Like Simpson, Rivière came to a tragic end: he plunged into a ravine in the 1960 Tour de France, broke his back and never competed again. Three months after Simpson’s death he admitted to massive use of amphetamines – a large injection and five pills for his hour record of 1959, for example. At one point, Rivière’s soigneur, André Prévost, worked with the British champion.
Vin Denson also remembers Simpson and what the world champion called his ‘Mickey Finns’. ‘He used to feel that he’d be fine, as long as he listened to intelligent sports doctors – and there were one or two clever sports doctors in the Gentse Wielersport [Simpson’s cycling club in Ghent]. He was told to keep within the bounds, take just eight milligrams of amphetamines.’
Eight milligrams of amphetamine, a former pro with an encyclopedic knowledge of drugs and drug-taking told me, is exactly what ‘a rider who was being careful would take at the end of a long race’, or in the second half of a circuit race. It’s a small dose, in keeping with what a medical adviser would tell a rider to use if he wanted ‘not to be dead by the age of 45’ as my contact put it.
My former pro added that his research indicated that up to 50 milligrams per day was more like the norm at the time. Could Simpson have used a greater quantity than Denson’s ‘eight milligrams’? Quite possibly, because there are two factors which have to be taken into account. Firstly, the body acquires resistance to amphetamines, meaning that as a cyclist uses them over time, the more he has to use merely to gain the same effect. It would be easy to start with eight milligrams, but not so easy to continue. Additionally, the Festina inquiry suggests that there is a natural tendency among athletes to assume that the more they take of any substance, the better they will perform, and that there is a tendency to ignore the health risks. This applies to amateurs with multivitamins as it does to professionals with drugs. Hence, if eight milligrams worked, who knew what 16 or 25 milligrams might not do?
Simpson may have thought this way, if his remark about stimulants to another source is to be believed: ‘If it takes ten to kill you, I’ll take nine.’ Consider the obsessive way Simpson treated other ways of improving performance, such as his diet: if he believed that more raw carrot meant you were more healthy, why should he not believe the same of a stimulant?
As for where the drugs came from, Lewis discovered the source later in the 1967 Tour, when two Italians came to the door of the hotel room he was sharing with Simpson. Italy was where the riders would go to buy amphetamines. They would ride over the border after training camps in the spring on the French Riviera and buy them. Simpson had a heated discussion with the two men in Italian, which Lewis did not understand, before eventually they shook hands and the two men left.
Simpson was given a box, ‘exactly that size’, says Lewis, and draws in the air with his hands a shape about six inches long, four inches wide and three inches deep. Lewis asked what was going on. ‘That’s my year’s supply of Mickey Finns,’ said Simpson. ‘That lot cost me £800.’ The amphetamine found on Simpson when he died, Tonedron, was one of the more expensive varieties – ‘the Rolls-Royce of amphetamines’, my ex-professional told me – compared to the basic and far cheaper Benzedrine.
Eight hundred pounds in 1967 was a huge amount of money. Lewis’s wage from his professional team employer at the time was just £4 a week. Peter Hill was a new professional in Simpson’s team, Peugeot, and he earned four times that, £16 a week. Even so, Simpson was spending almost as much per week on his supply of ‘Mickey Finns’.
Lewis is still angered by the fact that Simpson could afford to spend four times his annual salary on drugs. The episode gives the lie to the notion that all the competitors in professional races at that time were on a level playing field because they had access to the same drugs. Instead, the opposite could be argued: the more money a rider had, the more – and better – drugs he could buy.
The same principle applied to the quality of medical support a rider could purchase. All the senior riders had their personal soigneurs. These men were more than mere masseurs: the word comes from the French verb soigner, which means to ‘heal’, or ‘look after’. Before sports doctors arrived in cycling, soigneurs would offer a mix of sound advice and old wives’ remedies on training, diet, lifestyle, give massage, medical support, a sympathetic ear, and in some cases, drugs.
The term ‘soigneur’ was removed from official used in cycling, however, after the Festina scandal of 1998, in which the soigneur Willy Voet was arrested while carrying his team’s supply of drugs to the Tour de France. The word ‘soigneur’ has been replaced by ‘team assistant’ which does not have the same resonance. They must have qualifications, but are in many cases the same men doing the same job. Yet the soigneurs in the 1960s had no formal qualifications. Vin Denson was looked after by Bernard Stoops, who was a gravedigger by profession. Van der Weide, who massaged Lewis, was a fishmonger. Raymond Poulidor’s soigneur was a wizened old Italian called Leoni, who slept on the floor in the corridor outside his rider’s room.
These eminences grises traded on their mystique, their secret remedies, their little tricks handed down from generation to generation, some of which still survive. It is impossible to define how much they actually delivered, how much was common sense and basic science, and how much was trickery designed to make the cyclists feel they were in possession of something – a drug, a dietary secret, a way of training – which their fellows did not have.
When asked by the press about Simpson’s form in 1967, Naessens merely imitated an aeroplane taking off with his hand. Later, he was to be Willy Voet’s mentor in his chosen profession. Voet learned much of what he knew from Naessens, who he described as ‘one of the demi-gods of the profession . . . having your legs in his hands was simultaneously a measure of success and celebrity.’ Naessens, says Voet, would split himself in two for his riders, who he regarded as his children. ‘They were his life. He lost his marriage because of the time he used to spend away at races with them.’ Naessens died in 2000, and Voet says he was shocked that not one of the many cycling champions he tended turned up at the funeral.
Before Simpson won the Bordeaux–Paris single-day Classic in 1964, Naessens lived with him and Helen for a month, giving Simpson massage, watching his diet, and advising him how to train. He did the same thing for a week before Simpson’s unsuccessful bid to win the world championship in Renaix, Belgium, in 1963. Naessens certainly had his own trade secrets, like all his fellows. Harry Hall recalls: ‘He used to buy cattle feed and boil it like a witch’s brew in the hotel kitchen, then put it in the [riders’] bottles. It was so heavy, like thick rice pudding, that when they were handed up in the bags at the feed they would break the bags.’ The theory was, apparently, that this would sit in the stomach as it was absorbed, and would prevent the stomach muscles from tensing and using up energy. Pure quackery.
It is not clear how much Simpson would have paid Naessens for tips like this but Voet suggests it might have been double the wage of a normal helper and certainly beyond the reach of mere mortals. As is clear from Simpson’s business dealings, he believed in investment, and Naessens was just one more – and a costly one at that.
The comprehensive level of medical back-up which Simpson acquired is strikingly visible in the 1965 BBC film ‘The World of Tom Simpson’. Lying in his hotel bed during the Tour de France, Simpson points to a powdered protein supplement on the bedside table, and brandishes in front of the camera a handwritten page of notes from his doctor, listing what he has to take every day in the Tour: ‘What I need in tonics and medicine to see me through.’
The notes would presumably have come from one of Simpson’s two doctors, Dr Castro and Dr Vandenweghe. Castro was the medical officer of Simpson’s cycling club, the Gentse Wielersport, which, as we have seen, operated as an informal support network for the English professionals in Ghent. Dr Vandenweghe was president of his supporters’ club.
Simpson opens up his box of small ampoules – about the same size as the one Lew
is spotted – and describes the contents: ‘Vitamin B complex, liver extract, muscle fortifier – I can’t tell you what it does because it’s too complicated for me. I believe what the doctor tells me because it’s never done me any harm.’
‘Muscle fortifier’ could be innocuous, or it could be ‘doctor-speak’ for a steroid. There was one early hormone extract, Serodose A+B, widely available in cycling from about 1962, while Decca-dorabulin, the steroid most popular in the 1970s, was on the market from 1959 and available in Ghent in the mid-1960s. At the time Simpson was speaking, neither product was banned.
In his training, Simpson could be equally sophisticated. Lewis had spent a month with him as the British team prepared for the Tour de France, accompanying Simpson to Belgian kermesse races – circuit events based on a village fair. He had noticed that Simpson did not finish a single event. He used them as training, riding to the race, racing flat out for 60 miles to get an intense workout, then riding home to build his stamina for the Tour. Over 30 years on, a top cyclist today might well do exactly the same thing.
Although Simpson was ahead of his time in some ways, he was deeply flawed in one belief. He shared the popular misconception of the time that fluid replacement during a race was not important – and dehydration was to be part of the fatal cocktail when he died. And he did believe in some old wives’ tales: in a training article for Cycling in 1964, he advises ‘the cold water sit’ – placing the buttocks and crutch in a bowl of ice-cold water – and the use of cocaine ointment to toughen up the crutch. These practices are bizarre, the kind of thing that would be passed on by an old soigneur to a new professional in order to impress the ingenuous newcomer.
Simpson’s urge to go to any lengths to gain a competitive edge is explicit in an interview in 1966: ‘I’m prepared to try anything, even hypnotism.’ His way of thinking was not that there was a single magic remedy. Instead, his approach was holistic: if changing something would make you go half a per cent faster, that might not be a great amount, but if you could find 10 ways to gain that half a per cent on the opposition, suddenly you would be five per cent ahead. That is a considerable margin.
Every area merited investigation and experiment; diet, equipment, rest, training, the use of stimulants, hiring one of the best soigneurs. All are interdependent parts of a bigger picture. Stimulants might have helped Simpson to batter himself but their use would be pointless if he did not eat the right things and get the right massage to speed his recovery. Recourse to stimulants fits into a philosophy of total war: every means available has to be used.
At some point, Simpson must have made the decision to use his ‘Mickey Finns’: to lose his drug virginity. Was it a grudging realization that he had no choice but to do so if he did not want to go home with his tail between his legs, or a measured, systematic embrace of an extra weapon in the armoury? Or was it the first followed by the second? His enthusiastic, near-obsessive attitude to the other aspects of his profession – diet, equipment, medical and ‘soigneur’ back-up – and the eyewitness accounts would indicate this to be most likely.
Two of his contemporaries, both of whom lived close to him, would concur. ‘He was not unwilling [to use drugs], no way,’ says Lewis, his room-mate. ‘There is an acceptance – you’re a pro bike rider and you do it. You’re either in it, or you’re out of it.’ ‘He went looking for it, he went looking for a way to get right to the top’, says Brian Robinson, his flat-mate.
Simpson was asked by the journalist Christopher Brasher in 1960 about taking drugs. Brasher used the answer he gave, about using caffeine, in an article in the Observer after Simpson’s death headlined ‘The cyclist who had to take drugs’. His words have the tone of a man trapped between a rock and a hard place, between his competitive instinct and need for money on the one hand, and on the other the demands of a system which has no mercy on the principled underdog. ‘I am up there with the stars, but then suddenly they will go away from me,’ Simpson told Brasher. ‘I know from the way they ride the next day that they are taking dope. I don’t want to have to take it – I have too much respect for my body – but if I don’t win a big event soon, I shall have to start taking it.’
Such public statements about the use of drugs from any cyclist were rare before Simpson’s death. Simpson, however, was one of the few to talk about the topic. He stirred up a hornet’s nest among his fellow cyclists in 1965 with one of his ghosted articles in the People newspaper. ‘I honestly don’t think much doping, in the worst sense of that word, goes on in cycling,’ Simpson wrote, referring to ‘doping’ as in handing up bottles spiked with drugs. ‘Tell me where you draw the line between dope and tonics. Even the experts can’t agree on that one . . .’ he continued. ‘I admit that I also take vitamin injections and pills . . . to me they are tonics – medical aids to help my body. You can’t last the pace without tonics’, was the conclusion he offered.
Simpson claimed that his words in the People, a mixture of bluster and evasion, were taken out of context, and that he was misquoted, but they echo what he told Ludovic Kennedy in ‘The World of Tom Simpson’. ‘I’ve never taken dope. I take medical aid to help my body. There is a big difference between tonics and dope.’ The words have a tragic irony about them today: the ‘tonic’ he took on July 13 can hardly be said to have ‘helped his body’.
Vin Denson remembers Simpson justifying the use of amphetamines on medical grounds: ‘“To ride 280 kilometres”, he said, “it’s unnatural, and amphetamines towards the end are actually helping the body”. He’d been told it was more harmful to the body not to have them, which I thought was a load of junk.’
To anyone who has followed cycling’s drug scandals of the last few years, Simpson’s words have a hollow ring. To a man, the defence of the ‘EPO generation’ was that when they took drugs, they were doing so merely to look after themselves because the demands of their profession were such that it was impossible to compete ‘clean’ and remain healthy. ‘EPO is medicine,’ one top professional told me in the late 1990s.
Simpson also peddled the line – both to Kennedy and to the People – that drug use in cycling was an invention of the drug testers and the media. ‘I don’t worry about the suspicious officials with their obsessive inquiries and dope tests,’ he told the People. To Kennedy, he said: ‘There’s not as much of it [drug-taking] goes on in cycling as the newspapers and TV try to make out.’ Kennedy asks again: is doping going on? ‘I doubt it,’ replies Simpson.
He would not be the first, or the last, cyclist to be economical with the truth when it came to drugs, or to feign a lack of interest in the subject. It’s the point where my liking of the man has to be tempered, where the ‘buts’ start creeping in. I can understand Simpson’s drug-taking. I cannot honestly say I would have acted differently in his position. But the lies that surround drug-taking in cycling perpetuate the problem. In this aspect, Simpson seems no different from any other guilty cyclist.
Simpson’s use of amphetamines on the Ventoux cannot be seen as an isolated incident. It was not a matter of the man reaching for a lifeline on one desperate day and finding some amphetamines. Virtually everyone who has come into contact with Simpson appears to remember him mentioning drugs in a way which implied that they were an everyday matter for him. There is Lewis’s ‘Mickey Finns’, Denson’s ‘eight milligrams’. Harry Hall says that the line Simpson gave him was: ‘If you keep taking the sweeties, you’ll be all right.’ Asked about the issue, Albert Beurick always mentions a day Simpson told him he was racing ‘clean’, and this merely makes one wonder if this was the exception which proves the rule. Finally, there is circumstantial evidence which backs up the eyewitness accounts. At one world championship, in 1966, Simpson was seen to get in a rage with his bike when he could not lift the machine over a barrier; he threw it on the ground with a vituperative yell. Mental instability is one sign of the amphetamine user.
Jean Stablinski speaks at length and in detail of Simpson’s behaviour the night after winning the worl
d championship when they shared a hotel room: not only was Simpson unable to sleep, he got out of bed every 10 minutes to put the jersey on and ask ‘Stab’ – Stablinski’s nickname – ‘am I really world champion?’ His behaviour is either understandable joy, or the classic case of the man who has taken a large amount of ‘speed’ and cannot ‘come down’. That a touching anecdote such as Stablinski’s can be interpreted like this provides a depressing reminder of the way drugs in sport colour perceptions.
Colin Lewis is in a unique position. In his final act as Simpson’s domestique, he supplied the leader he clearly so admired with another ingredient which contributed to his death: a dose of brandy stolen from a bar on the run-in to the Ventoux. Lewis had got used to the constant search for water each day on the Tour. It was his job, as a domestique, and the café raid on the road from Marseille to the Ventoux only seemed different in hindsight. ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing, there was this big bar, other riders were grabbing bottles, the proprietor was chasing one of them, although the customers were on our side.’
Lewis grabbed a bottle of Coca Cola and four other bottles, although he did not know what they were. ‘I stuffed three of them into my back pocket, and the other down the back of my neck. Out of the bar, I worked my way through the convoy and back to the peloton. Tom was my major concern and I gave him the Coca Cola, which he was really pleased about. He took a long drink and handed it to the next guy. “What else have you got?” he said. I fished in my pocket and pulled out a half-bottle of brandy which was just a quarter full. “Bloody hell” he said, “my guts are queer today, I’ll have a drop of that.” He drank some and threw it over the heads of the other riders into a sunflower field.’
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