Something to Aim At has lost none of its impact in the years since I first saw it. The closing joke told by Simpson about the Duke of Norfolk still raises a smile, but the crucial element remains as emotionally charged as ever: the abrupt change of tone, like a cyclist shifting up through the gears at the point when Harry Hall begins discussing Simpson’s death and at the start of the fuzzy cine footage of his final wobbling moments. If anything, the sense of Pascoe’s obsession, the sense of mission that drove him to seek out Simpson’s old contacts and relatives, feels stronger than before now that I’ve followed the same course myself, for Tom and for other greats.
The same sense of a gear shift, an abrupt change of tone, comes when Denson is interviewed on the stage. Denson is a born raconteur, but given to digression; the memories flow out in a stream of consciousness. Until he gets to the run-in to July 13, 1967. Then, the abrupt sharp focus and tension becomes instantly palpable. It’s the old story, told anew, and because we know the ending, it’s as raw as ever. As are the old wounds, notwithstanding the passage of time. Denson tells the story of the day after Simpson’s death, explores the vexed question of who should have won the stage, makes it clear that there is a disparity between his version of events and that told by Barry Hoban in the film. He ends his tale with, ‘I still speak with Barry [Hoban] . . . just about.’
In the 2007 Afterword to a new edition of Put Me Back on My Bike, I detailed the emergence of new evidence surrounding Simpson’s death, prompted in part by an upsurge in interest in Simpson between 2002–6. My research for the book Roule Britannia took me to many of the contacts I had worked with on Simpson, as well as down new avenues; the BBC added an award-winning documentary Death on the Mountain, directed by Alastair Lawrence, with whom I worked on a consultancy basis; my colleague at l’Équipe Philippe Brunel – always fascinated by Simpson and the Ventoux – made further inquiries in 2002.
Among the many letters that I received after publication in 2001, there was one from Robin Gambrill, whose brother Mick had raced with Simpson on the British team at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. Robin provided a cutting from the Daily Mail of July 31, 1967, which gives some more detail to Harry Hall’s account of Simpson’s death. Hall estimated the distance between Simpson’s first fall and his final collapse as about 500 yards; JL Manning, the Mail’s reporter on the Tour, climbed the Ventoux shortly after Simpson’s death and found two piles of stones 420 yards apart.
Manning wrote: ‘At the first was scrawled on a piece of paper, “Here Tom Simpson fell”. On the second was written on cardboard, “Here Tom Simpson died tragically on the 13th stage of the Tour de France”.’ The picture conjured up was a poignant one, cycling fans marking the spot in an impromptu manner before the memorial was erected, which brought to mind the way that the point where Fabio Casartelli died in the 1995 Tour was marked.
Manning’s conclusion was similar to mine: ‘Simpson, knowing the Ventoux was a formidable challenge, took stimulants as he was in the habit of doing. Why else was a supply carried on him and in the baggage car?
‘As he struggled in the last half-hour of his life, these drugs screened the approach of desperate fatigue. In the intense heat his breathing gradually failed and his judgement was too impaired to realise that the limit of endurance had been reached.’
However, as I wrote in 2007, the principal new discoveries were that Simpson’s dependence on amphetamines was even heavier than I had initially indicated, and that the warnings to him to give up in the 1967 Tour had been more forceful than at first sight.
Gaston Plaud, who is 96 at the time of writing, spent 20 seasons as director of the teams sponsored by Peugeot Cycles, including a five year spell as Simpson’s directeur sportif. I visited him in the summer of 2006 at his flat in Tours, high above the Avenue de Grammont and we went back over his years with Simpson: theirs had been a rocky relationship, with Simpson frequently frustrated over the level of backing he received from his trade team, and Plaud exasperated by races his English star allegedly sold, and by the series of interviews he gave to the People newspaper in September 1965.
However, like most of those who came into contact with Simpson, Plaud still retained an affection for the Briton. He told me how he had encountered Simpson the night before the Ventoux stage; Simpson was, lest we forget, not riding for Peugeot during that Tour as it was contested by national teams, but as his trade team manager Plaud had the strongest interest in how he performed. It was clear, Plaud said, that Simpson was, ‘au bout du rouleau’ – at the end of his tether. ‘The face I saw was that of a very tired man. His features were drawn and he was very white. I knew he did not ride well in the heat and I said that he should not go up the Ventoux, because he was not healthy enough.’ On that afternoon in London in January 2017, Vin Denson repeated his claim that Simpson had come down with an infection and that ‘we knew he was not well’. Denson, too, had told Simpson not to push it further in the Tour, to ‘settle with what you have got and go for the world championship.’
Plaud filled in an important detail which had eluded me first time round: the tale of Simpson’s collapse in the 1967 Vuelta a España, alluded to in throwaway fashion by Dr Pierre Dumas, who mentioned almost in passing that Simpson had told him he had been ‘taken to hospital during the Tour of Spain.’ Plaud described in chilling detail an episode on the Col d’Envalira en route to Andorra when Simpson was ahead of the field and seemingly headed for the stage win – he had already won one, and would add a second later in the race – when he began to wobble across the road. The resemblance to his collapse on the Ventoux was obvious.
It echoed another mid-race collapse, I knew, that of Jean Mallejac in the 1955 Tour, also that of Ferdi Kubler on the same baking hot day on the Ventoux, but researching Roule Britannia revealed another: the Yorkshire climber Victor Sutton, invalided out of the 1960 Tour after a minor heart attack. Here, there was a clear amphetamine connection: Sutton’s friend Tony Hewson categorically recalled, in his account of their time racing in France, that his fellow racer had told him that he had been using the drug.
On the Envalira, Plaud stopped Simpson, and ‘stayed with him for a long time, until he was really back on the rails. It took a long time, because the peloton had time to catch him and come past. He was extremely tired that evening, but he was OK the next morning.’ The directeur sportif underlined that Simpson’s determination to continue in the race was far from rational. He had had to actually make his leader come to a halt – literally take him off his bike – in order to prevent him from harming himself. ‘He did not want to stop. He wanted to remain on the bike. I had to physically stop him. I caught him when he was still in the saddle.’
Simpson’s state of mind there recalls his determination to go on after he fell for the first time on the Ventoux, and fits with the use of amphetamines, which enable the mind to overcome the physical distress calls the body makes when it is in danger. Irrational behaviour is symptomatic of amphetamine use: I had already come across one witness describing Simpson’s ‘amphetamine rage’ at the 1966 world championship, and Denson recalled him grabbing a tree branch and trying to knock an Italian cyclist off his bike during an altercation early on the Ventoux stage.
It was the former journalist and cyclist Jean Bobet, however, who provided the most chilling details, speaking to Laurence. Bobet was fond of Simpson – he told me about getting the Briton to pose for the legendary photo with the bowler hat and cup of tea the evening he took the yellow jersey in the 1962 Tour – and he prefaced his story with the comment, ‘j’aime Tom’; ‘I like Tom,’ the use of the present tense being telling in itself. He went on to recall Simpson’s ‘terrible grimace’ when he interviewed him for a radio station on the morning of July 13, 1967. His final image of Tom was when he ‘poked his tongue out and there were five tablets, almost certainly Tonedron, because that was one of his favourite “medicines”.’
Simpson excused himself for speaking in slightly muffled tones – the tablets were getting
in the way – and joked that they were what he had needed to wake him up in the morning. This sounds like a man who had come to regard the use of amphetamines as casual, everyday, a joke, even though the practice was banned. This tied in with a story Plaud told me about how Simpson had slipped some of his ‘medicine’ to a dog at a party after the 1966 Paris–Tours race. Fortunately there had been a vet not far away.
That raised an obvious question: had I been too restrained in my original treatment of Simpson’s abuse of amphetamines? Quite possibly, although there is no doubt that those anecdotes would have made it into the original edition. You can’t use material you don’t have and it’s not easy to look for what have come to be termed ‘unknown unknowns’. You could just as profitably argue that the further revelations were partly prompted by my initial willingness to go much further into detail about Simpson’s amphetamine use, and to be more determined in my condemnation of it, than others before me.
At one point it was possible to argue that Simpson’s death was not related to his use of amphetamines; it is safe to say that that notion no longer stands serious scrutiny. Those closest to him remain – not unreasonably – defensive. Joanne Simpson’s answer to the French radio reporter’s question in 2007 makes that clear, so too Barry Hoban’s initial response when asked for his thoughts on the newly published Put Me Back on My Bike in 2002: ‘The only thing Tom did wrong was to die… [He] was doing nothing more than certain other riders were doing. Everyone knew that Tom took drugs but the use of the word “cheat” [in Put Me Back on My Bike] is wrong.’
I agree with Hoban on one key point: Simpson would probably have evaded this scrutiny or at least been able to brush it away, had he not died on July 13, 1967. But the use of the term ‘cheat’ merits a longer answer. Simpson broke the rules such as they were at the time. That others did likewise, that the rules were new and poorly enforced, and that we can understand – even empathise – with the reasons he broke the rules does not alter the facts. The amphetamines were taken to gain an advantage. Tonedron was not a placebo and it was not available to those without the means or the mindset of its users. What Simpson did wrong was to use amphetamine to excess (according to half a dozen witnesses) and to ignore the advice of those close to him. His death followed from that.
Simpson’s drug-taking should not be glossed over or explained away. It was tangled together with the other parts of his life: wheeler-dealing, dreaming, the will to win. Among the things I have learned from the history of drug-taking in cycling since the Festina scandal of 1998, is that a cyclist can be utterly amiable, and otherwise more than decent as a human being, but still choose to take drugs; a second is that drug-taking in sport is far from being a victimless offence: those who lose out include fellow competitors, the wider sport, those close to the drug-taker. Those who have popped the pill or wielded the needle cheat themselves as well as others, and Simpson’s story remains a morality tale in that sense.
Much has changed in the 16 years since I wrote this book, most sadly the deaths of several of those I interviewed: Harry Hall, at the end of 2007 – although his bike shop is still going strong, Albert Beurick in 2009 and George Shaw in 2016, as well as Peter Bryan in 2015 and Jean Stablinski in 2007. George’s project to republish the letters Tom had written to him during their friendship got as far as the proof stage, but is now in abeyance. The feature film of Tom’s story remains in the pending stage. The cycle circuit in Harworth never came to fruition, and there is now no Tom Simpson memorial race.
It was unclear how the 50th anniversary of Simpson’s death would be marked other than with the obvious gathering on the mountain on 13 July. What was certain was that the Ventoux would not feature in the Tour de France route for 2017; there would be no formal commemoration by the race organisers. That is not entirely surprising; the race ventured up the mountain in 1987 but not in 1997 or 2007 and the feeling now appears to be that the death of Simpson represents something that should be avoided rather than tackled head-on with all the complexities that entails. The Tour’s attitude to its own past is inconsistent: the high-profile pariah of the Festina Tour, Richard Virenque, is now feted at the race on a daily basis, while the villain of the post-Festina era Lance Armstrong has been expunged from the record books and is unlikely to be attending in the near future. There is obvious uncertainty about how to engage with the issue.
Although it was unclear quite where the Tour stood on Simpson – he was cited, naturally, when the Tour started in London in 2007 and Yorkshire in 2014 – the location of his death continues to exert its old appeal. At the end of October 2016, in near-Arctic conditions, there was a steady stream of cyclists of all shapes and sizes making the pilgrimage up the Ventoux. The monument, new steps and all, was far tidier than when I first saw it, with the rubbish cleared away. And the Tour itself still embraces the Ventoux as one of its great arenas: Barthes’s notion of a mountain with a malign personality sprang to mind in July that year when the Tour was unable to finish on the summit due to high winds, and the crammed crowd below Chalet Reynard caused Chris Froome to break his bike in a collision with a motorbike, forcing the eventual Tour winner to run up the slopes. It was the kind of madness that only seemed to happen on the Bald Mountain.
In 2007 I wrote in a new final chapter to Put Me Back on My Bike that if the Tour were eventually to be killed off by a succession of doping scandals, Simpson’s death might come to be seen as the “start of a painful and terminal downward spiral.” That was not an unreal prospect in the years before Armstrong’s downfall, between Operation Puerto in 2006 and the nightmare Tour of 2007 but it has not yet come to pass; the disasters of 2006–7 and Armstrong’s tortuous descent prompted a change of attitude among the authorities and most significantly among team owners and management, which has clearly filtered down. It can now be said that this culture change has created a significant critical mass within professional cycling against doping. It is no longer an accepted fact of life, no longer a taboo subject in the way that it was in 2001 and before.
That said, the contradictions remain, as does the fascination with Simpson. In 2009, the Tour finished its penultimate stage on Mont Ventoux, continuing a trend under its new organiser, Christian Prudhomme, for epic set pieces the afternoon before the apotheosis in Paris; one key issue on the day was whether the Briton Bradley Wiggins would manage to hang onto his fourth place overall on the race’s toughest ascent. Wiggins managed the feat (ironically, he was to be elevated to third overall after the Armstrong doping inquiry reported late in 2012) and he did so, he said, inspired by the spirit of Simpson.
Wiggins was too much engaged in his personal race to mark the moment as he passed the monument but the three other British cyclists in the race all paid their respects; Charly Wegelius threw a bidon, Mark Cavendish raised his hat, and David Millar – he who had raced up there with a Ventoux pebble in his pocket nine years earlier – threw a signed racing cap, collected by Simpson’s daughter Joanne. Later, Wiggins – born in Simpson’s old home town of Ghent – revealed that he had had a photo of Simpson stuck to the top tube of his bike, and a scrap of one of his jerseys in his own pocket.
‘When I reached [Mont] Ventoux on the second-last day it felt as if Tom was waiting for me,’ he said afterwards. ‘As I began the climb it felt as if his spirit was riding with me. It started on the early slopes and I imagined how Tom must have been feeling, riding towards his death, and the feeling grew as I climbed.
‘There were times when Andy Schleck [who finished second behind Alberto Contador, and just ahead of Lance Armstrong and Wiggins] was attacking and it was horrible. I thought, “I can’t go on. I can’t do this anymore . . .” But I then thought more vividly of Tom and how he must have felt that last day. It was like a reason not to give up. I felt like I was doing it more for his memory than anything. Tom Simpson is like the Bobby Moore of British cycling. I wouldn’t say he was a hero of mine because he was dead a long time before I was born. But I hold him in such high esteem.’
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bsp; The irony was that, as he prepared to retire seven years later having won the Tour de France and achieved the feat which eluded Simpson, Wiggins himself would become embroiled in contradictions that were reminiscent of those that had swirled around his hero for half a century, although he would do so without breaking any rules and without failing a dope test. At issue was his use of a corticosteroid, triamcinolone, to treat pollen allergies, with injections immediately before the 2011 and 2012 Tours de France and the 2013 Giro d’Italia. The timing left many sceptical, as did the fact that triamcinolone is a powerful performance-enhancer.
There was no anti-doping violation, because the injections were made with the approval of the governing body to treat a medical condition backed up by a specialist’s report. This was a grey area in terms of morality, one that had rarely been explored before, but the questions were painfully familiar: to what extent was the rider responsible for what was being put in his system? How much did he know about the substance’s properties? How far up and down the food chain did responsibility extend? To what extent was the rider’s reputation – by 2016, Wiggins was Britain’s most-crowned Olympian – tarnished by the affair?
The parallels between Wiggins and Simpson were clear: both were track specialists who turned successfully to the road, charismatic men with a sardonic humour and a flair for impersonation, and had strong links to Ghent, which Wiggins emphasised by ending his racing career in the tight old bowl of the Kuipke velodrome where the Major would thrill crowds by riding wall of death style up the vertical advertising boards. And the persistence of the old questions in new form and subtly different context underlined two truths: cycling cannot escape its past, and whatever new variants emerge, the old themes are unlikely to go away. The moral dilemmas remain essentially the same as they did half a century ago, the shades of grey will not turn magically into black and white overnight. The story of Tom Simpson, his epic, lovable life and his tragic, controversial death, is one for the ages.
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