also has the added extra of one of his cycle rides done in the time of a pandemic. A brilliant brilliant book
• 
  Ryan Macgillivray

  A very moving book both from a cycling and Spanish history standpoint.
  
  Moore does a fabulous job balancing his own monumental effort with presenting the grim reality of Spain before, during and post Civil War.
• 
  Ben Twoonezero

  A very disturbing book as it's account s of the Spanish civil war are harrowing to say the least. The cycle ride he undertakes is long , hard, and quite a feat for some one in his 50s. I preferred this to his previous books as it feels less judgmental to the people of Spain.
• 
  Thomas Brown

  This very enjoyable travel writing balances grim information on the Spanish civil War and very funny details of the author's experience riding the 1941 Vuelta route. Tim Moore manages to do both extremely well, and what a great trip it was.
• 
  Judith

  I didn't enjoy this one as much as some of his others but his history bits sends me off to read books about stuff I don't kow much about, in this case the Spanish Civil War. Tim's book did have some funny bits - 3.5 stars overall.
• 
  Kim Hayes

  I always enjoy Tim’s exploits and this is no exception. He doesn’t get any more sensible with age! The only criticism I would have which holds true generally with his other books, is that he can get a bit carried away with bike-speak. Thoroughly enjoyable, all the same.
• 
  Chris Thomas

  As usual, Tim Moore delivers the goods. Funny, informative, interesting but most importantly - funny! Made me laugh out loud in every chapter.
• 
  MR H R Hansen

  another Moore classic
  
  Epic ride and epic read. Interesting facts about the cycling during the Franco period mixed with his usual humour and word smithery.