Excerpt from the book Sports the Olympics Forgot This book describes 40 sports that ought to be played but aren’t, because I made them up.

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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the Tour of the Tandem has become increasingly popular with riders from Western Europe although it never really attracts the best riders, who are normally in training for one of the major cycling tours in May.

The first winners of the Tour of the Tandem were the Nagy brothers from Szeged who on different days alternated between front and back on their bike, which is not against the rules – indeed riders can change places during a stage if they so wish. Between 1958 and 1961 the Szabo brothers from Debrecen were the winners and they hold the record for winning by the largest margin, 45 minutes and 13 seconds in 1959, and the smallest margin 6 seconds in 1960. The race in 1960 was the first year when amateur teams were allowed to compete in the race and they often got in the way of the professional teams, which lead to pile ups on every stage including the infamous Lake Balaton Peloton Collision when half the teams finished in the lake after an amateur tandem team from Lodz in Poland suffered a puncture and swerved across the path of the other teams.