The first thing that attracted me to road racing, even before the mountains and protagonists of the Tour de France (which have been keeping me coming back for decades now),…

The first thing that attracted me to road racing, even before the mountains and protagonists of the Tour de France (which have been keeping me coming back for decades now), was the colour. This was a sport of attention-grabbing and bright hues – the yellow of the yellow jersey, the blue of the sky, the green of the mountains, and every possible shade of every possible colour in the garish team kits of the 1980s, all offset by dazzling sunlight on chrome. In spite of more recent forays into earth tones, monochrome and gritty black and white, cycling’s soul always has at least one foot in the brassy, lurid world of attention-grabbing kitsch, and I love it. Cycling’s relationship with the luminescent, the gaudy and the fluorescent is a deep and celebratory one. And this is an edition of Rouleur which celebrates the colours of cycling, both literal and metaphorical.