French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  That was until Joanne was 17 and Helen and Barry decided to move back to Britain from Belgium. Joanne wanted to stay on and complete her studies in Ghent. It was a decision that opened the door to her father’s world. ‘I was in my last year of high school, and all my friends were in Ghent. I had the choice, and I said, “Of course I’m not going back.” So I stayed and lived in digs in Ghent with Rosa Desnerck.’

  The Desnerck family owned near-legendary bike shop Plume Vainqueur, or Plum as it is now. After sponsoring a professional team throughout the 1950s they then also took in fledgling Euro pros – including, at one point, a young Tom Simpson.

  ‘Mum wanted me to be somewhere that was still part of cycling and at Rosa’s there were other English-speakers – riders who wanted to come to Europe and get the experience. Gary Wiggins – Bradley’s dad – was there, Eric Heiden too. All sorts of riders were in these digs. And that was when I started reading about my dad, and seeing the old newspaper stories.

  ‘It was all new information to me, so I started asking my mum about it. “Mum,” I’d say, “is this true?” But she was adamant it was all lies. I believed everything my mum and Barry told me. And if anybody mentioned doping, I got on my high horse . . .

  ‘But then, when I got to my mid-thirties, which was when I started to fall in love with my racing bike, I started wondering. I was angry that I hadn’t been told the whole story and then I was angry at Daddy . . . Why? Why are you so stubborn? But Mum says I’m stubborn like that – “You’re just like your father,” she says.’

  After years of listening, with rising frustration, to the stories about her father’s career, some true, some mythical and some contentious, Joanne is now taking action. Through lawyers, she is pursuing a copy of her father’s autopsy. ‘I just want the truth,’ she says. ‘I love the truth. Whatever the truth is, I want to know. Where did journalists get the information that Daddy was doped and had alcohol in his blood?’

  I begin to detail the numerous exhaustive accounts and eyewitness descriptions, which document both the culture of the time and the prevalence of amphetamine abuse. Even Chris Sidwells, Tom Simpson’s nephew, in Mr Tom, his biography of his uncle, says: ‘. . . like many before him and since, he began to use drugs – stimulants, because that’s what they used then. Not often, but use them he did and I can’t change that.’

  But Joanne waves all that away. ‘Prove it to me,’ she says.

  She has her own history of that day. ‘One of Daddy’s teammates, Colin Lewis, raided a café – I’m not sure if it was the Relais in Bédoin – and grabbed everything he could get. He then gave Coca-Cola to all the riders, then found Daddy and gave him the last bottle he had.

  ‘But it was Cointreau . . . Anyway Dad said, “Colin, give it to me – my throat’s so dry.” So he took two slugs of it and then threw it away. That’s how the alcohol got there. I’ve no problem with that – I know how it happened.’

  Incredibly, neither Joanne nor her mother has ever seen her father’s autopsy report. ‘I’ve asked Mum if I could see the autopsy report, because I’m sure in the report there are no lies. But she doesn’t have it.’ Once again Joanne’s frustration takes over. ‘I said to her, “Does this mean that you have never, ever read the report?” and she said, “No.”

  ‘So I asked, “Where does all the information come from then?”, and she said, “I don’t know – the journalists are liars.” But I want the truth. That’s why I want to see the autopsy.

  ‘I can live with the truth. If that’s the truth – that Daddy took amphetamines – then so be it. I don’t have to defend him constantly.

  ‘But you also have to see it in the context of those days. It’s like 40 years ago everybody used to smoke. They used to think smoking was good for you!

  ‘If the autopsy shows that he didn’t have amphetamines, then they can’t say that he died of doping. Then it’s a heart attack. But if they were there, then I won’t be accusing journalists any more, or defending him.

  ‘I can live with the truth,’ she repeats vehemently. ‘Once I know the truth it won’t hurt me any more. And I know the autopsy report will be the truth.’

  The tension in relations between Tom Simpson and an impetuous Eddy Merckx, which, as Peugeot team-mates, had come to a head during that infamous 1967 Paris–Nice, left its mark on Joanne too. Even now, she describes her relationship with Merckx as ‘funny’.

  ‘Are Eddy and I friends? Well, now, yes – but, until recently, no. I’ve met him about 20 times in my life, but I always had to remind him who I was, to introduce myself. That was up until 2016.’

  Merckx was the only professional to travel to Tom Simpson’s funeral in the summer of 1967. But it’s still taken the best part of 50 years for Joanne and cycling’s most famous champion to get to know each other. ‘I’m curious about Daddy’s friends,’ Joanne says. ‘I still like to hear all the old stories. I don’t want to hear, “Oh, your dad was a good bike rider . . .” I know that. I want to hear the naughty stories, or the funny stories.’

  But through a mutual acquaintance, Joanne and Merckx started riding together in August 2016, as they prepared to mark the 50th anniversary of her father’s death by riding up the mountain. ‘We had a lunch together, a tête-à-tête of sorts. He’s a lovely guy. I said to him: “Eddy, don’t you think it’s time for a Simpson and a Merckx to ride together again?”

  ‘So he told me that he was riding in Herentals. “Come along, you’re welcome,” he said. He didn’t have to ask twice. I turned up and we set off. Eddy was funny. He said: “Simpson – ride in front where I can see you! I don’t want to get flicked again . . .”

  ‘We spent the whole day together, riding, and then there was a barbecue afterwards. Eddy was reminiscing about Daddy, telling stories.’

  Tom was popular wasn’t he? I say.

  ‘Very liked, I think,’ Joanne says. ‘He must have been a nice guy. I see all the pictures, messing about, the bowler hat, showing his playful side. I miss knowing him; I miss what I could have had.’

  When Joanne joined the Cinglés du Mont Ventoux – the club of riders who have climbed all three ascents in one day – it was highly celebrated. ‘I’d wanted to do it incognito, but the guys behind it said they were so honoured that a Simpson was taking on the “Cinglés” that they rode a few kilometres with me. I think I must have been the most “judged” rider ever to do it!’

  Now, Joanne organises a ride on Ventoux every five years or so. ‘The first time I rode up was in 1997 and then, in 2001, I rode from Ghent to the Ventoux.’ Until she trained to ride the Ventoux in 1997, the mountain was almost a Simpson forbidden zone. For a long time, it was a taboo place, a no-go area that had caused the Simpson family too much pain. Joanne says that much was clear when she told her mother what she was planning. ‘I said, “You know what, for Daddy’s 30th anniversary, I’m going to climb the Ventoux and finish what he couldn’t finish.”

  ‘When I told my mum, she was, “Oh, you don’t have to do this, you don’t need to prove anything” – even up to the day before . . . “It’s the Ventoux,” she said. “Please don’t.” ’

  Maybe that was more about their own memories, though, I suggest, about everything that they had been through. Whatever, Joanne was undeterred.

  ‘I was riding up, thinking, “Bloody hell, Dad – this isn’t easy.” But then it was only 29 degrees when we went up; it wasn’t 40 degrees or more, like when he rode it. But then as I got higher up, I thought, “You did choose a beautiful place to die. What a view – what a view . . .”

  ‘I wanted to finish the 1.3 kilometres that Daddy didn’t finish. And I was so positive about it, and trained so hard, that I rode up and then said, “What’s the fuss? What’s the big deal?” So I thought, “Next time I’ll ride down from Ghent.” That’s what we did. We rode in stages, riding about 125, maybe 145 kilometres a day, with some friends in a little group.

  ‘We had a couple of rest days. The hardest part was Luxembourg and the Ardennes, all th
ose 25 per cent climbs! You don’t get climbs like that in France.’

  After that trip, Joanne’s commitment to maintaining her father’s memorial grew. ‘In 2007 I built the rest of the steps. But with all the permissions I needed from local councils, it took five years to do it.’

  Stubborn and dogged, I say, just like your father. She smiles.

  On the 50th anniversary of Tom Simpson’s death on Mont Ventoux, the 2017 Tour de France will be far away, on the other side of the country. Joanne has been bitterly disappointed by ASO’s lack of interest in reaching out to her family. ‘I’ve had no contact with them. My experience of ASO, speaking as one of the Simpson family, is that they’ve ignored us, as if we’re . . .’ Joanne’s voice trails off.

  But Tom died competing in their race, I say. Joanne looks out of the window.

  ‘July 2017 is Daddy’s 50th anniversary, but the Tour ignores it because they don’t want to be associated with it and with the “negative” image.’ She is convinced, also, that the Tour chose 2016 for its most recent ascent of the mountain, rather than 2017, in a deliberate avoidance of the Simpson anniversary. ‘Of course they did,’ she says.

  ‘It proves what I’ve always known all these years – they’re ashamed. The Simpson name is a blemish. So I say good riddance.’

  She has never met Christian Prudhomme, but in 1994, when Eros Poli took his famous stage win in Carpentras, Joanne and her mother were invited to the race as guests by then Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc, himself a former rider and contemporary of Simpson. ‘It was the first time we’d been invited. Jean-Marie knew my dad – but, as for the rest, they’ve never contributed to the memorial or the steps or anything like that.’

  To raise the 15,000 euros to repair the steps to the Simpson memorial, Joanne collected money at the Ghent Six Day for five successive years. ‘I didn’t want sponsorship. So all the money came from the Belgian fans.’

  One evening, Leblanc came into the velodrome in Ghent and dropped some cash into her bucket. ‘He gave me five euros,’ Joanne remembers. ‘So I always say the Tour de France has given the family five euros towards the 13 steps up to the memorial.’

  It’s always the number 13, Joanne remarks. ‘Daddy died on stage 13, on July 13; he was wearing number 49 – four and nine is 13 and it happened in 1967 – and six and seven is 13.

  ‘There are 13 steps up to the memorial. There were two steps already and I added another 11 in 2007. At the time, I didn’t even realise I’d built 13.’

  Joanne is climbing the mountain in July 2017, on the day of the anniversary, leading a group, including Merckx and, she hopes, Greg LeMond, to the Simpson memorial and then on, to the top. ‘I’m making the pace, leading the pack. It’s more of an honorary thing, but I can see myself with all these 18-year-olds . . . Imagine if I’m only doing ten kilometres an hour!’

  The Simpson memorial is one of the most visited in France, with a footfall that compares with the graves of Jim Morrison and Édith Piaf in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. ‘Daddy was never a drama queen but he chose a good stage. When I go to the Ventoux, I sit on the steps up to the memorial and I think: “You chose a special place.”

  ‘Half the people who stop at the memorial don’t even know that my dad ever won another race. They know that he died on the Ventoux – but they don’t know that he won Flanders, or Paris–Nice or the World Championships. I sit there on the steps, Jeremy, and I hear what they say. Nobody knows who I am, but these people come up and you hear them say, “Oooh, look, this is where the alcoholic died” or, “This is where the doper died.”

  ‘Do you remember anything about it?’ Joanne asks me.

  I don’t think so, I say, but then check myself because I can just remember the 1966 World Cup final. I watched that with my dad in a hotel in Glencoe. I remember the moon landings too, but Tom Simpson’s death on a mountain in France . . .? I try harder. ‘Maybe I can remember something,’ I say. ‘A newspaper headline, something on the news. When I see the footage, there’s something familiar. But that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all’: the elusive Tom – always out of reach.

  Every now and then, Joanne spends time up on the mountain. At around four or five o’clock, when the light changes and the temperature starts to drop, she will tidy up the mementoes scattered around the memorial. ‘I keep the lovely bits and pieces, the touching stuff – the special stuff, the cards and things like that. But I like to make sure nobody sees me.

  ‘Last time I went I found a cremation urn,’ Joanne recalls quietly. ‘We didn’t know what to do, so we spread the ashes on the mountainside behind the memorial. I’ve kept the urn, though, I didn’t feel I could throw it away.’

  Joanne was at the memorial in July 2016, battling the Mistral on the day of the running maillot jaune incident. ‘We’d been filming in the morning, but there was so much wind we had to come down. So we watched it in Mazan.’ She was also there in 2009, when the Tour reached a climax at the summit of the Giant, with Lance Armstrong fighting to prevent Bradley Wiggins from leapfrogging him and taking third place overall.

  Wiggins, who fought hard on the Ventoux to secure fourth overall – which, after Armstrong’s later disqualification, subsequently became third – had a photo of Simpson taped to his top tube as he climbed the Giant. ‘Tom will be watching over me,’ Wiggins had said before the stage. Behind Wiggins came his Garmin team-mate David Millar, who threw his cap towards the monument as he rode by. Joanne, standing watching the riders pass, caught it. A note on it read: ‘To Tommy, RIP, David Millar.’

  ‘I’ve kept it safe, up in the loft,’ she says. ‘I’ve never met David Millar, but I have some respect for him.’

  Yet, unlike in 1970, or in 1994, none of the Tour’s officials paused to pay their respects. Only Marc Madiot, the sports director of Française des Jeux and former professional rider, stopped his car, pausing for a moment to leave a bouquet of flowers on the memorial.

  It’s the hour of the ‘apéro’ in the south of France. I sit looking out over Marseille’s Vieux Port, sipping an ice-cold beer in the wood-panelled, smoke-stained bar at La Caravelle. Things haven’t changed much in here since Tom Simpson rode away from the start line, a stone’s throw away, on 13 July 1967.

  The heat of the afternoon has begun to fade, but even with a gentle sea breeze blowing through the open windows, the languid air is stifling. Outside, it’s still sweltering as the early-evening promenaders stroll past. The picture windows overlook the fishing boats and yachts, bobbing against a backdrop of old and new apartments. Dominating the horizon, across the city, is the hilltop basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, one of the most recognisable buildings in France.

  Marseille is an exotic city, cracked and broken in many places, grand and seductive in others. It is disparaged by some, depicted as seedy and dangerous, but I love the combination of rough and smooth, the collision of modernist and vintage, of French and North African, and the unerring heat of its long summers.

  The modernist blocks that overlook the city are ranged on the series of hills rolling down towards the sea. Some are still no-go ghettos, while others, closer to the coast and now sold as designer apartments with sea views, ring the old town. Zinedine Zidane, arguably the city’s most famous son, emerged from one such ghetto, the notorious Castellane district of bad estates and grim blocks. From the very top of the tallest of these you can see north, over the hills, beyond the brasseries and fountains of Aix-en-Provence and the wooded hump of the Luberon range, and, on a very clear day, even as far as the bleached summit of the Giant.

  Since it was named European capital of culture in 2013, Marseille’s ‘front of house’ – the Vieux Port, the Corniche and the areas around the university and the Prado – have been tidied up. My friend François Thomazeau, a veteran chronicler of cycling and of French life, lives close to the Vieux Port. ‘2013 did change things a bit,’ he says. ‘It sped up the completion of the Terrasses du Port area which is a success – maybe not commercially yet; it
is a little bit too posh for Marseille’s population.’

  François says that the Marseillais have developed ‘a real sense of pride at rediscovering how beautiful the city can be’. ‘And the tourists keep coming,’ he notes wryly, ‘which is quite unexpected for us.’

  But he acknowledges that the rise of the right wing, allied to the spate of terror attacks across France, is increasing tensions in the city, but adds that he’s never seen ‘blatant expressions of racism in the streets’.

  Yet for all the investment, Marseille remains fragile. ‘We just need more jobs,’ Thomazeau says, ‘and Olympique de Marseille winning games again . . .’ But, as an outsider, conscious of the city’s reputation, you don’t have to walk too far from the Vieux Port into the old town to feel the tension in the air. This part of Marseille, only a short distance from the quayside brasseries and luxury hotels, is full of noise and heat and spice.

  The heat on the morning of 13 July 1967 was already getting to some. As the teams arrived for the start of that day’s Tour de France stage, Pierre Dumas was already anxious. According to L’Équipe, the Tour’s doctor had spoken to the newspaper’s journalist, Pierre Chany, at the Hôtel Noailles the previous evening. ‘Dumas was worried,’ Chany wrote, ‘and said something I’ll never forget: “It’s going to be awfully hot tomorrow. If the guys start taking stuff, we could have a dead man on our hands.” ’

  Joanne Simpson calls her father ‘Daddy’ throughout our long conversation in Ghent, her relationship with him frozen in time, a faint memory of a bike race, of embrocation on tanned legs, of a strong hand holding hers and a winning, ready smile, from half a century ago.

  She says she has no memory of that fateful day in July 1967. ‘It’s all hearsay, all the stories my mum told me and Barry told me and other people. But I can’t remember anything. I don’t remember the last time I was with him. There’s nothing.’