The novelist Louis Nucera, who has been killed in a cycling accident outside Nice aged 72, was a devotee of the bicycle and of the Tour de France. His novel, Le Roi René (1976), was about René Vietto, the 1930s Tour champion, and in 1987 he wrote an account of his own experiences of cycling the same 4,813 kilometres as the Italian champion Fausto Coppi, the ciampanissimo who had won the race in 1949.