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God is Dead

The Remarkable Cycling Biography - Shortlisted For The William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award

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God is Dead

Von: Andy McGrath
Gesprochen von: Rory Alexander
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Brought to you by Penguin.

•SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2022•

The remarkable untold story of the mercurial cycling prodigy Frank Vandenbroucke, written by William Hill award-winning author Andy McGrath.

They called him God. For his grace on a bicycle, for his divine talent, for his heavenly looks. Frank Vandenbroucke had it all, and in the late Nineties he raced with dazzling speed and lived even faster.

The Belgian won several of cycling's most illustrious races, including Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Paris-Nice and Ghent-Wevelgem. He was a mix of poise and panache who enthralled a generation of cycling fans. Off the bike, he only had one enemy - himself. Vandenbroucke dabbled in nocturnal party sessions mixing sleeping pills and alcohol and regularly fell out with team managers. By 1999 his team had suspended him and this proved to be the start of a long, eventful fall from grace. Depression, a drug ban, addiction, car crashes, divorce and countless court appearances subsumed his life. He threatened his wife with a gun. He tried to commit suicide twice. And when police found performance-enhancing drugs at his house, Vandenbroucke said they were for his dog.

It seemed he had finally learned from his mistakes. Then, on 12 October 2009, aged just 34, Vandenbroucke was found dead in a hotel room in Senegal.

Guided by exclusive contributions from his family, friends and team-mates, William Hill award-winning author Andy McGrath lays bare Vandenbroucke's chaotic, complicated life and times. God is Dead is the remarkable biography of this mercurial cycling prodigy.

© Andy McGrath 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

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Kritikerstimmen

How doping killed cycling's 'golden boy'. A shocking, clear-sighted and sympathetic account of a talent destroyed by drugs. (Melanie Reid)
'With his talent, Frank is the Johan Cruyff of cycling. He could win anything.'
A stunning biography of this troubled individual. 320 pages of brilliance.
Superb. A riveting, warts-an-all dive into a complex, deeply flawed rider and man during professional cycling's lowest ebb.
The fact that we know the tragically opaque ending of this story from the start is what lends such a devastating quality to McGrath's careful biography. Soberly told and with a clear affection for its wayward subject, McGrath's account explores the narcotically corrupting power of sport itself. (Jonathan Liew)
My favourite cycling book of the year... McGrath has penned arguably the most insightful cycling biography to date. It leaves you both questioning how the sport was so dysfunctional while perversely pining for more stories from the doomed era. (Joe Laverick)
Captures the charisma and chaos of Vandenbroucke's short life perfectly.
Frank Vandenbroucke had the world at his pedals in the late 1990s ... but off [the bike] the Belgian lived in a soap opera, a mess of addictions, marital problems and, finally, death. McGrath is a sensitive yet compelling guide through this turbulence. (Ben East)
'I sometimes wonder if he was too intelligent to be a rider. He was a genius.'
'In Belgium, we need heroes, examples. People who don't break, people who release us from our daily mediocrity. People who can fly, who do things that we cannot. VDB on the Saint-Nicolas.'
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This book started out with a lot of info on Belgium and its cycling history and I thought that even though it's a book specifically about one of the sport's stars, the author would shift from narrow focus to broader view and back again throughout. That was not so. Would recommend for people who are especially fascinated with Frank Vandenbroucke's story, but if you have ever watched a documentary/listened to a podcast about one of pro cycling's fallen stars or just a person in the limelight struggling with addiction in general, there is really little new here. Yes, it's a tragic story, but the author has structured the narrative in a way that focuses heavily on Vandenbroucke's addiction and gets it's twists and turns from his journey deeper into it as if that is the unique/shocking aspect of this man's story. It's not and in my opinion it should not be put this way, because addiction isolates it's sufferers anyway when really their journeys are always alike in their patterns.

The narrator was good, but very detatched.

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