Put Me Back on My Bike_In Search of Tom Simpson

by William Fotheringham

  Mont Faron, March 13, 1967

  Below the steep mountainside, strewn with limestone rocks, the port of Toulon stretches into the distance in the late afternoon sun. On the hairpins close to the top of the great hill, two men are fighting the gradient: Eddy Merckx, broad-shouldered, round-faced, bending over his handlebars, and the willowy Tom Simpson. They wear the same colours, the black-and-white chequerboard of Peugeot-BP, but they have a common objective: victory in this year’s Paris–Nice ‘Race to the Sun’. They are friends and teammates, but they have not spoken for 48 hours, since Simpson slipped into a breakaway group in central France, finishing over 15 minutes ahead of Merckx.

  The Belgian’s supporters have accused Simpson of doublecrossing his teammate; Simpson’s fans say that Merckx was not strong enough to get in on the move. It is a classic conflict: the established team leader against the young upstart. But now they are united and in the lead, with a single purpose: gaining time on the rest of the field, who are over two minutes behind. They will not see them again.

  At the finish that evening in Hyères, Simpson will let Merckx cross the line a few yards ahead for the stage victory, knowing that he, not the Belgian, will pull on the white jersey of race leader. He will wear it in triumph at the finish on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in two days’ time. It is his biggest stage race win, and it puts him on the shortlist of favourites for the Tour de France.

  Payback time is five days away: Simpson will support Merckx as he wins the Milan–San Remo single-day Classic. Out of conflict, a close bond is born: on a rainy day in five months’ time, the Belgian will be the only European professional at Simpson’s funeral.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Your Neighbours Are the Unknown Stars’

  Jacques Goddet, 1955

  AS YOU FLY towards Marseille down the Rhône Valley, the great mountain emerges gradually to the left through the afternoon heat haze, beyond the sprawl of buildings that is the town of Avignon. This is Mont Ventoux: a glowering east–west ridge with a wisp of cloud on the top which is soon lost again, like the back of a shark rolling out of a wave and returning to the sea.

  The first time Tom Simpson rode up the Ventoux he saw it as ‘another world up there among the bare rocks and the glaring sun’. And on a summer afternoon almost 35 years on, with its lower slopes lost in the haze, its summit merging into the thunderclouds, the ‘Giant of Provence’ has an aura which is not quite of this world. This is frequently the case. With nothing so high anywhere near, the Ventoux continually draws the eye, but from a distance it never looks quite real. ‘You wonder what it’s doing there, between the Alps and Provence,’ wrote cycling historian Philippe Brunel. As with all mountains, its appearance is constantly, subtly, changing, depending on the angle from which it is seen.

  From Nîmes, 40 miles away, Mont Ventoux appears as a near-perfect dome, akin to Mount Fuji. From the autoroute south of Avignon it is like a beached, white-backed whale towering over eastern Provence, a steep head to the west, a gradually sloping tail to the east above the Côtes du Ventoux vineyards. The first time I saw it was in spring and the white rocks on the summit deceived me, as it has many others before and since, into thinking that there was still snow on top.

  Simpson’s life ended here on July 13, 1967, but the mountain spawned something equally potent: the Simpson myth. The ‘Giant of Provence’ is a defining factor in his story. The peak where Simpson died stands alone, visible for 65 miles on a clear day, dominating an area of some 2,000 square miles, give or take a few. Had Britain’s greatest ever cyclist happened to collapse in a coma by some anonymous roadside in, say, the Berry or Calvados, his death would not have had the same lasting impact.

  Of all the mountains climbed by the Tour de France, the Ventoux is the one which most readily takes on a personality, believed the philosopher Roland Barthes. ‘The great cols, be they Alpine or Pyrenean, and tough as they are, are ways of getting through the mountains: the col is merely a passage which struggles to take on a personality; the Ventoux, thrusting abundantly skywards, is a god of Evil to whom sacrifice must be paid. A true Moloch, a despot of cyclists, it never pardons the weak and exacts an unjust tribute of suffering.’

  When Barthes wrote that, 10 years before the mountain took a terrible tribute from Simpson, the Tour had climbed the Ventoux only three times. It had not taken long for the mountain to gain a fearful reputation for the toll it demanded of ‘the giants of the road’. ‘We have seen riders descend into madness due to heat and stimulants,’ wrote the journalist Antoine Blondin, ‘some going down the hairpins when they think they are going up, others brandishing their pumps above their heads and calling us murderers. There are few happy memories attached to this witches’ cauldron, which is always climbed with a heavy heart.’

  Memories of Simpson linger not only at his memorial near the summit, but also in the little towns at the mountain’s feet. In Carpentras, where he picked up his last bag of food and where the news of his death was revealed to the world. In Bedoin, where he dashed into a bar to get a final drink before he climbed the mountain. In Malaucène, where his dazed teammates attempted to come to terms with the loss of their leader and the police arrived to question his team manager and masseurs.

  It is now something of a cliché to say that Simpson’s dramatic death created the headlines in British newspapers that he craved throughout his career, and that he would have found this amusing. That may be true, but there is another twist which would have amused his sardonic mind every bit as much. In dying on the Giant of Provence, one of sport’s larger-than-life characters inadvertently annexed a whole mountain, the greatest memorial that nature itself could have put in his way. Had he wanted to be remembered, he could have chosen no better place.

  I pedalled out of the sleepy little village of Bedoin one August morning in search of Simpson. Somewhere in this huddle of stone houses on the south slope of the Ventoux, he went into a bar in search of water to cool him as he climbed, and alcohol to ease his stomach pains. As you roll past the last house and into the lavender fields, the mountain soars up to the left, the white tower of the observatory on the summit pointing to the sky like a lone finger. Close to, the mountain creates a feeling of insignificance like Ben Nevis seen from sea level in Fort William. Relatively speaking, it is only a little higher: 5,000 feet above Bedoin to Ben Nevis’s 4,400 feet from the loch-side town. The top of the Ventoux is 13 miles away as you engage bottom gear. For the moderately fit cyclist, that means at least two hours of hard toil. The record, in Simpson’s day, was just over an hour, set by the ‘angel of the mountains’, Charly Gaul of Luxembourg.

  The road does not look steep – yet – but it is gaining height deceptively through the vineyards, which will soon give way to oak woods. After four miles along the flank of the mountain, the gradient eases and the road swings to the left in a vast hairpin, the Virage Saint Estève. In the 1960s, the sweeping corner still had a massive, shallow banking of concrete setts on its inside, for the motor races which were first held up here in 1902. It has since been filled in, but the Ferraris and BMWs still race up, in the French hill climb championship, for example, between Bedoin and the summit.

  Thus far, the road has been heading east, away from the summit, which is directly above Bedoin, but the hairpin swings the road completely back on itself. For a brief second, the observatory comes into view high up above the straight ahead, framed by the trees on either side of the tarmac. It is an unpleasant reminder of how much height has to be won.

  Climbing away from Saint Estève, you soon notice something which sets the Ventoux apart. There are no hairpins to break the rhythm here as there are on other mountains. The road through the Bedoin forest snakes a little in its rock cutting, but is essentially heading straight up the flank of the mountain at somewhere between one in 10 and one in eight.

  There is no respite, no slackening of the gradient. If you were not riding through it on a bike, the forest would be a pleasant enough place. It was planted in the
late 19th century after woodcutters and farmers had turned the slopes bare, and begins with stunted oak trees lower down, which gradually give way to delicately scented cedars, fir trees and pines. Wild boars roam here and the oak woods provide some of the finest truffle-hunting in France for the locals and their dogs.

  On two wheels, this road plays with a cyclist’s mind. There are no landmarks in the forest. The road is featureless, enclosed by the trees and sometimes by shallow rock cuttings. You simply pedal, never knowing quite when the pain will end. Other cyclists may be just a few metres ahead, but you cannot increase speed to join them – an extra half a mile per hour can ask too much of your legs and lungs. The sweat pours down your face, making the eyes sting – and this is on a cool morning. Simpson came up for the last time in the heat of the afternoon, his constitution sapped by 12 days in the saddle, with lighter men forcing the pace. It is said that the air actually contains less oxygen here than higher up; because of this, in the early days of motoring, it was here that cars would break down.

  Jean Malléjac got no further than the top of the forest when the Tour came up in 1955. Foreshadowing the Simpson tragedy, the talented Breton cyclist, who had finished second in the 1953 race and was lying ninth overall, keeled over onto a pile of gravel by the road, still turning one foot which had remained strapped to its pedal. ‘Pouring with sweat, haggard and semi-comatose, he zigzagged on a road which was no longer wide enough for him,’ the journalist Jacques Augendre wrote that evening. ‘He was no longer in the material world, still less that of cycling and the Tour de France.’ He was saved, but never raced again.

  That day also ended the career of Ferdi Kubler, who had won the Tour five years earlier. The effervescent Swiss had sprinted up the foot of the mountain in his usual cavalier style, ignoring the heat, which was bad enough to melt the tarmac. He was warned by Raphael Geminiani: ‘Watch out, Ferdi, the Ventoux is not like any other col.’ Kubler replied: ‘Ferdi’s not like the other riders,’ and sprinted on. Soon, however, the gradient and the heat got the better of him. He wobbled to a halt, cursing in German and imploring the spectators to ‘push Ferdi, push Ferdi’. He did eventually get over the mountain, about 20 minutes behind the leaders, only to fall at least three times on the descent. Later in the stage he was seen entering a bar close to the stage finish in Avignon, where he downed one beer after another, then set off for the finish – the wrong way. That evening, covered in bandages, he called a press conference and announced his retirement with the words: ‘Ferdi is too old . . . Ferdi hurts too much . . . Ferdi has killed himself on the Ventoux.’

  In the horrendous heat – ‘a furnace’ says the report – half a dozen other cyclists collapsed in varying states of distress. ‘They shivered and shook and yelled inarticulately like madmen,’ reported L’Equipe. Some ran desperately for shade. The next day, worried by the near-death of one of their colleagues, many of the riders in the field threw away their ‘explosifs’, as L’Equipe called them. The day’s events, the mix of heroism and near tragedy, also inspired some of the most purple prose the Tour organizer Jacques Goddet, a director of L’Equipe, ever produced about the ‘Giant of Provence’. His daily editorial hailed ‘all the men who passed the Ventoux, without exception. Yes, all, lost in the rocky immensity of the Ventoux, baked white hot by the fiery sun, have the right to the admiration of the public, and to its esteem.’

  Malléjac’s near death, Kubler’s breakdown and the collapse of at least six others merely added to the spectacle, as Goddet saw it. ‘On this accursed ground, the battle raged, while all along the fiery mountain men fell by the wayside, beaten down by sunstroke, empty, drunk with the effort and the struggle, heaps of brave men who were once so solid and so resolute . . . Nothing stops the rhythm of the 1955 Tour de France.’

  After the forest, and the single hairpin among the trees – towards the top and known, baldly, as Le Virage du Bois, or ‘the hairpin in the wood’ – the forest thins out, and the top of the mountain shoulder can be made out: ‘the sloping desert’ as Goddet called it. At Chalet Reynard, huddled in the scree slopes, the road from Sault – the newest way up, opened in the 1950s – comes in from the right. ‘Up there, you leave planet Earth,’ wrote Goddet in 1955, and in the final metres before the café, Provence opens up behind your back wheel like a map spread out on the floor: green vineyards, honey-coloured villages, brown forests. Past the café, the road swings to the left, between poles which mark it out in the snow, and the bare scree slopes begin, with a few last vestiges of vegetation among the ‘Sahara of stones’. ‘You turn left and it’s parched white, in that heat it was like going into an oven,’ recalls Vin Denson of the day his leader died.

  The top of the Ventoux is a hostile place, formed between 100 and 130 million years ago when vast plates of limestone were pushed up beneath a vast sea. The great scree slopes are produced by constant erosion in the extreme climate: the rocks split as water on and inside them is frozen in temperatures which can plummet to minus 27 degrees centigrade, and the bits are then bounced about by the wind.

  No precise figures exist for the speeds of the Ventoux’s winds. The weather station on the summit was closed in 1960, and France’s meteorologists do not accept the accuracy of readings prior to 1980. It is said that the gusts regularly exceed 150 mph and that they once hit a world record 200 mph but the local weathermen do not take the latter figure seriously. Meteorologists stationed on the summit years ago recall that the gusts used to break their anemometer. The wind would bend iron poles, move parked cars, and blow stones as big as a man’s fist up the slope. The gap between the two hummocks that form the summit was not lightly named the Col des Tempêtes.

  For obvious reasons, there is speculation that the name Ventoux comes from the Latin for ‘windy’: ventosus. ‘Windy mountain’ seems the tidiest theory, but there are others. One is that the name comes from the word vinturi, which is Ligurian – the language once spoken up the coast to the east – for ‘mountain’. Mont Ventoux could actually mean ‘mount mountain’ or perhaps ‘mountain of mountains’. Others hold that the root is vintur, Gaulish for ‘victory’.

  The summit has its own microclimate, averaging about three or four degrees centigrade. In climatic terms, from bottom to top you travel from Provence to Lapland in just over 10 miles: from lavender fields in Bedoin to ski lifts at Chalet Reynard. The temperature can be up to 20 degrees colder between summit and foothills and this was exploited to the full in the 19th century when 30 people earned a living on the mountain producing ice, which was laid down in the winter in specially dug pits and then exported in summer as far away as Arles and Marseille.

  It is a complex, exotic ecology. Among the 60 rare plant species are the subalpines found on the summit: saxifrage from Spitzbergen and a poppy found in Greenland and the North Cape. One resident, the rare Tengmalm’s owl, is a native of Finland and northern Russia; the wild boar, salamanders and vipers complete the mix. Since 1990, much of the mountain has been a UNESCO biosphere nature reserve, with ‘its feet in the Vaucluse, its head wanderiing between the Arctic and the Antarctic’, in the words of the writer Louis Nucera.

  All the way up, I had Tour heroes for company, or at least their names written on the road in fading paint when the race finished at the summit in 2000: Jan Ullrich, Erik Zabel, Udo Bolts ‘and company’ with the vast ‘T’ logo of their Deutsche Telekom team; Richard Virenque and his fellow in drug-taking disgrace Pascal Hervé; Jaja, for Laurent Jalabert. Danes, listed one by one – Bo, Nikolai, Jesper. Every Belgian in the race, in a neat line: Mattan, Baguet, De Wouwer.

  After Chalet Reynard they were joined by the man who was to win that stage, Marco Pantani, in a perfect yellow stencil repeated every 10 yards for a mile, and, poignantly, the name Ochoa. It could have referred either to Ricardo, mown down and killed by a car while out training in March 2001, or his twin Javier, disabled in the same moment. Pantani, whose name now spells ambiguity over drugs; Ochoa, a name linked forever to two-wheeled tragedy.

&
nbsp; Men have been riding bikes up here for over a century. The road from Bedoin was opened in 1882, to great fanfare, to enable the construction of the weather station, which took another seven years. Soon after its opening, Adolphe Benoit, director of La Provence Sportive newspaper, became the first to make it up the mountain on two wheels. In his editorials, Benoit encouraged his readers to emulate him, and by 1905 they were racing up, in ‘Le Marathon du Mont Ventoux’. The marathon was won by a local woodcutter, Jacques Gabriel, a broad-shouldered young man who hauled his single-geared, fat-tyred clunker over the 19 miles from Carpentras to the summit in two hours, 29 minutes. It is a time which would shame many today, and, indeed, made the two hours I took over the shorter distance from Bedoin look pedestrian.

  The road down the other side of the mountain, the steeper northern face above Malaucène, was opened in 1932, and major cycle races such as the Tour du Vaucluse and Dauphiné Libéré began to make occasional visits from 1935. It was not, however, until well after the war, in 1951, that the Tour visited for the first time, scaling the north side, and not until the following year that the Tour men struggled up from Bedoin, led by Jean Robic, a gritty little Breton known as ‘Biquet’, the little goat.

  As well as sorting out the mountain goats from the flatland lambs, the Ventoux provided ‘monumental decor’, in Goddet’s words. It fitted well alongside such spectacular Tour staples as the rock columns of the Casse Déserte, on the Col d’Izoard in the Alps, the spiral road around and up the dead volcano of the Puy-de-Dôme in the Massif Central, and the precarious track which clung to the mountainside nearly 9,000 feet above sea level on the Col du Galibier. Conquering such places turned the Tour riders into giants. That was how the Tour’s first organizer Henri Desgrange intended it, and that is precisely what Goddet called his riders – ‘these miniscule beings climbing a fiery Calvary with a backdrop of desolation’ – when the Tour came up in 1955.