Author Andrew Parker

While the training regimens of professional athletes have changed by leaps and bounds over the past century, the archaic nature of most professional sports around the turn of the twentieth century meant athletic glory was once harder to attain. Sports used to be so difficult that I doubt most modern athletes would have been able to compete at a professional level if they had been born a century earlier. Take, for example, the 1928 Tour de France, the focal point of Phil Keoghan’s documentary, Le Ride. Blending an often untold history lesson with a painstaking recreation of a race so brutal that only 41 of the 168 entrants were able to finish, The Amazing Race host and avid cyclist looks at one such event where no amount of modern day strength conditioning and ingenuity would make an athlete’s task any easier.