After reading both the book and all the derogatory comments made toward JV, I kinda despair for humanity.
To say that
One Way Ticket is an exercise in narcissism is, obviously, to miss the point of autobiography. The problem with such a comment isn't its obviousness, it's that some will see it as an attack on the author when it is entirely about the book:
One Way Ticket is narcissistic. It is narcissistic because it sees the world from only one perspective, it is never able to step back and see things how others might have seen them, despite all the benefits of hindsight.
Take, as an example, the story about
the ground-breaking revenue sharing deal the AIGCP nearly pulled off with RCS, only to be let down by the individual members of the AIGCP who,
One WayTicket tells us, allowed themselves to be bullied into accepting the status quo. That is shown only as a betrayal, it is not considered a legitimate decision by teams guarding their own interests.
The inability to consider the motives of others is not
One Way Ticket's only blindspot. Take the bullying. Anybody who has read about the book, seen JV interviewed on the subject, or listened to any of the podcasts he's appeared on plugging the book, will probably be aware that the young JV was bulled by his shoolmates. He's gone into some detail on the bullying in some of these interviews. But in
One Way Ticket, despite the first half of the book going very heavy on JV's childhood (it takes up about a third of the book), the bullying is only mentioned when we get to Floyd Landis, where it is used as a justification for why JV finally stood up for Landis against the man who was bullying the disgraced Tour winner: Armstrong.
The weird thing here is that the bullying explains a lot with JV, and explains a lot with
One Way Ticket. It explains, say, why so little time is given to the team's wins - a Grand Tour (Giro d’Italia, 2012) and four Monuments (Paris-Roubaix, 2011; Liège-Bastogne-Liège, 2013; Il Lombardia, 2014; Ronde van Vlaanderen, 2019) of which only the one already told in the previous book,
Argyle Armada, is told here - yet so much time is given to Dave Brailsford tapping-up Bradley Wiggins and winning him away to Team Sky. The story as presented is about the ethics of tapping riders up but it isn't really about that at all. It's about Brailsford bullying Slipstream into letting Wiggins go.
Bullying, it's the root of so many things in the story told in
One Way Ticket - from Armstrong to ASO - but bullying isn't the story told in
One Way Ticket. And that's a criticism of
One Way Ticket. It's a book that doesn't actually understand the story it wants to tell and so leaves most readers, even those inclined to like JV and so want to like the book, feeling it's a book lacking in insight.