The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles
Vuelta Skelter by Tim Moore
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Vuelta Skelter

Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Tim Moore

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 10 hours 16 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Brought to you by Penguin.

Tim Moore completes his epic (and ill-advised) trilogy of cycling's Grand Tours.

Julian Berrendero's victory in the 1941 Vuelta a Espana was an extraordinary exercise in sporting redemption: the Spanish cyclist had just spent 18 months in Franco's concentration camps, punishment for expressing Republican sympathies during the civil war. Seventy nine years later, perennially over-ambitious cyclo-adventurer Tim Moore developed a fascination with Berrendero's story, and having borrowed an old road bike with the great man's name plastered all over it, set off to retrace the 4,409km route of his 1941 triumph - in the midst of a global pandemic.

What follows is a tale of brutal heat and lonely roads, of glory, humiliation, and then a bit more humiliation. Along the way Tim recounts the civil war's still-vivid tragedies, and finds the gregarious but impressively responsible locals torn between welcoming their nation's only foreign visitor, and bundling him and his filthy bike into a vat of antiviral gel.

ยฉ Tim Moore 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Don't be fooled by this suave and nonchalant athlete: endurance cycling has not come easily to Tim Moore. His grand-tour trilogy has been 20 terrible years in the making - a time-scale that allowed him to forget just how awful he felt riding round the 2000 Tour de France (French Revolutions), and just how stupid he looked retracing the 1914 Giro on a wooden-wheeled bike in period kit (Gironimo!). In between he has pulled a donkey across Spain (Spanish Steps), ridden an East German shopping bike down the Iron Curtain (The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold), driven a Model T Ford across the US (Another Fine Mess) and mysteriously failed to grasp that this kind of stuff doesn't get easier with age.

Don't be fooled by this suave and nonchalant athlete: endurance cycling has not come easily to Tim Moore. His grand-tour trilogy has been 20 terrible years in the making - a time-scale that allowed him to forget just how awful he felt riding round the 2000 Tour de France (French Revolutions), and just how stupid he looked retracing the 1914 Giro on a wooden-wheeled bike in period kit (Gironimo!). In between he has pulled a donkey across Spain (Spanish Steps), ridden an East German shopping bike down the Iron Curtain (The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold), driven a Model T Ford across the US (Another Fine Mess) and mysteriously failed to grasp that this kind of stuff doesn't get easier with age.

Audiobook details

Author:

Narrator:
Tim Moore

ISBN:
9781473598355

Length:
10 hours 16 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Random House

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

Vuelta Skelter is really three books in one. It's the story of Moore's own epic 2,760-mile, lung-busting, thigh-wrenching journey... It is a rich, kaleidoscopic look a the legacy of the Spanish Civil War... And it is also a tribute to Berrendero - a tough, dour loner who refuses to give an inch, either to the mountains or to the authorities... Moore wants to restore JB [Berrendero] to his proper place in the ranks of cycling legends. He succeeds superbly. Marvellous Reading Tim Moore is a joy... you will belly laugh at the bedraggled, gazpacho-guzzling figure Moore cuts in Vuelta Skelter... he emerges as a two-wheeled Groucho Marx and a thoughtful Simon Schama combined. Vuelta Skelter's style is colloquial, full of jokes... the narrative races along like Berrendero on a good day... a valuable portrait of those post-war years of murder and hunger, and the modern Spain that still hardly dares mention them. Vuelta Skelter...[is] 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. Expand reviews
The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles