Put Me Back on My Bike Read online

  A professional cyclist is more often absent from home than present, which leads to a lack of routine. When he is present, the husband has to be the centre of attention; when he is not, there is little support for the wife running the household. Simpson’s schedule of appearances was sometimes so packed that he would drive past the end of the road where they lived in Ghent, en route from one race to the next, and would be unable to stop. ‘All his races are in the evening which makes it late every night before he’s home,’ Helen wrote to George and Marlene Shaw on July 18, 1963. Joanne, their youngest daughter, was eight weeks old. The combination of a new-born baby and a husband coming home late at night and having to get his sleep must have been explosive. ‘It would worry me if the children cried in the night. We had a bedroom on the top floor, and if they had a disturbed night Tom would go there.’

  Before telephones were ubiquitous, keeping in touch was difficult. Helen and Tom wrote long letters to each other every day. Helen would post hers to the permanence – the headquarters – of whatever race he was riding. Sometimes the letters would follow him around Europe, and arrive home after he did. Even today, she still automatically writes her address on the back of any envelope. On one occasion, when Helen wanted to find out how her husband was faring on the Tour de France, she had to send a telegram requesting a phone call. Simpson learned about Jane’s birth from a newspaper.

  The unstructured lifestyle did have its rewards, however. Simpson won one of his biggest victories, the motor-paced 350 miles from Bordeaux to Paris, just six days after their second daughter, Joanne, was born. He had to leave immediately after the birth and, when he did get back, ‘it was very special,’ recalls Helen, ‘because I was still in hospital and he didn’t come back to Ghent until midnight, so they opened the hospital door especially to let him in.’

  Simpson, it has to be remembered, was a man who was frequently under pressure, which made life tense at the house in Ghent. There was no time, for example, to celebrate his world title. ‘When he came back [from the world championship] he was very short, I don’t think he realized what it entailed, [or] all the reactions of people. It was a combination of being tired . . . he came home and said “I’ve got to get ready, go to a presentation or something.”

  ‘We used to live on a knife-edge. He used to take it out on those closest to him, he would get so worked up and cross about it. You had to be careful what you said [when he was racing]. He was a different person when he was not racing. I used to say to the girls, “Be careful what you say, because he’s under a lot of pressure.” I could read him like a book, I knew when to talk, when not to talk.’ Simpson was, in the words of his early trainer, Benny Foster, like ‘unstable dynamite’: liable to explode when you least expected it.

  Helen had no inkling that her husband was pushing himself too hard. After all, this was not a time when people were given to analysing the way they lived and worrying about its effect on their health. ‘He would come back [from training and racing] physically totally exhausted. It was 110 per cent all the time. He was overambitious, he put mind over matter. [But] I never thought he was not capable of recovering. His recuperation was second to none. It never worried me at all.’

  As well as nursing Simpson through his fatigue, Helen had to support him during the low periods in his career, which were at least as numerous as the victorious times. His withdrawal from the 1965 Tour, the knee injury which wrecked much of his 1961 season after the win in the Tour of Flanders, the skiing accident at the start of 1966 which lost him half the months he should have spent racing in the world champion’s jersey. Here, the couple’s attitude was pure Yorkshire, for all that Simpson was actually a Nottinghamshire boy by way of Durham. ‘It was up and off and get focused again. He wouldn’t dwell on it. You dust yourself off and start again.’ It is in this way that she seems to have dealt with her husband’s untimely death.

  On July 13, 1967, Helen was sunbathing in the Corsican resort of Pianotoli with the children and Blanche Leulliot, the wife of the French journalist Jean Leulliot, who organized the Paris–Nice ‘Race to the Sun’. She had brought the children in the Renault Four, nicknamed ‘Puff-Puff’, which her husband won in the Brussels Six Day. It was Leulliot who had introduced Simpson to the island, where the family had holidayed for the past two years; it was Leulliot who had helped him buy 11 hectares of scrubland which Simpson planned to develop into holiday chalets. The family’s holiday house on the plot, with its view across towards Sardinia, was almost finished. Tom had not yet seen what was perhaps the ultimate symbol of his rise from an anonymous house on an estate in a mining village. A place in the sun after a childhood of grey skies.

  Helen was listening to the radio following her husband’s progress on the Tour de France: suddenly the announcer reported that he had fallen off. This was nothing new. Tom often fell off. Then it was reported that he had fallen again, and that he had fractured his skull. The two women were more worried. It would be a good idea perhaps to go to the café at the head of the beach to call the permanence.

  The operator took 15 minutes to get through; a little group of villagers had gathered around the telephone. Blanche spoke to her husband, limiting her answers to ‘Oui . . . oui . . . oui’. She did not break the news then, but took Helen to the house where her father was staying. ‘Daddy came into the room, and his face was that colour,’ Helen says, pointing to a white china mug on the table.

  The next day, Helen and her father took the first flight to Marseille. In the airport, ‘heaving with journalists’, she was met by Jean Leulliot, who broke the news that stimulants had been found in Tom’s bloodstream. In the morgue in Avignon – ‘of course I wanted to see him’ – she found a card from Tom’s brother Harry. It bore the words, ‘His body ached, his legs grew tired, but still he would not give in.’ They are now inscribed on Simpson’s gravestone in Harworth.

  She was in shock as she was given her husband’s wedding ring, his clothes and had to make the instant decisions: choose the coffin, decide ‘in a flash’ whether and where he was to be buried. ‘My first reaction was “Why have you gone and left us here?” You can’t eat, you can’t drink, your mind wanders. I kept thinking about the girls, then I’d come back to reality and it was real. I read it in the newspapers.’

  Her father shared the hotel room in Avignon with her that night: there were fears that she would ‘do something silly’. The funeral was ‘horrendous’ and in a couple of days she was back in Belgium, sorting out their affairs, when she collapsed with a burst ovarian cyst. Two weeks in hospital, with no visitors, followed. There were reports that she had had a miscarriage due to shock. By the time she saw their daughters again, a month had passed since she had left them in Corsica.

  Simpson died intestate: as a man who lived intensely for the day, his own death was not something for which he was ever likely to make plans. His financial affairs were complex: he owned property in three countries, he was living in Belgium on an English passport and earning money in France. He and Helen had managed the properties together, but tying up the loose ends took her years.

  Matters were not helped when Helen’s assets were frozen, as happens automatically under Belgian law when there is a death, and she had to borrow money. ‘Many times I’ve said to him “If you could see me now”,’ says Helen, half-angry, half-laughing as she looks skywards. There are reports that Helen had to take legal action against his life insurance company, which is said to have refused to pay out on the grounds that his death was self-inflicted: she is adamant that this did not happen.

  As we looked through the letters of condolence which had arrived at the house in Mariakerke while Helen was in hospital, we came across the last letter she sent to her husband, written on the morning of July 13, 1967, and posted ‘express’ from Corsica to the Great Britain team’s hotel in Sète. Helen does not read it all to me. There is a mixture of encouragement at his fourth place on the previous day’s stage – ‘I’d have pushed you if I could’, wifely advice (‘tr
y to be pleasant with all the supporters’) and reflection on how happy her holiday is with the children, who are learning to swim. There could be no more poignant illustration of a life on the cusp between bliss and tragedy.

  Helen first saw the Ventoux a year after Tom’s death when she went up the mountain for the unveiling of his memorial close to the summit. ‘I had to do it. I wanted to see where he drew his last breath. It had to be done.’ She cannot explain what she felt. Her face works a little and she chews her nails, but she cannot say more except that when she is there, she feels the need to be on her own. With her, at the unveiling, was Barry Hoban, a member of the small British cycling community in Ghent, who had won the stage across the Midi dedicated to her husband’s memory the day after he died. In December 1969 they were married and Hoban moved into the house that the Simpsons had built in Mariakerke.

  Hoban, who was to win a further seven stages in the Tour, clearly felt in the shadow of Simpson, his former rival and role model. He had lived not far from Harworth, had raced with Tom as an amateur, had been his rival as a professional. Just how friendly the pair were is a matter of some debate in the British cycling world. But Hoban respected Simpson, supported him when he took his world title, and kept the British flag flying in Ghent for another 13 years after his death.

  After Hoban retired from professional racing in 1980, he and Helen returned from Ghent to Wales, where Hoban briefly marketed a range of Barry Hoban bikes for Coventry Eagle. In their factory in Newtown, a vast photograph of Simpson stood behind the counter in the reception area. One area of their house is devoted to the mementoes of the two professionals with whom Helen has spent her life. There is Tom’s world championship medal; the certificate giving him the freedom of the town of Mariakerke; Hoban’s race numbers, and a photo of Hoban, Simpson and an Australian, Nev Veale, larking around with an umbrella in a rainy San Sebastian in the run-up to the 1965 world championship. ‘If Tom isn’t mentioned every day in the house, he is thought about,’ says Helen. ‘He is part of our life and our children’s. He gave me two beautiful children. It would be nice if he were here, but I feel blessed that I had him for six short years.’

  Revisiting the site of a bereavement is widely believed to help the healing process. This seems to have been the case with Helen, who now wishes she had had Tom cremated so that his ashes could be scattered on his mountain. Helen and Barry pay an annual visit, and clear away the piles of offerings left by fans at the memorial close to the summit before they rot and get blown away – three and a half bin liners full in 2001. She has recently been organizing the renovation of the memorial, which is now becoming unstable due to poor drainage and erosion.

  ‘When you see the amount of people going up there, it touches you,’ says Helen. ‘They drop something [on the memorial], say a prayer. I went on July 13 [2000], which was the anniversary, and met someone who said they had been up there every year on that day. We walk, collect flowers, have a picnic and sit with Tom. I like going up there.’

  Col de Peyresourde, July 5, 1962

  ‘Allez Seemson’ shout the crowds in the chilly, drizzling rain, 5,000 feet up on the green slopes of the Pyrenees, as the gaggle of 25 cyclists struggle up the hairpins. The race announcer, travelling just ahead of the lead group, has told them the news: Tom Simpson is about to become yellow jersey of the Tour de France.

  When this first mountain stage of the Tour began in Pau – ‘the belvedere of the Pyrenees’ – Simpson was lying third, but now race leader, Willy Schroeders of Belgium, and the man in second, André Darrigade, are both lagging behind, unable to stand the pace set by the wafer-thin, curly-haired Spaniard Federico Bahamontes. The ‘Eagle of Toledo’ has bided his time for 11 days as the Tour circled France from Nancy in the east to the Atlantic seaboard. Now, at last, he is in his element – the mountains. Spain is just eight miles away, over the snow-capped summits to the left, and he can make the flat-landers suffer.

  As race leader ‘on the road’, all Simpson has to do is follow the rest, and ensure that he loses no time to the Dutchman Ab Gelderman, who is 30 seconds behind in the standings. He has done the groundwork in the last 11 days, by staying at the head of the race; today Bahamontes has unwittingly helped him by tiring out Schroeders and Darrigade, and whittling the front group down to the 26 strongest men in the race.

  Straightforward today’s task may be, but it’s not easy. Already, they have climbed the Tourmalet, which rears up like the side of a house out of the little spa town of Barèges, and ends at 6,000 feet above sea level on the freezing shoulder of a great amphitheatre of cliffs. They flew down through the avalanche tunnels at 60mph, and straight up the next col, Aspin, with its dark pinewoods leading up to impossibly sloped hay fields. All Simpson has to do now is finish the job, by staying in this group for the 30 miles to the stage finish in Saint Gaudens, where he will pull on the yellow jersey with his sponsors’ names – Leroux, Gitane – hastily stuck to a panel on the front. No Briton will repeat the feat for 32 years.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Roule Britannia’

  headline, L’Equipe, 1962

  A HARD-AS-NAILS BELGIAN weeps in the front seat of a team bus: a fellow cyclist has just died in front of him. A normally ebullient Italian stares into space on the start line. A Swiss vents his anger on photographers who took pictures of the corpse. Black ribbons on sunburnt arms. A teammate points his fingers at the sky to tell the world that he has won a race for a dead man he saw every morning at the breakfast table, yet barely knew. A mass of cyclists promenade in a brightly coloured cortège of grief, too bewildered to compete.

  Scenes at the death of a Tour de France cyclist. I remember them when I hear the name Fabio Casartelli; similar things are recalled by those I spoke to about Tom Simpson’s death. Casartelli, a young Italian of 24, riding his first Tour de France, died in 1995 of head injuries after a high-speed fall. No one was left unaffected by the event.

  What I felt was nothing abnormal in the face of sudden tragedy: confusion, a desperate search for sketchy information, an unease about intruding on those who were close – in this case teammates and personnel. The worst part was the questioning: was something as frivolous as a cycle race – my livelihood, our livelihood – a worthwhile exercise if a man could die for it? Afterwards came other emotions. There was resentment at anyone who did not understand what had happened, such as the local guests at the next morning’s start, bent on having a good time. The cyclists they had come to see were so shaken they could barely speak. There was a shared, overwhelming sense that the final days of travelling through France should end as quickly as possible. The party was bereft of any festive ambience, but we all had to go through the motions.

  I felt this way in 1995, but I had never met Casartelli and would have had trouble recognizing him. I never had time. By 1995, the Tour was a sprawling monster comprising 4,000 people spread over a huge area. In contrast, the race was relatively small when Simpson died, with perhaps 700 people in the caravan. It was so intimate that, the night before he died, Simpson bumped into four English journalists in the street outside his hotel in Marseille and treated them to a show of bargaining with a street pedlar.

  Death on the Tour is uncommon, despite the speed at which the cyclists descend mountains and the frequency with which they fall off. In fact, the biggest risks are run by the spectators among the motorcade. Only three Tour cyclists have died on the race: the Spaniard Francisco Cepeda, in 1935; Simpson; and Casartelli.

  Simpson’s death was a rare tragedy, in a small event, in an intimate sport. But there was another reason why the shockwaves were far more intense in 1967 than in 1995. Casartelli, for all his Olympic title and worthy talent, was still on the uphill slope towards celebrity. Simpson was established on the plateau, one of the select group at the top of the sport who needed no further introduction.

  Simpson’s fellow cyclists found an unprecedented way of expressing their feelings: they chose not to race. The senior riders in the race – Simpson�
��s colleagues in the elite – met before the start and decided that that day’s stage across the baking roads of Provence to the town of Sète should be a tribute to the dead man. Vin Denson was the man the elite chose to win the stage, according to their leader Jean Stablinski, the stocky little Polish immigrant who had been world champion in 1961. With Simpson gone, Denson was the senior rider in the British team.

  Instead of Denson, another Briton, Barry Hoban, rode ahead and crossed the finish line first. The dispute about whether or not he had been designated the winner before the start misses a more important point. His victory struck an emotional chord across Europe and was the strongest possible illustration of the grief and respect felt for Simpson. Nothing similar would be seen again on the Tour until the death of Casartelli.

  The 1967 Tour de France riders were in a state of shock. In the British team, Denson felt ‘numbness and disbelief. I was like a zombie.’ On the road to Sète, Denson and his teammate Colin Lewis both imagined that they were seeing their dead leader whenever a white jersey came into view, as did Jean Stablinksi. Denson wanted to go home there and then. So too did the 1965 winner Felice Gimondi. As the riders stood for a minute’s silence on the start line among the plane trees of Carpentras’s Boulevard Albin-Durand, the Italian Gimondi was so strung out that Dr Dumas had to calm him down. The man who was to win the 1968 race, Jan Janssen of Holland, also needed the doctor’s attention.

  The senior cyclists who decided that a Briton had to win that day were a close-knit bunch, no more than 15- or 20- strong. They were the men who made the headlines, personalities with massive public profiles. Two of them, Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor, divided the French nation’s loyalties. They fought it out for the victories in the great Tours and one-day Classics, in which they formed their own little alliances; they shared the same trains, planes and cars and attended the same soirées. Simpson had been part of the group.