Bodacious Beaumont.
The lovely little town on the hill southeast of Edmonton has got it goin’ on
these days. Not only did Beaumont recently take over hosting the annual Tour
d’Alberta bike event (and do a fine job of it); it’s also home to one of the
hottest new restaurants in the west, Chartier. This once-sleepy French town is
accumulating reasons to make it a destination. Edmonton cyclists have long
appreciated Beaumont as a place to ride out to and back. And now there’s a
terrific place to stop and take a load off, yet another Beaumont success story:
Crepe and Shake on 50th Avenue just west of 50th Street.
The Tour of Alberta professional bicycle race is just a few
weeks away, but I have to admit that I’m having trouble getting excited about it.
The race route this year is, in my view, the least inspired one in the race’s
four-year history. Why? No true mountain stage, very little gravel, and too
many urban stages.
Before reading this book, all I really knew about Jacques
Anquetil is that he was the first man to win the Tour de France five times,
that he dominated cycling in the years between the reigns of Fausto Coppi and
Eddy Merckx, and that there was some kind of incestual monkey business in his
personal life. Paul Howard’s clever title for his 2008 biography of Anquetil is
a nod to the Steven Soderbergh movie of 1989, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, in which a disturbing but strangely arresting
James Spader films various women talking—just talking—about their sexuality.
That film was compelling but gave me the creeps; the same can be said for
Howard’s book about Anquetil’s life. The Frenchman was a great champion and an
enigmatic character, but like Spader’s character, a complicated and curiously
sympathetic perv. All of which makes Anquetil’s story one worth telling—and
re-telling.
