Chased by Pandas: My life in the mysterious world of cycling

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This is the celebration of a true cyclist's career, which will appeal to anyone who's embraced the weekend ride whilst dreaming of the mountains.

Many anecdotes get a paragraph or two but could be a whole chapter although the hardback already runs to 300 pages. Now, having retired at the end of the 2021 season aged 35 and no longer bound by the constraints of the racing circuit, Dan feels the time is right to tell his story in the same forthright and honest manner that he rode his bike. But, when it comes to actually discussing these fears, Martin’s not the guy for the task, his tone is just too reassuring to allow you to experience any sense of danger, his positive outlook – or his ability to deep-six his fears and not think or talk about them – takes all edge off these topics. With no disrespect to Pierre Carrey, I do wonder if Martin’s literary agent, David Luxton (Brendan Gallagher’s Corsa Rosa, Peter Cossins’ Climbers, Geraint Thomas’ According to G franchise), may have missed a trick and should have brought Hannah Grant in as Martin’s ghost.

This book reflects Dan's generous and outspoken spirit, his resilience to pain, crashes, bad luck and, finally, his acceptance of destiny. But about half way this tiny stripling of a lad rocketed out of the bunch to disappear up the lane ahead. There are of course more constructive ways use one’s time than to read road cyclists’ autobiographies, but I dare say – even before I’ve read the book myself – that STS would be positively surprised if he bought (or loaned) the book and wasted a couple of hours of his time by reading it! Each chapter's title has a sub-title based on a typical cyclist's fear: the fear of losing a race, the fear of retiring from the sport, the fear of mountains or downhills, the fear of doping and, ultimately, the fear of death. What Martin is telling us in Chased by Pandas and what Martin told Kimmage five years earlier, they’re substantially the same, in both he’s telling us he hasn’t really used painkillers save for the odd paracetamol every now and again.

Dan is a proud husband of Jess, a British long-distance runner who competed in the 2016 Olympics, in Rio, and a proud father of twin daughters, Ella and Daisy, born in September 2018. Was a huge fan of Dan Martin ever since the Liege win, where he displayed an unbelievable level of cool to just tail-gun the pack and pick his moment. With its descriptions of the profound boredom that oozed from Monaco, or the Tourmalet’s telluric faults and anarchic curves (“like a piece of spaghetti through pesto”), Chased by Pandas is definitely one of the better written chamois memoirs – even if it is another of those chamoirs where the subject’s voice is often lost behind that of the ghost – but at heart it is as light and as trivial as most of the others. I’ve always aspired to race like that since (rarely succeeding thanks to adhd driven impulsiveness) but it was so clinical and enjoyable to watch him constantly positioning himself in the right place the whole way through that day.

I’m sure I also remember, for example seeing riders with CC Giro (Dan’s club) jerseys when on Audax rides in the area! Dan also discusses every aspect of the professional cyclist’s life – food, discipline, money, dreams, friendship and betrayal. Dan is unashamed when it comes to exposing these dark feelings, his weaknesses and how he tried to deal with them, his attitude exemplifying Mark Twain's quote: "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear". It was explicit in the way it talked about doping, that was an important part of the article, it justified why Carrey saw Martin as a hero, he was a guy who chose to reject doping, with Carrey linking that stance to the careers of Romain Bardet and Thibaut Pinot. Perhaps planning accounts for plenty, after all if you find a climb that suits, if you know you’re on form and are targetting mountain stages in the third week of a grand tour then the odds begin to narrow, all the same the confidence is notable.