The book’s cult began to spread more widely when, after more than two decades, it was translated into English (wonderfully, by Sam Garrett). That only happened once Krabbe – already well known in the Netherlands as not only a novelist, but also a chess master – had become relatively famous, following the film adaptation of his book The Vanishing, the disturbing tale of a woman’s kidnapping in the south of France at a rest stop (in the film, on which he has a writing credit, the couple has bikes on the roof, and the Tour de France plays on the radio in the background).
One of the people who discovered The Rider when it finally appeared in English was Simon Mottram, the founder and CEO of Rapha. The translation was published just as Mottram was putting together ideas for his new company. “I read it cover to cover in two hours and thought, thank God, somebody has totally articulated – totally nailed – the fundamental appeal of road cycling and road racing,” he says.
The book was mainlined right into the company’s DNA. For its first photo shoot – the first of the soon-to-be-iconic paeans to beautifully lit, grainy suffering – it sent two riders and a crew to the very site of Krabbe’s race. All new Rapha employees are given two books: Built to Last, a business book, and The Rider.
“All of bike racing is in that book,” he says. In Rapha’s early days, the company even sold it on its website, where Mottram says it sold more briskly than on Amazon. “To say we are fans,” he says, “would be an understatement.”
Mottram has always thought the book would make the “perfect” film. “The film would be interesting to people who weren’t cyclists,” he says. “Because it’s actually about suffering, and application, and struggling against yourself.”
Film rights actually have been purchased by a film composer named Michael Rohatyn. As I discover when I call him, he lives on my very Brooklyn block. While not a fanatical rider himself, he sees in The Rider “the potential for a great sports movie, like Downhill Racer.”
It could have been about tennis, he says, about anything. “This is really about mental breakdown and self-punishment and that feeling of frustration of being who you are.”
Krabbe writes in The Rider, as he is eclipsed by the pack in a flashback to a race before the one in France: “I’d given up a few thousand hours of my life to prove that I belonged with them, and now it turned out that this was not the case.” (As for the film, Rohatyn says, “It’s moving along.”)
Simply talking about the book, says Rapha’s Mottram, “makes me think I need to go out and ride it again.” He means read it, of course, but the slip, Freudian perhaps, is entirely understandable. For nothing else you will read feels as much like riding.
Copyright © 2016 Rodale Inc.