The Sports Bookshelf

CYCLING BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2014 The boom in cycling books has been a feature of recent years in the sports books market, their popularity fuelled by a mix of success stories and shame. On the one hand, the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish, Chris Froome and Chris Hoy have taken British cycling to a new level in terms of achievement on the road and track. On the other, the doping revelations that engulfed seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong have placed cycling at the heart of a scandal unprecedented in the sporting world. The Wiggins autobiography My Time was the biggest selling sports book of 2012, while the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2012 was Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race , based on the Grand Jury evidence that exposed Armstrong as the biggest drug cheat of all time. The Armstrong story spawned another William Hill contender last year in Seven Deadly Sins , in which journalist David Walsh's detailed his dogged pursuit of

WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2012 The Secret Race , the jaw-dropping expose about the drug-taking, blood-doping, cheating and cover-ups that revealed so much of professional cycling's recent history to be a sham, had to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for 2012, in the words of the judging panel, because it "fundamentally changed the sport being written about". It was to a large extent the evidence of former Olympic champion and leading Tour de France rider Tyler Hamilton to a grand jury after US federal prosecutors pursued a two-year investigation into allegations of doping against Lance Armstrong that led this year to the announcement by the United States Anti-Doping Agency that Armstrong should be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned for life. That evidence is outlined in all its disturbing detail in The Secret Race , which Hamilton, who was Armstrong's teammate in the US Postal Team, had begun writing in collabo

Today has been the publishing world's so-called Super Thursday, the October date that signals the start of the Christmas sales push. Among 97 new titles to hit the shelves, the crop of new sports books includes offerings from Stuart Broad and Gary Lineker -- and two books that will hope to benefit from the wave of popularity that has made Bradley Wiggins into a strong contender to be named BBC Sports Personality of the Year. We will not know the thoughts of the Tour de France winner and Olympic champion himself until November 8 -- publication date for Yellow Jersey's new Wiggins autobiography, My Time -- but in the meantime, two titles celebrating the feats of sport's most famous mod revivalist are released today. Bradley Wiggins: The Story of Britain's Greatest Ever Cyclist , by Press Association journalist Matt McGeehan is published by Carlton Books .  The 128-page biography looks at how the Wiggins 2012 success story has been more than a decade in the making,