The Tour de France is one thing. But it is not the only thing. Not by a long way.
Over recent years, and much in keeping with the spirit of adventure that has compelled my Accidental Tourism, I have become increasingly obsessed with the almost endless and eclectic variety of lesser races that proliferate throughout the road racing calendar, and across the world. Sometimes these races are venerable institutions dating back almost a century. Others appear from nowhere, rapidly dreamt up on the back of a tourism brochure at a trade fair, and often destined to disappear in a flurry of unpaid bills and with even greater haste.

All of these races defy economic logic. They are, to all intents and purposes, raced in a vacuum. The wider world has no idea that they are taking place, and cares still less. Even the global cycling world pays no heed to them. They might as well not exist. But they do. And therein lies the magic.
Over the last year or so, I have already spent time at many of these races, painstakingly persuading the organisation of my relevance, begging for a lanyard to lend me legitimacy and benefitting obscenely from the hospitality of my unwitting hosts. I did just this, for example, at the 75th edition of a one-day race I’d never heard of called Paris Chauny. On arrival at the start line, I was stunned to encounter a fully-fledged and annoyingly noisy publicity caravan made up of normal cars belonging to tree surgeons, plumbers and accountants, all with balloons flying from the bumpers. The race started when a bloke walked to the front and went, ‘3, 2, 1…Allez!’ and then pointed towards a statue of Joan of Arc, as if that explained everything. And off they went, deep into the woods where the Armistice was signed on November 11th 1918.

At Gran Piemonte, an autumnal moving feast of a race, I inhaled clouds of mind-healing sulphur, stumbled across the fascinating etymology of the name Ottolenghi and witnessed once again the transcendence of Isaac del Toro.

In Hartlepool I shared notes with the great, retiring Lizzie Deignan about how hard it is to impress on her continental team mates how beautiful England can be, when the Tour of Britain got underway next to the towering edifice of an oil rig in a scrapyard.

In the Cévennes I ran up a smouldering slag heap, ate pork meatballs wrapped in offal with a drunken antiques dealer, while half of the peloton abandoned the Étoile de Bessèges in protest because another car had driven into the middle of the bunch.

In Abruzzo, in the spring, I discovered the castle to which the Italian royal family had fled once the king had had the temerity to depose Mussolini in 1944. I ate a pizza there, and watched a bike race which was won by someone whose name I instantly forgot.

And at the Superga basilica, I left a flower at the memorial to the victims of the Turin air disaster, and thought about my friend Bill Lievesley whose father was among the dead. Then I watched Del Toro win again.

Detour! is a love letter to these fringe events on the margins of the sport. The book will follow my journey to and around some of cycling’s most obscure races, getting to know the people who make it happen, the riders who take part and the folk through whose land the peloton rushes. What keeps these races from collapse? What faith and passion guarantee their existence? What daily wonders do they throw up in their path? And why was Alpecin Decueninck’s Dries de Bondt called to the podium of Paris Chauny to receive a special prize? Not even he knew.

Detour! will be a travelogue loosely woven around these footnotes in the calendar. It will celebrate difference, fetishise chaos and thrive on curiosity. Wherever the journey takes me; whether to the Duracell Dwars door het Hageland or the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s Cup Women’s Tour of Thailand, the beating heart of the project will remain, always: the races.

In the end, they’re all that matters.