Put Me Back on My Bike_In Search of Tom Simpson Read online

  In July 1998, I was asking these questions about living men, with whom I had, in some cases, developed close working relationships, and whom I had presented to the cycling public as heroes. They were questions which you tend to steer away from if you work in the professional cycling world and I had managed to avoid asking them until the Festina scandal thrust them in front of me. But Pascoe’s film was a reminder that they were old questions, that they were not properly addressed at the time, and that was all too familiar. During the Festina case, the unwillingness of cyclists and the cycling world to confront their demons was only too apparent. In the way people had reacted to Simpson’s death – and still reacted to it – that same unwillingness could be seen.

  The drug questions had lain dormant since the late 1960s. Then, suddenly, the Festina scandal thrust them into centre stage. The difference was that, in Simpson’s case, they stemmed from a man’s death, which broke hearts and turned lives upside down. From the moment when I began to wonder why Simpson had died, as those on stage at the film show still seemed to, I ran headlong into these bigger issues like a train going into the buffers.

  Since his death, Simpson has played an occult role in British cycling: influential by his very absence. In Italy, Fausto Coppi holds a similar position, for similar reasons. Coppi magnetised the Italian public in the 1950s with a series of spectacular world championship and Tour de France victories, and indeed was Simpson’s great hero. He lived a controversial life and died tragically at the age of 40, apparently from malaria although speculation over whether he may have been poisoned made headlines in Italy over 40 years later. Coppi’s picture is still to be found behind the counter in Italian bike shops. He remains the benchmark against which all Italian campioni are measured.

  The Belgians, on the other hand, do not have to wonder what might have become of the greatest cyclist of them all, Eddy Merckx, winner of 445 professional races, including five Tours de France. The all-conquering ‘Cannibal’ is now overweight and unhealthy. He remains an imposing presence but without the mythical aura of Coppi or Simpson.

  The Briton was a hard act to follow. It took 32 years before Chris Boardman became the second British cyclist to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. Simpson won the men’s world professional road race title and four of the one-day Classics: Tour of Lombardy, Tour of Flanders, Milan–San Remo, and the now-defunct Bordeaux–Paris. It took until 2009 for Mark Cavendish to emulate him in Milan–San Remo and two more years for Cavendish to take the men’s world title. It was 1984 before Robert Millar became the first Briton to better Simpson’s sixth overall finish in the Tour de France, although Chris Froome and Sir Bradley Wiggins have won the race since; Simpson’s 1967 win in Paris–Nice was not equalled by a Briton until Wiggins in 2012.

  Like Banquo’s ghost at the feast in Macbeth, Simpson is still there in spirit. Every talented British cyclist since he died has been touted as a possible successor: Graham Webb, Derek Harrison, Bill Nickson, Graham Jones, Robert Millar, Joey McLoughlin and David Millar. Only the two Millars have come close to matching Simpson’s achievements.

  Graham Jones remembers being frequently compared to Simpson after turning professional in 1979. Jones had great talent. Like Simpson, he had a prominent nose. He rode for Simpson’s old team, Peugeot. He even wore the same jersey as a professional – the black and white chequerboard of Peugeot had been left unchanged since the 1960s – and, like Simpson, he had gone to France with his bike and his bag to seek his fortune. But Jones would be the first to admit that he lacked Simpson’s killer instinct.

  The continuing British fascination with Simpson so many years after his death could be seen throughout 2001 in Cycling Weekly magazine. This is the bible for hard-core British cycling fans, widely read by the older generation of cyclists. An editorial on Boardman’s retirement late in 2000 declared that he, not Simpson, was Britain’s greatest cyclist. It sparked off a passionate, if spasmodic, 10-month-long debate in the magazine’s readers’ letters pages. Most who wrote in had a clear favourite. On the one hand was Simpson, with his all-round record: a single Olympic medal, a professional road title, a top-six finish in the Tour, four single-day Classics and massive star status at home and abroad. On the other was Boardman, the short-distance specialist. He had been an Olympic and world champion on the track, had won the prologue time trial at the Tour de France three times, and had spent six days wearing the yellow jersey.

  For a Mr Denny of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, however, there was another issue. No matter how good Simpson’s record, he had been shown to have taken banned performance-enhancing drugs. Therefore he was a cheat. It was ‘completely inappropriate’, he felt, to suggest Simpson was the greatest; therefore Boardman, who was known to be ‘clean’, had to be the better of the two. Clearly relishing the emotions which the controversy aroused, the magazine then decided to bring it back to life at the end of 2001. It ranked the top 50 British cyclists of all time, announced that Boardman was better than Simpson and put him at number one, then provided extra letters pages for the readers to have their say.

  If it was surprising that cycling fans were debating Simpson’s merits 35 years on, still more surprising is the way the man’s death can stir the emotions of professional cyclists of today, even those born long after he died. When the 2000 Tour de France visited Avignon, I sat down with David Millar in the start village, the cluster of sponsors’ tents where cyclists and the press gather before the stage begins. Millar had worn the yellow jersey at the start of the Tour and had raced up Mont Ventoux past the Simpson memorial for the first time the day before. He was fiddling with a limestone pebble which he had been given by Simpson’s daughter Joanne, who had picked it up next to the statue. She had seen Millar throw his racing cap at the memorial as he passed, as a sign of respect. ‘Simpson was one of the first stories I heard when I got into cycling,’ says Millar. ‘It’s moving every time you go up there.’ The stone stayed in Millar’s suitcase for the rest of that Tour, and he still has it. In spite of the fact that Simpson had died almost a decade before he was born, Millar knew whose ghostly wheel marks he was following.

  Where Simpson definitely surpassed Boardman and all other British cyclists since he died was in the impact he made on European hearts and minds. I lived and raced in France in the mid-1980s, almost 20 years after his death. People would often say ‘ah, I remember Tom Simpson’, or ‘ah, like Tom Simpson’, when they learned that I was an English cyclist in their country. The affection could still be felt. Simpson remained the reference point.

  The epitaph on Simpson’s monument on Mont Ventoux, ‘a sporting ambassador’, is utterly appropriate. As the first cyclist from outside mainland Europe to achieve true stardom, he was a sporting pioneer, blazing a trail which leads, indirectly, to the achievements of Lance Armstrong today.

  Simpson was not the first Briton to race in Europe. Brian Robinson paved the way four years earlier and his achievements as the first Briton to make any impact on the Tour de France are often overlooked. But Simpson was the one who made the great breakthrough, in his results and in the status he attained. His successes were the first step in a long process of opening up the Tour, which would eventually turn from a relatively insular European bike race into the world’s greatest annual sporting event, with a truly international field.

  The Tour de France’s official historian, Jacques Augendre, a stooping, bespectacled man with the studious look of a university professor, was a journalist when Simpson first rode the Tour. He made this point to me 34 years on, as Armstrong rode to his third Tour win: ‘When English riders arrived at the Tour they gave it an extra dimension, broadened the race’s international appeal. Simpson’s winning the yellow jersey [in 1962] was a turning point. Today, Armstrong’s victories stem from all that. It was a long evolution but Simpson was a pioneer of something which ended with Greg LeMond and Armstrong. The Tour de France was Flemish and Latin, now it belongs to the Anglo-Saxons as well.’

  For those who want t
o go and find physical reminders of Simpson, the possibilities are few and far between. There is the much-visited memorial at the spot where he died on Mont Ventoux and a bust in the Sportpaleis in his adopted home town of Ghent. Until recently, however, there was nothing in Britain, despite that when he died he was riding for his country and wearing the Union Jack. There was only the gravestone in his home village of Harworth, where he lived as a boy, although his jersey, shorts and gloves could be seen in a cycling museum in, of all places, Llandudno. Perhaps the lack of a memorial in Britain reflected the confusion that surrounds him, the question of whether he is hero, villain or victim. Should he be celebrated officially, or quietly forgotten? This rather sorry state of affairs was finally put right in August 2001 with the opening of a small museum in the Harworth and Bircotes sports and social club, a one-storey timber-framed building in the shadow of a pit heap and great concrete lift towers. ‘Museum’ is perhaps something of a grand term: the display is a single, large glass case in the entrance hall filled with memorabilia which had previously been scattered to the four winds.

  The centrepiece is Simpson’s white Peugeot bike, with its intricate chainset and complex centre-pull brakes, and the jersey and shorts which he was wearing when he died. The white jersey with Union Jacks crudely sewn on the shoulders is surprisingly small and stained, with the Peugeot stickers removed for some reason; the shorts are thick wool from another era, when Lycra was unheard of. There are other jerseys – the blue and red Great Britain strip he wore to win the world championship in 1965, and the rainbow-striped jersey he won on that day. There are special issue magazines, race programmes, and newspaper articles, including his ghosted, overblown ‘revelations’ from the People in September 1965, which were the source of great controversy at the time. There is even the race number plate which he carried on his bike, which I had seen unearthed at the house of his former mechanic Harry Hall.

  Much of it looks like the kind of material which fans hoard away in boxes and it’s none the worse for it. I had seen a lot of it before. When I visited Simpson’s friends, teammates and family in search of the essence of the man, an identical ritual took place at least a dozen times. The envelope or cardboard box was opened, the cuttings, pictures, letters and souvenir magazines poured out onto the table. I know what these hoarded papers represent to the people who give them up to go on show.

  The crowd assembled for the museum opening is similar to that at the film show seven months earlier: veteran cyclists in the main. Most have been riding the Tom Simpson memorial road race, which has been organized in or near the village since Simpson’s death by his friends George Shaw and Dave Marsh.3 To maximise the turnout, the informal ribbon-cutting ceremony has been planned to coincide with the race, on this occasion combined with the national over-40s championship. The television commentator David Duffield, who can talk about Simpson – or anything else – until the cows come home, has come all the way from Bath. Another voice of Eurosport, Mike Smith, is doing the race commentary. As the rain drives down, the voluble Smith gets a little emotional as he recalls the same weather on a dark July day in 1967 when a larger, more sombre crowd gathered to bury Simpson half a mile away.

  The president of the British Cycling Federation, Brian Cookson, has driven over from Preston to do the presentations. Like most of those present, he has his treasured Simpson memory – seeing him riding his last race in England, on the seafront at New Brighton in June 1967 – and he still has his copy of Simpson’s autobiography, Cycling is My Life, autographed on that day. The enduring fascination goes to the very top of British cycling.

  There are others in Harworth who remember Simpson with less reverence. While delivering flyers for the event, Dave Marsh bumped into a local woman who remembered being courted by the great man before he disappeared in search of fame and fortune. There was no happy ending: ‘He came round to my house at midnight, and I told my dad to tell him to bugger off, because all he could talk about was bikes.’

  The tone at the opening is upbeat, with a team from local television adding to the sense of occasion. ‘As far as I’m concerned, Tom will never die,’ says his widow Helen. The museum may be extended, depending on funds, local politics and what other memorabilia comes in. More substantial, however, are plans for a purpose-built, one-mile cycle-racing circuit around the building, costing £750,000, and, of course, bearing Simpson’s name. It’s the sort of facility which is rare in Britain, and sorely needed: nowadays, if a teenage Simpson were living in Harworth, itching to ride bike races and emulate his heroes, he would have a frustrating start to his career. Increased road traffic has led the British cycling calendar to contract in recent years. If those wanting to emulate Simpson can do so here in future without the risk of being run over, there could be little better tribute.

  To complete the circle – or, as the French say of the Tour de France, to ‘buckle the buckle’ – Ray Pascoe had driven up from London, with copies of Something to Aim At to sell from the boot of his car. The book and souvenir stall was the same as in January as well. Beurick and Denson were there too, among the group of teammates and family.

  In much the same way that you could work out who was in favour in the Kremlin by watching the parade of Politburo members, the guest line-up was worth examining. As well as Denson, two of Simpson’s other teammates from the 1967 Tour, Barry Hoban and Arthur Metcalfe4, were in attendance. The fourth team member who had been present on the 13th of July, Colin Lewis, was absent. He had been invited, but did not make the long trip from Devon. Lewis was aware that he had been persona non grata with both Helen and Barry Hoban since the appearance of an article in the Sunday Times about Simpson two years earlier. The interview with Lewis by the award-winning sports writer David Walsh dealt with Simpson’s drug-taking in some detail. It had prompted an outraged response from Simpson’s widow. Lewis is a straightforward man, whom I’d visited at his bike shop in Paignton, and he was clearly hurt.

  This was not the first article about her former husband to arouse Helen’s ire. The chief cycling historian at the French newspaper L’Equipe, Philippe Brunel, is a devoted Simpson fan, and he wrote what he considered a definitive profile of the rider in 1997. This provoked an angry letter from Helen which has left him bemused and insulted. There is nothing in his article which is contentious, but he clearly accepts that Simpson used drugs. Helen was utterly welcoming to me in my research, unstinting with her time, but the experience of my two highly regarded colleagues indicated that the family defends Simpson’s reputation closely.

  This impression was strengthened a few days before I went to the opening of the Simpson museum when my publisher received an email. It came from Chris Sidwells, Simpson’s nephew, and the author of the Simpson biography Mr Tom: The True Story of Tom Simpson, and it fell into two parts. First came an apologia for his own book, which he admitted had largely ignored the drugs issue, the complexities of Tom’s personality and other issues. This was followed by the suggestion that Yellow Jersey should reverse my commission, and instead get him to write what he described as “a sort of ‘Tom Simpson Unplugged’”, because I was being poorly informed by my sources, virtually all of whom, he believed, had telephoned him to tell him what they had told me and what they had not told me.

  Apart from conjuring up a hilarious vision of the phone lines of Britain humming with the people I had interviewed reporting back to base, Sidwells’ email raised an important point. Only a member of the inner circle, it implied, was qualified to explore the Simpson myth. But the question and answer session at the film show seven months earlier had led me to feel exactly the opposite. It was high time for an account of Simpson’s life written by someone who had no particular axe to grind. Time to go beyond the emotional baggage which has overwhelmed the story.

  Of course, I should confess that I come to this story with my own baggage. His was the first name I heard in connection with cycling and the Tour de France. I came out of school on the afternoon of July 2, 1978. My father, who was a
big Simpson fan and was responsible for stirring my interest in cycling, was sitting in the car waiting for me and my brother, his ear bent down to the car radio. It was tuned to a French station, Europe 1, to pick up that afternoon’s live Tour coverage. When I got to the car, I asked Dad what he was listening to, and he told me ‘some English guy is in the break. They say he could be the next Tom Simpson.’ The rider on that occasion was Paul Sherwen; since then, like so many other English cycling fans, I have waited for the next Simpson, and have subconsciously measured any British cyclist of talent against the standard he set.

  If you are an English cycling fan, it is hard to escape the man, hard not to feel his breath on the back of your neck at times. Six years on, when I wanted to race in France and wrote to various clubs to request a place in their teams, there was a little thrill when I opened a reply from the Club Olympique Briochin in Saint Brieuc, Brittany. They would be delighted, their president wrote, ‘to welcome me as they had welcomed many Britanniques, including the late lamented Tom Simpson’. Simpson’s old club! I still have the letter.

  Financial need overcame sentiment and I chose Normandy because the club there found me a job. Even so, when I got on the ferry there was still the feeling that I was, in my own small way, following the Simpson trail, going to France with my bike, my bag and a few quid to see what might transpire. ‘Living in a flat with no hot water and thinking you’re going to be a pro’, as one cyclist who went on to become a professional would say to me a few years later.

  Back in England, my French adventure long over, I happened to be driving south down the AI and turned into Harworth, eager to pay tribute in some way. I couldn’t find his grave though. I couldn’t even find the churchyard – and the gravestone is not there in any case, but in the cemetery. Despite that, just being in the village where Simpson had lived as a child meant something to me.