There was nothing else to approach the near-fatal episode of that year before the Simpson tragedy but there were more warning signs of the potential for disaster when the Tour finished on the top in 1958. The winner, Charly Gaul, was ‘on the edge of asphyxiation’ as he headed straight through the crowds at the finish and into the race ambulance to recover.
The qualities which set the Ventoux apart are shown in a newspaper cartoon of 1958 by the artist Pellos who depicted it as a vast, squat monster, troll-like and sadistic. It has an ironic smile on its face as it pulls the tongue out of the mouth of an anguished-looking cyclist, while his fellows look up in awe from below. The Alps, on the other hand, are shown as two smiling giants on the sidelines.
For at least 2,000 years the Ventoux has drawn men to it, inspiring this mix of fascination and dread. Pottery trumpets found on the summit are believed to be ex-voto offerings brought up during the Iron Age. According to the writer Seneca, Julius Caesar had a temple built on the summit and dedicated it to Cicius, the god of the Mistral. The first to record climbing the mountain was the Italian poet Francisco Petrarch, who ascended with his brother during a moonlit night on April 25, 1336, to watch the sunrise. He clearly appreciated the view, writing to his father: ‘Owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed.
‘I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes toward Italy, whither my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to rise close by, although they were really at a great distance.’ For the intrepid and sure of foot who want to follow in the poet’s footsteps nearly seven centuries on, companies in Malaucène and Carpentras organize walking trips to the top to watch the sunrise.
Petrarch was right about the view from the top: to call it spectacular is an understatement. On a clear day, Marseille can be seen 100 kilometres to the south, while in the east the panorama begins with the Pelvoux massif and it runs west to the hills of the Cévennes via the Lubéron massif and the Rhône Valley. To the north, the hills of the Drôme rise and fall like vast waves on a sea of land, rolling to the feet of the snow-capped Alps.
Shortly after Petrarch’s visit, a chapel was constructed just below the summit, dedicated to the Holy Cross, and endowed with a box containing one of the many bits of the ‘true’ cross which were touted around Europe in the Middle Ages. The winter climate at the summit was too harsh for the resident hermit, however, and he lived in a house further down the mountain rather than in the chapel.
As late as the 18th century, the annual pilgrimage to the chapel on September 14 would still attract 500 people and in the 19th century up to two thousand were believed to climb the mountain annually. It was clearly a perilous business. The 16th-century writer Thomas Platter writes of ‘numerous crosses’ on the path to the top where pilgrims climbing to the chapel ‘had found death by fatigue or accident’.
As with all mountains, part of the fascination of the Ventoux must derive from the hostile forces the mountain can unleash. Hurricanes could wipe out up to 90 sheep and 30 goats in one fell swoop, and flash floods would wreak havoc in neighbouring towns. The mountain was known for its wolves until the late 19th century and, to complete the picture, its caves were reputed by local legend to lead down into hell itself. Even the very stones are to be feared when the wind gets up. In one midwinter storm in the 1970s, the body of a woman tourist was found just below the summit. The car she and her husband were driving had been blown off the road, its windscreen smashed by a stone driven by the wind and she had then attempted to walk the few hundred metres to the observatory for help. Her body was virtually unrecognizable due to bruises from the windblown rocks. ‘She had been stoned. Killed by the rocks. It seemed incredible,’ said a soldier stationed at the summit at the time. Her husband, who had also gone for help, was blown over a wall at the observatory but survived.
In winter, the upper part of the mountain is frequently cut off by snow. Soldiers at the observatory recall blizzards that lasted nine days, and the little garrison on the summit being cut off for weeks at a time and running out of food. One man talks of wandering for five or six hours in one of the white-outs, until his dog found the way. Others were not so lucky: in 1936 two soldiers got lost in a white-out close to the summit. One was found shortly afterwards, frozen to death. It took 40 hours to locate the other, blown 500 yards down the slope; in a tragic twist, he was discovered to have died only a short while before the rescue team came across his body.
The motor races claimed the life of at least one driver, in 1960, and just above Simpson’s memorial is another stone dedicated to a cycle-tourist who died up there. Even watching the Tour is not without risk: in 1994, on the day the Tour came up the mountain, a young German fan was killed by lightning close to the summit.
Mont Ventoux remains a hostile place even in summer. The heat is perhaps most feared, but the massive variations in temperature are the greatest danger. In July 2000, high winds, hail and snow on the summit forced the curtailment of the annual mass participation event, the Etape du Tour, that year run up the Ventoux. Half the 7,000 participants were turned back at Chalet Reynard because of the risk that someone would die of exposure. Two days later, when Pantani and Armstrong led the Tour to the summit, the wind was blowing so strongly that it was hard to stand, and much of the race’s infrastructure had to be left in Carpentras as it would have been blown off the top. There was no elaborate finish flag for Marco Pantani to ride under when he won – the bald cyclist on the ‘bald mountain’ – and no massive inflatable podium for him to stand on and celebrate his victory. Yet again, Roland Barthes’s ‘god of Evil’ had shown its power over the devices of mere mortals.
As you approach the memorial, retracing Simpson’s final miles, the road snakes across the bare scree slopes. The thinness of the air begins to make itself felt in your lungs. There is a slight sensation of breathlessness to add to the sheer effort of getting the pedals round after almost two hours climbing without a let-up. To the right, the great mass of sunbaked limestone soars into the sky. Far below, to the left, what looks like the whole of Provence is on display, with row after row of rolling blue hills to the south. As the road crosses the mountainside, still climbing steeply, a series of vast U-shaped bends go into the heart of the rocks and out again onto the shoulders of the summit. These great bowls are natural suntraps, where the sun’s heat bounces off the bleached rocks. They feel like a succession of vast natural kilns, as if designed to draw in the maximum amount of heat. The last of these, which is also the largest, is one and a quarter miles from the observatory, just below the point where Simpson took his last breath, with his objective for the day within reach, just a few minutes away.
The memorial stands to the left, a kilometre before the summit. Here, the road on which Simpson wobbled to a halt for the last time is so steep that merely walking up it is an effort. The granite profile of a cyclist with the words ‘Olympic medallist, world champion, British sporting ambassador’ was paid for by a subscription fund, launched by Cycling magazine the week after Simpson died. The idea of putting a monument here was inspired by the Guthrie memorial on the Isle of Man, which records the death of a motorcyclist in the TT. There are still bike races through Guthrie’s corner, as there were in Simpson’s day: the landmark was well known to cyclists of the time. One of the men who launched the fund, the journalist Peter Bryan, recalls the response as ‘overwhelming, a national thing’. Cycling clubs held whip-rounds and raffles, raising around £1,500.
While looking for Simpson’s autopsy in the local archive in Avignon’s Palais des Papes, I came across Bryan’s letters to the local préfet requesting permission to use the land where the memorial stands. They are in the same red-bound, string-tied folder as the local police report recording the cyclist’s death. So too is a copy of the black-bound Simpson memori
al issue of Cycling Weekly sent to oil the wheels of local bureaucracy. The memorial was unveiled in 1968 by Helen, Hoban, and Taylor, and when, in 1970, the Tour passed for the first time since the tragedy, Eddy Merckx, no less, tipped his cap and crossed himself as he led the race past. This was only natural: Merckx was a former teammate and the only fellow professional to attend Simpson’s funeral.
The feet of the faithful have worn the stone leading up to the monument into rough steps, giving it a much-visited feel, rather like the amply marked grave of Jim Morrison in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and with a similar pile of offerings. To the writer Julian Barnes, it is ‘the tumultuous altar of some popular if dubious Catholic saint’. Over the years, a heap of ex-votos from the two-wheeled Simpson faithful has accumulated and rotted in the wind and sun. When I visited in July 2000, the collection included tubular tyres, half a dozen cotton racing hats – with stones on top to stop them blowing away – a broken wheel, energy bars, a French racing licence in the name of Sylvie Reverand, sunglasses, a tyre lever, a bottle cage, a saddle, two lollipops and a dinosaur from McDonald’s.
A clean-up in the summer of 2001, when Helen and Barry Hoban had removed three bin liners full of artefacts, had left the memorial looking neater this time: a cotton hat from Holland (Van Vliet containers, with the date, 15/8/ 2001, in felt tip), another from Belgium, a couple of feeding bottles, a single bunch of flowers. The new vogue, it seems, is to leave stickers on the plinth – from Germany, Ireland, Holland – or to pick up stones from the mountainside and inscribe them in felt pen. ‘A symbol of the struggle for perfection, you will always be remembered,’ says one, left there by an English family. On the left of the stone there is a small plaque, placed there by his daughters Jane and Joanne, who retraced their father’s last road in 1987. It reads: ‘There is no mountain too high.’
In an echo of the thousands who used to struggle up the Ventoux to pay their respects in the Chapel of the Holy Cross, people on bikes now come from all over the world, drawn by the memorial and the mountain – it is hard to tell which is uppermost in their minds. When the Tour visits, they flock in their hundreds of thousands, much to the consternation of the local ecologists. Some go to extremes in their devotion to the mountain, like the newly wed couple who rode up in specially made white cycling shorts and tops, the bride’s outfit topped with a veil, perfect lipstick and a big, if wobbly, smile. It earned them the front cover slot in the local magazine, Les Carnets du Ventoux.
On a midweek day in mid-August, the 21st-century pilgrims are there in all shapes, sizes and ages: slender adolescent youths on second-hand Gitanes handed down from the 1980s, Marco Pantani wannabes in full team replica kit, fat old cycle-tourists on tired-looking bikes with bellies bulging in their jerseys, young men on mountain bikes spinning tiny gears, club cyclists from every corner of France and Britain. They race, huff and puff, and wobble. In some cases, they walk up, painfully pushing their bikes. The cycle-tourist from Kent who follows me up to the memorial is climbing for the second day in a row, once on each of his two bikes.
Often, husbands are followed by their wives. Patiently, the women overtake their other halves every few minutes in their Renault Clios, shout encouragement from the lay-bys and take photos as if hubby is riding his own private, miniature Tour de France. The ritual ends with a brief halt at the memorial; a slippery walk up the rocks in stiff-soled cycling shoes to leave the obligatory souvenir; a coffee in the bar by the observatory; and a long look at the view before they put the bike on the car roof rack.
At the turn of the last century, the public appeal of the Tour de France lay in the fact that the competitors were pioneers, setting off to do things no right-thinking mortal would attempt: circumnavigate France in 250-mile chunks on dirt roads, risk being eaten by bears while ascending the Pyrenean passes. That was the great attraction for its first organizer, Desgrange; that was why his paper’s circulation went up during the Tour. Now, however, much of the Tour’s popularity comes down to the fact that its great set piece venues, the mountain passes of the Alps, Pyrenees and Massif Central, are all open to the public, the weather and the legs permitting.
To be convinced of the strength of the fans’ desire to emulate and empathise with the supermen, you have only to drive the route of a mountain stage of the Tour de France in the hours before the race passes. Hundreds of thousands of cyclists – the same mix as were there on my mid-August ride up the Ventoux – throng the roads, defying the gravity and the heat and risking life and limb among the advance Tour vehicles.
‘Faites-nous rêver’, say the placards on the Tour route, and it is written in faded paint on the Ventoux’s tarmac: Make us dream. And that is why people will always climb the ‘bald mountain’ and its brethren. Unless you are friendly with the ground staff, you cannot go to Headingley and fantasise that you are Ian Botham destroying Australia in 1981, but you can get on your bike and pretend you are part of the great moments of the Tour: Eddy Merckx’s epic escape of 1969 through the Pyrenees, or Marco Pantani’s destruction of Jan Ullrich on the Galibier in 1998.
So it is with Simpson. Motor-racing fans can leave bouquets, but they cannot gain any empathy with what Ayrton Senna might have felt as he sped around the Imola track before careering off the Tamburello curve and into the great Formula One paddock in the sky. But for the price of a low-cost air ticket to Marseille and a night in a Ventoux hotel, however, you can retrace the final kilometres of Tom Simpson’s gilded but tortured career, if a little more slowly.
The act of riding up the mountain is a shared experience. All Simpson’s teammates who were with him on the Tour when he died have made the pilgrimage, as has Harry Hall, who picked him up off the road and obeyed his order to put him back on his bike. When his daughter Joanne rode the mountain in 1997, she was specific about the reason: it was ‘to finish what Daddy didn’t do’.
You can share some of the dull ache he must have felt in his calves and buttocks as he shoved on the pedals and the lactic acid built up. You can sense the hot sun on the back of your neck as he did under his pushed-back white Great Britain cap, and feel the dryness in your throat as the rocks suck the moisture from the air. Your eyes will probably sting as the sweat pours into them but you can cast them up to the observatory. Its constant presence exudes the immense power which the ‘Giant of Provence’ exerted as Simpson fought his way towards its summit. Perhaps, if the pain permits, you can reflect on the contradictions in the man and his sport.
There is more to Simpson than a tragic end, more than a world champion’s jersey, more than an enduring controversy stemming from three tubes of pills. He has also kept his place in cyclists’ hearts and minds for 35 years because we can go and get some idea of what he was trying to do when he died and what it must have felt like. On that August morning, that is why we were there.
Afterword: Sixteen Years On
As the French say, on prend les memes et on recommence: take the same guys – or some of them – and go back to where you began. To mark the start of the 50th year since the death of Tom Simpson, the Hammersmith Cyclists’ Film Show in January 2017 was again centred on Ray Pascoe’s Something to Aim At. The showing was followed by a question and answer session with Vin Denson, as it had been on my first visit in 2001. Before this, however, came a couple of telling moments.
The first was a pair of photographs on the screen of the event’s founder, Charlie Woods, who had died in 2014; the second, the display of some of Vin’s most prized possessions: a black and white chequered Cycles Peugeot jersey belonging to Simpson, his own leader’s jersey from the Tour of Luxembourg, and one of the two yellow jerseys that Major Tom had won in the 1962 Tour de France. The jerseys, all souvenirs of the cafÉ that Vin and his late wife Vi had owned in Ghent, were held up with the reverence Catholic pilgrims might have accorded to holy relics, and this being the era of the selfie, there was the chance to have one’s photograph taken with them afterwards.
There were changes. Ray’s film library had
expanded to include other icons of British cycling, more obscure, but equally meritorious: the seven time women’s world champion – indeed, the first Briton to wear the rainbow stripes of the road title holder – Beryl Burton, the time triallist Alf Engers, a cult figure of the late 60s through to the 80s, and the ‘Brit Pack’ of men inspired by Simpson to race the Tour.
The film show had moved from the Riverside in Hammersmith – undergoing rebuilding – to the Art Deco splendour of the Phoenix in Finchley, where it was scheduled for early afternoon ‘to give a North London clubman time to have his Sunday club run then get here after lunch,’ as the organiser put it. The crowd was sparser, 100 perhaps, and the demographic had altered subtly in 16 years, reflecting the way cycling in Britain had changed since the start of the 21st century.
Veteran cyclists were still the majority, but no longer predominant; they were intermingled with younger couples, fathers with children, such as the under-10 champion from the Welwyen Track League, who were being steeped in the sport’s folklore in the same way that I had been 40 years earlier. There was the odd specimen of a breed that had been beyond cycling ken before full beards became mainstream, fixies turned into a ‘thing’, and Rapha was founded in 2004: the London hipster.
The showing kicked off with a 10-minute short film shot by Ray at the Ventoux in 2007, when new steps had been constructed from the road up to the Simpson memorial, meaning that fans no longer had to clamber up, slipping and sliding in their cleats. As well as revealing a surprisingly large crowd there to witness the snipping of the ceremonial ribbon – bits of which were being cut off to keep as souvenirs – the footage showed that the old questions and the old unease persist: having ridden to the site of her father’s death, within minutes Joanne Simpson was being asked searching questions about doping and current cycling morality by a reporter from the local radio station. She evaded them neatly, but the topic hangs in the air as it always has.
Put Me Back on My Bike Page 21
