The Green Bullet by Matt Rendell

“From award-winning author Matt Rendell, an examination of the phenomenal success of Alejandro Valverde and the moral decay at the heart of Spanish cycling,” is the synopsis of The Green Bullet on Rendell’s publisher’s website. I found the book to be quite a hard read – with more detail on Spanish politics and the finer nuances of Operation Puerto than Valverde’s character.

> Buy now: The Green Bullet by Matt Rendell for £12.34 from bookshop.org

I’ve read plenty of books on cycling, including Rendell’s best-known publication, The Death Of Marco Pantani (which I’d thoroughly recommend). I was excited to get stuck into The Green Bullet and learn more about one of the most controversial figures in modern cycling, who, in my eyes, serves as a bridge between the Armstrong era and the modern peloton as we know it.

Valverde has always been a touchy subject in cycling, and going into this book, I was keen to see how Rendell cut through the broad variety of opinions on him. He was the subject of one of the biggest doping busts the sport has ever seen, but after serving his ban continued to win at the highest level, becoming World Champion and racing into his 40s.

As controversial as he was, you can’t deny that Valverde was a great racer to watch. He was dynamic and aggressive, punchy and sharp, and he won massive races all the way through his career. However, if you went purely off Rendell’s book, you wouldn’t know any of that. Pretty much any mention of Valverde’s race results are very factual – almost like a cut and paste from Wikipedia – and fail to really capture the imagination or convey the flair that Valverde was known for.

If you don’t know much about Valverde, I’d suggest doing a light Google search on his career to understand the scope of how long he raced for, how much he won, and how he raced. I say this because, in truth, I think a light Google search is about as far as Rendell got in his research of this book. After slogging through the introduction – which reads like Bala’s Pro Cycling Stats page put into prose – I was slightly concerned the rest of the book would continue in the same way; stat and fact heavy with little deeper research to really lift the lid on Valverde’s character, motivations, or personality. Sadly, I think I was right.

The book is generally interesting if you’re interested in Spanish politics or Operation Puerto – but not if you’re interested in Alejandro Valverde. Sadly, Rendell seems more set on going down rabbit holes and riding tangents for pages and pages at a time, often focusing on the minutiae of the political landscape in Spain, rather than telling us anything about Alejandro Valverde we can’t find out from his Wiki page.

I really struggled to get through Rendell’s copy. He hasn’t really spoken much to anybody else throughout the book and it’s really crying out for at least the tiniest input from Valverde himself.

The real gut punch comes in Rendell’s conclusion. Orion, the publisher, states: ‘Even today, Valverde maintains his reticence. The Green Bullet breaks the silence’ – an assertion that is objectively opposed by Rendell’s own conclusion where he confesses to not having had access to Valverde, despite positing a lot of (actually quite interesting) questions he would have posed to him – “but that’s for another book.” The lack of access to Valverde here is really telling, and I think titling the book ‘The Green Bullet’ is quite misleading, given the number of pages dedicated to almost anything other than Bala.

Overall, I think if you want to dedicate some time to reading a book about a controversial figure in the world of cycling, there are better out there. God Is Dead by Andy McGrath is a personal favourite of mine, and even Rendell’s own The Death Of Marco Pantani would be a better use of your time. If you’re really interested in Spanish politics, or you want an account of Operation Puerto, take a look at this one. If not, I’d say this is a book you won’t feel too bad about missing.

Verdict

Promises a story about one of the most controversial cyclists of all time, but delivers something totally different – a miss

> Buy now: The Green Bullet by Matt Rendell for £12.34 from bookshop.org

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