Put Me Back on My Bike

by William Fotheringham

  It is still part of the game for professional cyclists to reach their physical limit in the mountains: drugs do not have to play a part. But physical collapse is rare. The image of Stephen Roche being given oxygen after a stage finish in the 1987 Tour is familiar to most cycling fans; I remember the Italian domestique Giovanni Fidanza being put under the mask after a desperate battle to make the day’s cut in 1994. Eddy Merckx and fellow Belgian Martin van den Bossche had the same treatment on the Ventoux in 1970. But these were precautionary measures: Roche and Fidanza never lost consciousness.

  Given what he had seen, and his feelings on doping, it was no surprise that on the morning before Simpson died, Dumas should have a premonition of what might occur. This is according to the veteran journalist Pierre Chany, who met the doctor at about seven in the morning near Marseille’s main street, the Cannebière. ‘The air was warm already. We exchanged a few words and he [Dumas] said something to me which I’ll never forget: “The heat will be terrible today. If the guys start to play about with dope we’re liable to have a death on our hands.”’

  There was a context in which recourse to stimulants, for all that it was reprehensible and dangerous, was entirely understandable. Merely consider the demands placed on the cyclists by race organizers in the 1960s. Here too, cycling was on the cusp between antiquity and modernity: the sport still harked back to the pre-war years, when superhuman feats over superhuman distances were the norm. The longest stage in the 1967 Tour de France covered 225 miles, from Clermont Ferrand to Fontainebleu, lasting 11 hours and starting at 7.40 a.m. – at the end of three weeks in the saddle. The following day there were two stages totalling 95 miles. When Simpson’s teammate Arthur Metcalfe finished that year’s race, he was ‘like a skeleton’, he says, with his blood pressure so low that he would black out whenever he stood up.

  It was not just the Tour de France which placed extreme demands on the riders: the Bordeaux–Paris one-day Classic, which Simpson won in 1963, was 348 miles, mostly paced behind small motorbikes at high speed, starting at around two in the morning and finishing some 14 hours later. The Corona London to Holyhead one-day race was 270 miles, covered when Simpson won in 1965 at an average of 26 mph and after 11 hours in the saddle. Today, the maximum permitted distance for professionals has been cut to a more reasonable, but still daunting, 175 miles.

  The 1967 Tour de France in which Simpson died was 3,000 miles long, one of the longest in the post-war years, and the Tour organizer Jacques Goddet later said that Simpson’s death came as a message to him to make the race shorter. The following year it was reduced by 200 miles, and the Tour would never again reach such distances. In fact, it would rarely break the 2,500-mile mark for the next 20 years. The total distance of the 2002 Tour is exactly 1,000 miles less than in 1967.

  The spectacle of cyclists driving themselves to their physical limits and beyond, for entertainment and profit, creates a moral dilemma both for the race organizers, who devise the route, and for the journalists. They can simultaneously admire the men’s courage and yet wonder if the human cost can be justified. Goddet was both organizer and reporter: in his editorial in L’Equipe, he describes the Aubisque stage as ‘a fabulous day’, and waxes lyrical about the ‘pitiless cruelty of cycling, a sport of total effort’. A dozen years earlier, he had described the near-tragedy involving Malléjac, which ended the careers of at least two other riders, in a similar eulogy.

  It would be too strong simply to say that the Tour organizers at the newspapers L’Equipe and Le Parisien were blind to the risks simply because of the copy that such spectacles made; Goddet had become aware of the doping problem as early as 1931, when he wrote in the newspaper L’Auto, ‘the riders are addicted to poison’. He told the journalist Pierre Chany of his worries about the issue as early as 1951. The organizers were, however, prepared to take the chance and Goddet admitted later that Simpson’s death ‘posed a grave ethical problem and he felt guilty’.

  The Tour had been founded in 1903 in order to make headlines and sell newspapers by turning the participants into supermen who managed feats beyond mere mortals. That was no longer the overt message, as it had been in 1903, but Goddet and Levitan were still at the same time creating the Tour route and profiting from the headlines and sales the superhuman feats in the race brought to their papers. Nowadays, that would be seen as a conflict of interest.

  However, the problem was not simply the matter of races over inhumanly long distances. The duration of an event does not cause doping. Athletes still feel the need to take drugs to win a 100-metre sprint lasting 10 seconds. Even when the Tour was a relatively benign 2,000 miles in 1988 and 1989, there were still positive drug tests.

  The volume of racing was equally important. The nature of professional cycling at the time, dominated as it was by agents such as Daniel Dousset and Roger Piel, meant that the more often a cyclist raced, the more he earned, as long as he performed. There was little incentive to save energy and prepare carefully for a single objective. Doping was an inevitable consequence of the combination of miles spent in the saddle racing and miles spent at the car wheel between races. This was acknowledged by a group of cyclists approached by Dumas for a random test at a track meeting in 1969. They refused on the grounds that they had used amphetamines to keep them awake while driving, and would test positive – unfairly, they claimed, as there was no law against ‘speeding’ in a car.

  One of the greatest Belgian cyclists ever, Rik Van Steenbergen, wrote in a newspaper article in 1967: ‘I’ve had to drive to Paris, then immediately after the race get back in my car for a 10-hour trip to Stuttgart where I had to get on my bike at once. There was nothing to do. An organizer would want this star or that one on the bill. He would pay for it. Another would want the same ones the next day, and the public wanted something for its money. As a result, the stars had to look fresh in every race, and they couldn’t do that without stimulants. There are no supermen. Doping is necessary in cycling.’

  Jacques Anquetil summed up the situation perfectly when he said: ‘You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a professional cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants.’ Rudi Altig made the point more simply: ‘We are not sportsmen, we are professionals.’

  Dumas was the man who found the little tubes in which Simpson had kept the amphetamines he took during the stage. That is common knowledge. What the tapes reveal for the first time is when he found them: at the start of the desperate attempt to revive Simpson. ‘I began coming across them as we undressed him to give him cardiac massage, and said to myself, “There you are.”’

  A photograph taken on the day shows the unconscious cyclist lying there with his white Union Jack jersey pulled up above his waist, revealing the braces he wore to keep his shorts up. The picture Dumas’s sentence evokes is devastating in its clarity: the doctor rolls the jersey up the inert torso, feels the pillboxes through the woollen material of the pockets in the back and thinks, ‘Oh right, I know what these mean.’

  Dumas does not sound surprised that he found the drugs. He had seen Simpson drive himself into the ground before. He had watched from his car Simpson’s vain fight to continue in the Tour the previous year in spite of an appalling open wound in his arm. He knew that the rider used stimulants. He was clearly fond of the British leader but that did not mean he was blind. ‘We were very good friends. He told me everything. He’d told me himself that he was taken to hospital during the Tour of Spain [three months earlier]. I’d been obliged to hospitalise him after the finish of a stage of the Tour, a time trial two or three years earlier. He generally recovered very quickly.’ The word ‘generally’ is the giveaway here: this was a regular occurrence as far as Dumas was concerned.

  At the hospital in Avignon that evening, the doctor took the three tubes out of Simpson’s jersey and passed them to the head of the Tour’s detachment of gendarmes. One tube was labelled Tonedron, the others unlabelled. One was half-full, the others empty. He showed
them to the race organizer, Jacques Goddet, who spoke of seeing ‘little tubes of explosive products, and all empty’. This lends a new weight to Goddet’s editorial in L’Equipe the next day about the tragedy. ‘We had already wondered if this athlete, who when under pressure had a painful look, did not make mistakes in looking after himself . . . Doping? We can fear the public revelation of a tragedy caused by this scourge.’ Goddet knew for certain when he wrote this that Simpson had indeed used drugs. He was effectively preparing public minds for the scandal that would follow.

  The gendarmes placed the little tubes under lock and key, and Dumas set off the process of interrogations, medical expert’s autopsy and judicial inquiry which was to result in the ‘Simpson affair’. ‘I said to myself that it wasn’t natural that an athlete in his prime should die in this way, so I refused permission for burial.’

  Dumas could have ignored the tubes. He could have failed to put two and two together. He could have thrown them away. He might have done, had he felt that Simpson had a right to privacy in death, or had he considered that the rider’s drug-taking was not an issue; or, perhaps, if he had not had several hours since he came across the drugs in which to reflect, at least briefly, on what steps to take. Had he acted differently, Simpson’s death might have been quietly forgotten like the near-tragedies that had preceded it.

  The moment Dumas refused interment was the moment when the Simpson tragedy took on a different dimension. Once Dumas decided to set the investigation in motion, the tragedy merged into the wider history of drug-taking in cycling and in sport in general. In this context, it came at a key moment: the mid to late 1960s were a time of increasing awareness and debate about the issue, with a new willingness among the press to recognize the problem, and a new readiness among the authorities to fight against it.

  Dumas played a key role here as well. In 1960, after coming across Nencini and his drips, he had gathered team doctors on the Tour de France to discuss the topic. The Tour doctor spoke at another conference, a Europe-wide one, in the Alpine resort of Uriage-les-Bains, in 1963, held by the French sports ministry to define the problem and ways of combating it.

  A year earlier, cycling’s international governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, had thrown out a motion from the Polish Federation to make the UCI responsible for combating doping. Measures against the use of drugs in cycling, when they came, were led by police in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and France. They treated action against sportsmen as an extension of their operations against drug traffickers and behaved accordingly. The sports federations followed, empowered by new laws, such as the one passed by 356 votes to 0 in the French national assembly at the end of 1964, and ratified on June 1, 1965. It prohibited ‘the deliberate use of any substance designed to enhance artificially the physical capability of a sportsman where the substance is known to be harmful to health’. There would be fines from £35 to £350, and prison sentences of one month to one year. Amphetamines, such as Simpson and the other cyclists used, were banned by this law.

  Early anti-drug operations at cycle races were crude, did nothing to make cyclists feel well-disposed towards their imposition, and lacked any credibility. In April 1965, for example, ‘medical examinations’ were carried out at the Het Volk one-day race in Simpson’s home town of Ghent. All roads into the city were sealed by police, all cars involved with the race were searched. The first five finishers were tested, apart from two who ‘did not understand the situation’. It was a farce: a vast show of strength which had been easily subverted.

  The mix of attempted coercion and official laxity continued through 1966. At Royan in the Tour de France, Dumas accompanied gendarmes as they carried out the first drug tests on the race. They checked pulse rates, looked for needle marks on riders’ arms, and took urine samples. The riders went on strike, marching down the road for 200 metres the next day shouting, among other things, ‘Piss yourself, Dumas!’ But six men, among them the cyclist who finished sixth overall, Herman Van Springel, tested positive for amphetamine and its derivatives. It took over a year for the legal process to result in Van Springel being fined.

  Jacques Anquetil, by then a five-times winner of the Tour, and the biggest star that cycling had ever seen, summed up the feelings of the Tour men: ‘We find these tests degrading. Why do cyclists have to be suspected and controlled while any other free man can do what he likes and take what he likes?’ The sentiment that cyclists are unfairly penalised by those who would prevent them ‘looking after themselves’ is one that persists to this day.

  Anquetil’s denunciation was countered by Levitan in his editorial in Le Parisien: ‘Was this a revolt? No, it was an admission. An admission of concern about the test and its consequences. An admission of inability to move away from suspicious practices. An admission that minds are troubled by the determination of the authorities.’

  There are claims that Simpson, the world champion at the time, did not participate in the strike. In his biography Mr Tom, his nephew Chris Sidwells writes: ‘Tom made a point of not getting off his bike. He was one of the few who rode the infamous 200 metres.’ Simpson’s behaviour during the episode is a central part of Sidwells’ argument that he did not willingly use drugs and supported the authorities, but it is by no means clear what Simpson’s feelings were.

  In his book Doping: Cycling Supermen, the journalist Roger Bastide suggests the opposite. Simpson was merely the first to break ranks: ‘After three minutes Tom Simpson got back on his bike and provoked a furious breakaway.’ Pierre Chany wrote that Simpson criticised the strike only because it raised the profile of the issue.

  The conflict between testers and tested came to a head at the 1966 world championship in the Nurburgring in Germany, where the first six finishers refused to give urine samples. This was not uncommon: both Jacques Anquetil and Rudi Altig had refused tests in Belgium in the spring, and had forfeited wins in the Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne classics as a result. Anquetil and Altig, that year’s world champion, and the runner-up to Simpson the previous year, were among the Nurburgring six, along with four of the biggest names in cycling: Gianni Motta, Raymond Poulidor, Italo Zilioli and Jean Stablinski, who was world champion in 1961. Stablinski says the strike was over the procedure of the test: there was apparently no doctor present. Poulidor, hilariously, had apparently got lost trying to find where he was to be tested.

  What followed was farcical. Stablinski was banned for two months, Poulidor for one month, but the suspensions lasted all of 10 days before the UCI Congress cleared the cyclists. There were no penalties, and the top three finishers retained their medals. It can only have left the cyclists with the impression that the cycling authorities were not consistently prepared to take serious measures against the biggest stars if they refused tests; and that race organizers who wanted the stars at their races would come down on their side.

  It was total incoherence, a fist of cotton wool in an iron glove with no coordination of measures or penalties between countries. Anquetil’s fate after the Grand Prix des Nations time trial that October can only have confirmed the impression. ‘Master Jacques’ was the most outspoken of all the top cyclists in his opposition to the tests and told the press: ‘We have to take stimulants for such a race. Yes, I have taken stimulants today.’ He was fined 2,000 francs, but did not receive a ban as ‘a gesture of mercy to the cyclist and his comrades’. This was due to ‘the great honour bestowed on international cycle sport, to wit his [Anquetil’s] Légion d’honneur’. He was saved by the gong.

  It is only fair to Simpson to speculate on the effect this climate would have had on him at the time he died. By July 13, 1967, the use of drugs had been banned for two years. Amphetamine use was illegal. Drug tests were being carried out, but not in a way which lent the process the slightest credibility. The sport was in a state of flux. The most senior cyclists of the day, Simpson’s peers and friends, were actively contesting the imposition of drug testing. The arguments for the use of drugs were being
at least as strongly put as the arguments against. It was not clear by any means whether the economic weight of the senior riders and promoters would be overruled by the punitive powers of the authorities.

  It was not set in stone that if a cyclist like Simpson won a race while using drugs he would be tested, or that he would be punished if he refused a test. Dumas had warned riders and managers before the start of the 1966 Tour that measures would be taken, but the world championship strike had left the issue hanging. If Simpson had become a regular user of amphetamines before the day he died, as seems highly likely, what incentives were there for him to give up the practice?

  ‘Dear Tom Simpson,’ wrote Jacques Goddet in his editorial the evening before the start of the 1968 Tour de France, ‘You will not have fallen in vain on the stony desert of the Ventoux. Doping is no longer a mysterious sickness, hidden, uncontrollable, uncontrolled. For it really seems that there is a common determination among the riders to be rid of this scourge.’ Sadly, Goddet was wrong: drug-taking in cycling did not cease from the moment Simpson died. There would be a major drug scandal on the Tour roughly every 10 years after, and a constant low-level flow of positive drug tests. What changed was the official attitude to combating the practice.

  A month to the day after the Simpson tragedy, Désiré Letort was found positive after winning the French national championships, having taken an amphetamine-based product. A campaign was mounted to have the decision overturned. Delegations from his home region of Brittany lobbied the French Cycling Federation but the gold medal was simply not awarded.