Life of Mamils

When Martin Gatenby was a small boy, he saw the Tour de France on television for the first time.Like many people who have witnessed this great spectacle, he was inspired to dream of cycling across the cobbles of Northern France, over the Alps and Pyrenees and into Paris. For the truly talented few, fulfilling that dream meant a life of dedication and suffering, a career at the very highest level of the sport and a chance to count their names amongst the greats. For many others, things were different.This is the story of one man's personal journey from the grassroots of cycling to the finish line of the Tour de France, a journey that took him down some of the very same roads as his heroes and over many of the same mountains. He didn't become a sporting great... he became a middle aged man in lycra instead.