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

  The little frisson came again when I saw Mont Ventoux for the first time – and thought the limestone on the top was snow. I felt it again in 1994, when I followed the Tour de France over the mountain. Then, the anticipation began mounting several days before, and the adrenaline grew all the way to the monument. The sensation has come each time I have driven or ridden up it, giving the mountain a hallowed feel.

  It would be fanciful to say that Simpson’s presence could be felt everywhere I went when researching this book, but just as the film gave him colour, mannerisms, an accent and a pedalling style, he was brought back to life for me by the people I visited with a succession of cherished mementoes and memories. Everyone I met on the Simpson trail has their own ‘Tom’, ‘Tommy’ or ‘Mr Tom’, that they carry with them like a monkey on their back: mine is a metal plate with the number ‘49’ on it, a tiny 40-year-old recipe book, a sheet of foolscap listing ‘tonics and medicines’, a teenage boy’s scribbled letter, and the image of a young doctor reaching into the pockets of a white checked woollen jersey.

  Melbourne, Olympic Games, December 1956

  Tom Simpson is slumped in the middle of the oval, banked, concrete track, his head in his hands. Among the hustle and bustle of bikes, cyclists and blazered officials, he is a small, sobbing figure in his white jersey with the red and blue stripes and Olympic rings. His three teammates, Mick Gambrill, Don Burgess and John Geddes, and the British team manager, the avuncular, rotund Benny Foster, have gathered around him. They are saying the same things: ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault. We can still get the bronze.’

  Simpson is inconsolable, convinced he has just lost his team the gold medal in the team pursuit. It had been going so well. They had qualified strongly, beaten the Russians in the quarter finals. Then came the semi and the Italians, who the young British team had already beaten when warming up in Russia. The Britons were flying round the velodrome pursuing the Italians, who had started on the other side. When they reached the banking at either end of the track, one of the four would move sideways, slightly up the slope, swinging back down to join the string.

  After one of his turns at the front, Simpson could not catch up. Just as Geddes was pushing up the speed at the front of the line, the youngster went too far up the banking. Geddes had no idea what was happening, and kept accelerating. There was no way back, and the British were down to three men. Qualification for the final was a formality for the Italians.

  Simpson is the youngest in the team. He turned 19 just six days before the Games opened. He is the most ambitious, and feels the pressure more than the others. It’s his first season racing at international level. He has been away from home for 10 weeks, warming up here amidst the adulation of the expatriate Britons, who will applaud the quartet when they win their consolation bronze medals.

  Before the five-day flight here, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, the team had to fill in forms stating their future goals. All four had the same aims: Olympic pursuit champion, world pursuit champion, world road race champion. Only the youngster, so angry at his own failure in Melbourne, will reach his objective.

  1 Sadly, Arthur Beurick died in December 2009.

  2 Sadly, Charlie Woods died in 2014; his memoirs, Bikie, had been published in 2004.

  3 Sadly, George Shaw died in April 2016 and David Duffield in February that year.

  4 Sadly, Arthur Metcalfe died in December 2002.

  CHAPTER TWO

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

  Provençal proverb

  ON THE SECOND floor of his neat half-timbered house midway between Manchester and the Peak District, Harry Hall had a small office where he kept the records of his career.1 Hall, a tall, slender, white-haired man in his late 60s, ran the biggest bike shop in Manchester for over 30 years. He was a veteran world cycling champion and worked as mechanic on Britain’s national cycling teams in the 1960s and 70s. He was also one of the last men to see Tom Simpson alive.

  The office is a neat yet disordered glory hole, an organized chaos of newspaper cuttings, photographs and race manuals. Among the piles are several small notebooks. They are Hall’s diaries from his races with Great Britain, in which he meticulously recorded the work he carried out every day on each rider’s bike: a tyre replaced here, gear ratios changed there.

  Hall was mechanic for the British team on the 1967 Tour de France when Tom Simpson died. That year’s notebook is small, red, and unlabelled, and he has had a struggle to find it for the first time since he put it away after returning from the race. On page after page the names Tom, Barry, Colin, Arthur and Vic are written: Simpson and his Great Britain teammates Hoban, Lewis, Metcalfe and Denson, whose name Vin was usually changed to Vic. The notes tell the story of the cyclists’ Tour, as well as Hall’s work each evening: ‘fit silk tyres’, ‘change forks with spare’. His charges’ form can be read in the gears they choose – lower than those of their mates if they feel bad – and their fluctuating morale is indicated by the days on which Hall glues lighter tubular tyres onto their wheels, their misfortunes in the roll-call of punctured tyres and parts damaged in crashes.

  Delving into the cupboards that morning, Hall has just rediscovered a road-stained metal number plate, three inches square and drilled so it can be bolted over the top tube of a bike. On either side, painted in white on the black background, is the number ‘49’. It is Tom Simpson’s race number from the 1967 Tour, which was on his bike the day he died.

  There is a deep symbolism about cycle race numbers. For all cyclists, putting one on for the first time is a moment of passage in their first race. For most, each time they pin one on their backs for a race there is a little rush of adrenaline. It is always said of the most competitive that their character changes ‘when they pin a number on’, and Simpson was surely numbered among these. In the Tour de France, a cyclist is always referred to by his number, or dossard, when he is mentioned on the race’s short-wave radio as having punctured, crashed or broken away. If he is in a break, it is his number which is marked on the motorbike marshal’s blackboard which keeps competitors informed; Simpson would have been le dossard quarante-neuf. In a certain sense, the man is the number.

  The bitterest moment for any competitor in the Tour is if he has to abandon the race and his number is taken off his back and unbolted from his bike. Simpson’s number is still in the little plastic bag where Hall placed it on the evening of the tragedy. The image comes freely to me: Hall outside the British team hotel on the evening of July 13, 1967, undoing the little screws which held the plate on Simpson’s white bike, unfolding the metal. He would have been working like an automaton, going through the motions of his evening routine of cleaning and adjusting the bikes. What to do with the number?

  Initially, the plate lived in the toolbox that Hall took with him to races. Then it went missing. When it resurfaced, it went into the drawer, but Hall did not like to take it out. If he came across it while rummaging for something else, he would push it under some papers, not relishing the memories it prompted. It was, he felt, ‘the last bit of Tom’. There it lay now in front of us on the desk, a slightly scuffed souvenir of the fruitless fight to save Simpson’s life in the desperate minutes after Hall had heard him whisper his last words – ‘on, on, on!’

  British cycling is a small world; before working as Simpson’s mechanic, Hall had known him for several years from a distance as a young prodigy from Nottinghamshire, a 19- year-old, pigeon-chested slip of a lad. He competed with him at track meetings on the Fallowfield velodrome in Manchester in the 1950s, when stars like Reg Harris would draw crowds in their thousands.

  After a meteoric rise, Simpson had disappeared to seek his fortune in France in 1959. Hall rode with him in his last race in England, then over the next years he followed his progress from afar, like the rest of the British cycling public. Simpson had gone to a distant world, with an aura of romance born in part from the scarcity of information abo
ut it. Only the biggest races were mentioned in the newspapers. There was one English magazine covering the major races, Sporting Cyclist. French magazines such as But et Club and Miroir-Sprint, with pages of black and white reportage, were bought in a certain shop in Manchester by the fans Hall knew and passed around like samizdat in the USSR.

  Like so many others, Hall listened with his mates to a crackly Radio Luxembourg when Simpson became the first Briton to win the world professional road race championship in 1965. He couldn’t understand the French, and, like all British cycling fans, he could barely believe it when the journalist Charlie Ruys turned to him and said, ‘He’s won, the bugger’s won.’ He saw Simpson return as a star to the Manchester track where they had raced together. He watched him banging a leathery steak on the side of his plate at breakfast and complaining lightheartedly about what he was being given to eat before the 270-mile London to Holyhead classic, which, of course, he won.

  Then when Hall travelled with Simpson to the 1967 Tour, it was largely unknown territory for the mechanic, as it was for the majority of the British team. The manager, Alec Taylor, was taking time off from running his car-hire business in south London. Hall, and the driver, Ken Ryall, both ran bike shops; his fellow mechanic, Ken Bird, was working in one. For his efforts over the four weeks, Hall was paid the princely sum of £110.

  Simpson designated Hall as the man who would look after his bike; he knew him a little, had seen him at other races. The British leader was particular about his equipment – ‘what he had, where it had come from and how it was dealt with’. Having the best components on his bike and the right man working on it was all part of getting an edge over the opposition. Whether by instinct or design, Simpson was clearly canny enough to realize that the better his relations with the man who was looking after his bikes, the better his machines would be kept. He had a similarly close relationship with the team’s chief soigneur, the Belgian Gus Naessens, who looked after his diet and physical preparation.

  Simpson had Hall glue his tyres on with special white cement made by the Italian Pastelli company. They were lightweight tubular tyres he had bought himself from the manufacturers, Clément, in Paris. He had wheels built by a young British mechanic in Ghent. His shoes were handmade by a Belgian specialist. He rarely rode the bikes he was given by his sponsor, Peugeot, but had instead bought himself a hand-built machine, like the other top professionals rode, from the Masi company in Italy. It was then painted in Peugeot colours. It’s a small deception, but one that frequently occurs in professional cycling, when a star cyclist feels that his team’s cycle sponsor is not able to produce the goods quite as he wants them.

  Simpson had even devised his own saddle by gluing foam onto a plastic shell, and adding a leather cover made out of one of his wife’s crocodile handbags. ‘It wasn’t perfect, because he tried to stick down the edges and they kept coming loose. It was a bit tatty, but he liked it. He was probably the first person to think of it,’ Hall notes. In fact, Simpson was 30 years ahead of his time: virtually all racing bike saddles are now made in this way, comprising a thin leather cover, foam padding, and a plastic base.

  When the brief details in the notebook from the 1967 Tour jog Hall’s memory, Simpson’s obsessive competitive drive springs back to life. On the rest day early in the race, Hall changed all three of Simpson’s bikes from five- to six-speed – gear changers, sprockets, spare wheels and all. It was a long job and he worked late into the night in the market square at Belfort. The story behind the day’s work speaks volumes about Simpson’s urgent need to gain any advantage, however small, in any way he could. The British leader had been annoyed 24 hours before when the 1966 winner Lucien Aimar ‘ripped his legs off’ on the first big mountain of the race, the Ballon d’Alsace. Aimar had six gears, which gave him an extra ratio, lower than that ridden by the others. He could continually change pace, accelerating, waiting for the others to catch up, then accelerating again. It gave him a huge psychological advantage.

  That evening, Simpson contacted a friend in Belgium, who brought the parts to Belfort immediately for Hall to work on the very next morning. He told Hall as he worked: ‘If anyone comes snooping around, hide it [the bike] away.’ He added: ‘I can get the buggers back. When they sit on my wheel I’ll blow their brains out. I’ll get the bastards.’

  Simpson had worn the yellow jersey of Tour leader for one day in 1962. He was the first Briton to pull the most coveted prize in cycling over his shoulders, and deservedly made headlines. However, he had lost third place that year when he crashed, and finished only sixth overall. That was to remain the best British finish for 22 years but in fact it was neither nowt nor something: good enough to permit him to hope for better things, but not convincing or lucrative in the long term.

  The Tour of 1967 was a 3,000-mile loop, starting in the Loire valley and heading east through Normandy, across northern France and into Alsace for that first rest day. South it went through the Alps to the Ventoux, and across to the Pyrénées, before the run north through the Massif Central for a stage finish on top of an extinct volcano, the Puy de Dôme, then up to Paris for a final time trial. The day before that Tour, which began in the town of Angers, a ballot was held among the journalists on the race to predict the possible winner. The verdict was brutally clear: they rated Simpson only 11th, with a mere nine votes, compared to 54 for the 1965 winner, Felice Gimondi of Italy.

  The Tour had frustrated Simpson for the five years since his single day in yellow. He had never won a stage. In 1966 he had abandoned in tears while wearing the rainbow jersey of world champion. His all-or-nothing bid for victory in the Alps had backfired when a dramatic attack on the Col du Galibier was followed by a spectacular crash on the descent, which left him unable to hold the handlebars.

  Simpson’s other Tours were tributes to his ability to drive himself beyond his physical limits. In 1965, he rode himself to a standstill with a blood infection, caused by a septic hand which had debilitated his entire system. The year before he had struggled through for 16th place while weakened by a tapeworm, and he had finished an exhausted 29th at his first attempt, in 1960. As well as the press, some of his fellow cyclists doubted whether Simpson had the stamina to last through the Tour. If he had doubts himself, he hid them, and he made no secret of what he wanted to do. When his wife Helen put him on the train for Angers at Ghent’s Sint Pieters station, his final words to her were ‘see you in Paris with the yellow jersey’.

  Hall was the only person Simpson would allow to work on his bike, and in the evenings he would sometimes come and talk to the mechanic as he stuck on tubular tyres, altered gear ratios and washed off the day’s grime. Simpson seemed relaxed, but he was playing for high stakes. ‘He said to me’ – and the memory makes Hall laugh – ‘I’ve got to win a lot of money. I’ve put down a deposit on a Merc in a showroom in Ghent, and when I come back I’ll buy it, so I’ve got to earn some good money.’ This is the ‘something to aim at’ of Pascoe’s film.

  To the young mechanic, he came across as a man ‘whose mind was always one step ahead’, who felt keenly the need to profit to the full from a career which had a limited span and could be cut short at any moment. ‘He was a bright lad, commercially. It was quite simple: “you’ve got to make money, because how long do we have?”’ recalls Hall.

  Four days before he died, as he lay on his bed in a hotel room in Metz, Simpson summed up his position to Geoffrey Nicholson of the Guardian. He could only get a better contract, he said, ‘if I can prove I’m a Tour man, prove that I can be a danger, and I’ve never done that yet . . . I’ve got no more excuses. I can’t say next year I’ll be better. The only person I’d be kidding is myself.’ A good Tour, he said, meant finishing in Paris in the top three, or holding the yellow jersey for five or six days, or winning a couple of prestigious stages and finishing in the first 10. Nothing less would do.

  Simpson would also explain his strategy for the race to Hall. It was dictated by the weakness of his team. A potential
Tour de France winner needs eight or nine strong support men, or domestiques, around him. They can offer spare wheels or give up their bike if a tyre punctures, pace him back to the field after a toilet stop, offer their slipstream if a rival goes ahead, or simply give moral support by their presence.

  For most of the Great Britain team, the Tour was a matter of survival rather than helping their leader. Of Simpson’s nine teammates, five had not ridden the Tour before. Three were not even racing full-time as professionals. Simpson was riding his own race. ‘His idea was that the lads were fine, but they weren’t a support team,’ says Hall. ‘All he expected from them was to see a few faces around him, a few voices in the bunch, maybe a wheel or a bike change. If he was going to do anything, it would be an individual effort.’

  As Hall describes how Simpson approached the 1967 race, he suddenly switches, in the middle of the flow of words, into the first person. The effect is uncanny. Is he quoting his dead leader verbatim, from memory, or is it as if, in mulling this over for more than three decades, he is paraphrasing several different conversations he had with Simpson? ‘“The plan is, and it sounds daft, I want to try and win the Tour, but I haven’t got the advantage of the strength some teams have. The plan is to pick one or two points in the race where I’ll really attack it, critical points where time can be won and lost. I don’t want to be in the [yellow] jersey, but I don’t mind what position I’m in as long as I’m within three minutes at the time trial [the final stage]; I can win it.” That was his belief: “I can take three minutes out of any of these buggers.” That was his whole plan.’

  Simpson had three target stages: the Alpine stage to Briançon, over the Col du Galibier, stage 13 from Marseille to Avignon via Mont Ventoux, and the leg through the Massif Central to the top of the Puy-de-Dôme, three days from Paris. Each included one of the hardest mountain climbs in the race at or near the finish.