Put Me Back on My Bike Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by William Fotheringham

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  1. ‘Something to Aim At’

  2. ‘You Don’t Have to be Mad to Go Up the Ventoux, But You’re Mad if You Go Back’

  3. ‘PS I’m 19th Overall Now’

  4. ‘Unstable Dynamite’

  5. ‘Roule Britannia’

  6. ‘A Kind of Expatriate Dick Whittington’

  7. ‘If It Takes Ten to Kill You, I’ll Take Nine’

  8. The Past is a Foreign Country

  9. ‘It is Not Natural . . .’

  10. ‘Your Neighbours Are the Unknown Stars’

  Afterword: Sixteen Years On

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Tom Simpson: Race Record

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Tom Simpson was an Olympic medallist, world champion and the first Briton to wear the fabled yellow jersey of the Tour de France. He died a tragic early death on the barren moonscape of the Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour.

  A man of contradictions, Simpson was one of the first cyclists to admit to using banned drugs, and was accused of fixing races, yet the dapper ‘Major Tom’ inspired awe and affection for the obsessive will to win which was ultimately to cost him his life.

  Put Me Back on My Bike revisits the places and people associated with Simpson to produce the definitive story of Britain’s greatest ever cyclist. This revised edition of William Fotheringham’s classic biography, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Simpson’s death, features a new foreword and postscript further exploring the truth behind the legend.

  About the Author

  William Fotheringham writes for the Guardian and Observer on cycling and rugby. A former racing cyclist and launch editor of procycling and Cycle Sport magazines, he has reported on sixteen Tours de France as well as Six Nations rugby and the Olympic Games. He lives Herefordshire with his wife and two children.

  Also By William Fotheringham

  A Century of Cycling

  Fotheringham’s Sporting Trivia

  Fotheringham’s Sporting Trivia: The Greatest

  Sporting Trivia Book Ever II

  Roule Britannia: A History of Britons in the

  Tour de France

  This book is dedicated to the late Geoffrey Nicholson, whose vision of the Tour de France inspired me as a teenager and guided me as a journalist.

  William Fotheringham

  PUT ME BACK ON MY BIKE

  In Search of Tom Simpson

  Foreword

  Put Me Back on My Bike closes with a brief look into a bag of letters. The bag belongs to Helen Hoban, Helen Simpson as was, and contains the hundreds of messages she received after her first husband’s death. As a whole, there could be no better expression of how Tom Simpson’s public felt about him 50 years ago.

  Another batch of letters, those prompted by the publication of this biography, underlines how the emotions Simpson engendered among cycling fans have endured for five decades: amusement, admiration, love, frustration, annoyance, grief.

  Such is the power of the Simpson story that it has its own momentum. In the 15 years since this book originally appeared, the story has moved on, with new revelations from fresh sources, and new investigations into his life and death.

  Inevitably, in exploring subject matter so controversial, the book led to a few arguments on its own account. Equally inevitably, the Simpson story was not one that I could leave behind once I had finished typing. For all that he has been dead for many years, Simpson gets under your skin, and interviews for a later book, Roule Britannia, often led back to Tom. For the sake of completeness, all this is worth looking at, and the new material appears in a fresh final chapter.

  When writing this book, I occasionally pondered the value of looking into the death and life and character of a man who had died so long ago, under such controversial circumstances. The poems, press cuttings, tall tales, rants and recollections that have arrived on my doorstep since June 2002 leave me in no doubt that it was worth the effort.

  Simpson clearly still matters, immensely, to a huge number of people, and not solely to cycling fans. That vindicates my original decision to portray him as a three-dimensional character, the less likeable qualities as well as the good. Anything else would have been a disservice; as with the film that inspired this book, it is a choice between seeing the man in colour, or leaving him in black and white.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Something to Aim At’

  IT IS NOT the average Sunday afternoon at the movies. For one thing, there is something unusual about the audience at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith on a dark day in January 2001. I’m perhaps the youngest of the two hundred of us. We’re nearly all men, mostly aged over 50, thin and with a healthy glow, the same men you will see in the lanes of the Home Counties on Saturday mornings pedalling immaculate bikes to garden centre cafés to drink tea and gossip. Veteran cyclists.

  What we have come to see is not the normal Sunday afternoon matinée either. Something to Aim At has never gone on general release, and its name would mean nothing to normal members of the public or to cinema critics. It is unpolished, amateurish in places. That reflects both its budget, and the fact that it is as much a 75-minute labour of love as a piece of cinema. It is part enthusiast’s film, part work of art. It tells the story of Tom Simpson, Britain’s greatest ever cyclist, and was made by a lifelong fan of Simpson’s named Ray Pascoe. In 1967, when his hero died on Mont Ventoux in the 13th stage of the Tour de France, Pascoe set out with his camera and tape recorder, seeking out old newsreel footage, interviewing Simpson’s associates and family.

  The film’s name comes from an anecdote told by Simpson’s mechanic. Simpson was out to win that Tour de France and before it started, he went into the Mercedes showroom in Ghent, where he lived. He put down a deposit on the best car they had, the one on the turntable going round in the window. He knew the thought of the car and the cash he needed for it would stay in the back of his mind and motivate him. As he said: ‘It gives you something to aim at.’

  Pascoe is a balding, earnest-looking man, a former racing cyclist who saw Simpson race, loved his style, his aggression, his charisma. He can remember first meeting Simpson in 1961 when he was an awestruck young cyclist racing in Ghent, staying where all the British cyclists stayed, in Simpson’s friend Albert Beurick’s guest house.1 They met a few times over the next few years, exchanged a few words now and then. That was enough to feed Pascoe’s passion.

  A film enthusiast and technician, Pascoe has gone through 30 years of emotional effort, a bank loan, five-figures’ worth of his own money, and countless unpaid hours in making his two films about Simpson: Tribute to Tom Simpson, in 1972, and Something to Aim At, completed in 1995. He has tracked down Simpson’s mentors, Simpson’s widow, Helen, his clubmates and his teammates. In the film, they talk of the man’s drive, ambition, and talent. And Pascoe has unearthed archive footage which takes most of the audience back to their adolescence, and which can cause a shiver down the spine.

  The great cycling stars of the past exist as two-dimensional figures, seen in black and white photographs, known for a string of racing results and little else. Pascoe’s film changes that. We can see Simpson in colour. We can see the fluidity of his pedalling style. We can listen to Simpson’s voice as he tells a joke about the Duke of Norfolk and a racehorse to the BBC interviewer Eamonn Andrews. We can admire his polite response as Andrews asks quest
ions which display a wince-making ignorance of cycling.

  Simpson’s voice, his accent a mix of Nottinghamshire and lilting Durham, bridges the 33 years since he died and connects directly with my experience of cycling. His voice has been turned slightly flat and nasal by the tone of Flanders: the same has happened to all the English cyclists I have ever known who have been based in Belgium.

  Pascoe found both the home where Simpson was brought up in the Nottinghamshire mining village of Harworth and the house which he built in his adopted city of Ghent yet barely lived in. Early in his research, Pascoe interviewed Simpson’s parents, who have long since died, and most touching of all, he was loaned some home movies of Simpson and his two daughters. Here is Tom skiing, with one child falling over in the snow as they all build a snowman; here he is on the beach in Corsica, lifting his daughters one by one over a stream so that they don’t get their feet wet. The cycling idol as Mr Everyman. After Pascoe sent a copy of the film Something to Aim At to Simpson’s daughter Jane, who was four when her father died, she wrote to him: ‘I had never heard my daddy’s voice before.’

  Most of us have never heard Simpson’s voice either, or seen the way he pedalled and how his expressive face worked, and this only makes his death all the crueller as it is played out for us in the grainy black and white television footage of the fatal day in the 1967 Tour. As he zigzags painfully up the mountain, the camera pans ahead to the leaders he is chasing: they are only a few hundred metres away from him. It might as well be 100 miles. Like a ship foundering in a storm, his torso rolls slowly from side to side with each turn of the pedals as he struggles up the mountain. The gasping mouth never closes: he has the look of a man drowning. The end is sudden, a brutal transformation from struggling man to inert body on a bike, held up, lowered gently down, his chest pumped vigorously by the desperate doctor.

  After the showing, two of the men interviewed by Pascoe for the film take to the stage for a question and answer session. One is Simpson’s friend and supporter Beurick, an unhealthy-looking mountain of a man who has trouble walking; the other is Vin Denson, Simpson’s close friend and his teammate on the race when he died. They are joined by another professional cyclist of the time, Keith Butler. The emotions are still raw; the film has rubbed salt into the long-open wound. The tears come easily to Beurick, who can barely speak coherently when he is asked about Simpson. It’s hard for Denson as well: on top of reliving Simpson’s death, Denson has just had to watch images of his late wife Vi, who is interviewed alongside him in the film. Both men speak as if Simpson had died only yesterday. Clearly, the tragedy was a life-changing event with which Denson and Beurick have still to come to terms. Butler, who was more distant from it all, remains more dispassionate.

  The vividness of Denson’s and Beurick’s grief is striking, more than 30 years on, but is understandable. What intrigues me more are the undercurrents which are still steering the two men. They cannot help but bring hidden issues to the surface, unwittingly or not. There are few questions from the audience – Denson and Beurick need little prompting, they clearly have a need to talk – and there are no clear answers. There is no confusion about the character of the man, his athletic class and mesmerising charisma, but both men seem as confused now as they were way back in 1967 about the reasons for Simpson’s death and the issue it raises: the use of banned drugs.

  No one in the audience actually mentions drugs. Pascoe’s film had dodged gently around the issue in a ‘lift your skirt to step over the puddle’ kind of way, just as much of the material written about Simpson has done. But amphetamine pills were found in his pockets; the drug was in his urine and stomach contents. And amphetamines are the first thing in Beurick’s mind once he has dried his eyes and collected his thoughts.

  He does not need to be asked. All he needs is a public platform where he can be allowed to speak for his friend. He is adamant that drugs did not cause Simpson’s death. Simpson rarely used drugs, he says. On the occasions when he did use them, he knew what he was doing. His use of them was carefully thought out. There was nothing wrong with Simpson using drugs on the rare occasions that he did, he insists, as every cyclist used them in those days. A box of drugs was found in the Great Britain team car, acknowledges Beurick: they were said to belong to Simpson but, he asks, were they really Simpson’s or did they belong to someone else in the race? His arguments are not those of a man who is trying to hide the truth, but they give the impression that he has spent three decades building his own version of events.

  Beurick is equally hazy about the question of responsibility for Simpson’s death. He speaks angrily about the doctor who treated him, the late Pierre Dumas, who was the chief of the small medical team at the Tour de France in 1967. After mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed, Dumas had Simpson taken to hospital in a helicopter. Being flown off the mountain and high into the sky caused him to die of brain damage from oxygen deprivation, Beurick tells the audience. He clearly wishes to absolve his friend of any responsibility for his own death but, in spite of this, he, Denson and Butler all agree on one thing: Simpson was perfectly capable of riding himself to death without drugs in his system. He ‘became twice the man’ when he pulled on the Union Jack jersey, says Denson, and was prepared to ride himself ‘into unconsciousness’ for his country.

  Simpson is far from being the first public figure to die a controversial, partially explained death. Parallels can be drawn in his case with the bitter arguments over Scott of the Antarctic, George Mallory and perhaps Ayrton Senna. They have one thing in common: the issue of how they died and what can be deduced from it has put their achievements in the shade.

  There are other unsolved issues. For example, we have just watched footage of Simpson winning his world championship in 1965. It was the most important win of his career, taken with a glorious mix of courage and cunning. There is lengthy, elaborate speculation among the panel as to whether a deal of some kind was made with the rider who finished second, Rudi Altig, and the various ways in which it could have been done. It is rumoured, says Denson, that Simpson paid Altig 100,000 French francs to let him win.

  Up comes another thorny question: what really happened the day after Simpson’s death, when his teammate in the Great Britain squad, Barry Hoban, won a stage dedicated to his dead leader by the rest of the field. A touching image of solidarity, you might think – and so thought everyone at the time who was not immediately involved. But Beurick and Denson claim that Denson was appointed as the man who would win, and that Hoban knew of the deal, but robbed him of the stage win. Hoban has always denied that this was the case.

  Petty it may seem, but there appears to be something of an underlying turf war over who was Simpson’s best friend, with the reflected glory that comes with the status. Hoban was given that title by the press, largely because that was a convenient way of explaining the victory; Denson says Simpson was ‘like a brother’ to him. Beurick makes the same claim. He gets angry when he recalls the fact that Hoban has always had credit for the victory and calls the rider ‘a prick’, a ‘young upstart’, in front of 200 people. Denson seems embarrassed by the situation, as well he might. It’s all rather complicated, and the whole question is muddied further by the fact that Hoban ended up marrying Simpson’s widow Helen.

  As an illustration of the deep-rooted and messy legacy that Simpson has left behind him, it has been a telling couple of hours. Several things strike me. First, there is the enduring hero worship of a man who died when I was still in nappies. The film itself is the product of that hero worship, which has persisted through most of Pascoe’s 60 years. Then there are the fans. More than three decades since the cyclist’s death, 200 people are prepared to come here, in many cases from far outside London. They have come to see a film some of them probably own already, to hear again a story which they already know, to hunt the bookstall in the foyer for postcards and old magazines.

  The persistence of the old men’s enthusiasm is touching. It’s a measure of the status Simpson m
ust have enjoyed during his life and a reminder of the lasting impact of his untimely death. The organizer, a tall, reed-thin veteran cyclist and author, Charlie Woods2, is another Simpson fan. He has run these sessions before; this one has sold out, in the biggest turnout he can remember. Clearly, affection for Simpson is not dead: cycling fans of an older generation have fond memories, and they want to know more about him.

  The presence of Beurick and Denson is undoubtedly a draw. For the ageing fans, who seem to hang on their every word, it is a way of being transported back in time to connect with their hero. Denson and Beurick knew Tom, they rubbed shoulders with him. And they seem to like the celebrity which rubs off on them.

  Just as surprising as the enduring affection for Simpson were the unresolved issues and the degree of anger and conflict caused by this man’s death. All of this was to spring up in my face when I began researching this book, but they were already there in the open at the Riverside Theatre on that January afternoon. Why did Simpson die? Could the doctor who treated him have been responsible? To what extent could Simpson’s death be called self-inflicted?

  Everything stemmed from the fact that Simpson died while using banned drugs. This brought back the same thoughts that had kept me awake for 20 nights in a row in July 1998. Then, my mind had worked overtime as the Tour de France descended into chaos in the days after the Festina team was busted for drugs, a scandal which made newspaper front pages all over the world, and which called into question the validity of the entire sport of cycling.

  The questions surrounding the Festina incident were basically the same as those over Simpson. To what degree is an athlete who takes performance-enhancing drugs at fault for his actions? How heavily do we weigh the fact that an athlete has taken drugs against the magnitude of his achievements and his status? How far up and down the sporting food chain does the responsibility extend? Does it go as far as race organizers, who devise the courses? Team managers who want their men to perform? The press and the fans who love to watch the spectacle?