Bicycle Film Festival
Posted on Tuesday 14 October 2008 by Paul Foster
Inez and I saw 3 films on the programme, and would definitely recommend the event for an outing next year. It is always in the first week in October, and you know that you’ve come to the right place if you see rows of fixed wheel bikes, some sans brakes with brightly coloured rims tethered outside.
We saw “The Road to Roubaix” didn’t actually cover much of the racing, but concentrated on events behind the scenes, interviewing former and current riders, mechanics etc. There was a lot of footage of the cobbles and riders training on them - it is definitely mountain bike terrain but raced on road bikes. Not much by way of excitement, but a lot of the unique atmosphere of the event is captured.
Much more exciting was “Les Ninjas du Japon” which followed a Japanese team’s participation in the Tour du Burkina Faso. This completely surrreal event has echoes of the early Tours. Only it happens this century. Think roads that abruptly give way to dirt tracks, livestock blundering onto the course, unreliable cars, broken radios and haphazard organisation - the teams were asking passers by where the start of one stage was! The commissaire was hard pressed to keep the thing running - hampered by an absence of a working radio, he was reduced to writing down numbers of the riders in the bunch on scaps of paper to stop them getting into the team cars for a crafty lift. He was clearly powerless to stop them from hitching lifts by clinging onto the team cars though! The racing was fast and furious, not to say attritional due to the brutal heat and clouds of choking dust. The proceedings were followed by bemused locals, and the film provided a lot of insight into just how tough life is there.
Finally there was a documentary about track racing in America in the 1930s. Lots of retro images in flickering black and white, with horrible crashes, corruption, drugs. So no change there then. Reassuringly, despite the drugs, crashes and skulduggery, a number of these particiapnts were interviewed, having made it to their late 80s or beyond. One of the best, Alf Goulet lived to be 103. They made them harder in those days.