Put Me Back on My Bike

by William Fotheringham

  The French magistrate’s report into Simpson’s death lists alcohol as one of the contributory factors, and Lewis accepts that he is responsible for giving Simpson the cognac, although the British leader made a second café stop at the foot of the climb, where he drank more alcohol. He accepts the idea that what he gave Simpson may have helped to kill him, but points out that his leader knew what he was doing. His job was to grab what he could: Simpson did not have to take the bottle off him.

  As a new professional, Lewis lost his innocence in the most devastating way, going from admiration to grief in the space of two weeks. Now, he cannot resolve the contradictions with which he was presented by living alongside Simpson and coping with his death. ‘I’ve got a lot of respect for the guy. The guy was a champion. He was destined to be a champion. He had a spirit which was unquenchable, but that spirit was his own downfall.’

  Another customer has driven down from Swansea with his six-year-old son. After getting dad his bike, Lewis brings him into the workshop to point out a second-hand, scaled-down racing machine. After a few adjustments, father and son take the bike for a small test ride, and the boy returns to be told that, if he behaves, perhaps Father Christmas will oblige in due course. ‘I got a load of these a few years ago, they don’t make them any more and they are hard to find,’ explains Lewis. ‘I sell them on condition that they come back when the child grows out of them. They’re unbeatable – once you get a child on them, they’re hooked.’ The two extremes are rubbing shoulders again. Lewis won two national championships, was one of the best cyclists Britain produced, yet he is still worried about making children ride bikes.

  Faced with the satisfaction Lewis takes in planting another little acorn at the bottom of the cycling tree and the lack of cynicism it reveals in him, I feel a little ashamed at the scepticism which the spate of drug scandals of the last few years has engendered in me. In spite of all he saw and felt in 1967, Lewis has clearly not lost his faith in the physical and spiritual value of riding a bike, and racing a bike. Whatever Simpson felt he had to do to get to the top, whatever illusions Lewis and the rest of us have lost, that at least endures.

  Como, Italy, October 16, 1965

  The world champion is alone as he circles the banked concrete velodrome in the town alongside the great lake north of Milan. Tom Simpson is alone, with the field far behind as he savours victory in the Giro di Lombardia, the final one-day Classic of the 1965 cycling season. Alone, as his childhood hero Fausto Coppi was on each of the five times he won this 165-mile race through the mountains that surround the lake. Like the ‘champion of champions’, Simpson is ‘un uomo solo al comando’: on his own and in control. The best cyclists in the world have been powerless to follow him.

  In his white jersey with the rainbow stripes around his chest, he is easy to recognize when he rides in the bunch; when the world champion makes his move, the whole peloton knows, as they knew when Simpson attacked in the previous weekend’s Classic, Paris–Tours. He was easily spotted, and they all followed. The terrain is tougher today, and Simpson made his move early, with 125 miles and four mountain passes to go before the finish. His attack drew a dozen of the strongest in the field. One by one, they weakened and dropped off the pace until only the Italian Gianni Motta was left. On the little climb of San Fermo della Battaglia, nine miles from the finish, he too gave his best. It will be three minutes until the little group which is chasing Simpson comes onto the track.

  The ‘tifosi’ packed around the track know they are witnessing history. Only one world champion has won Lombardy before, one of their own greats, Alfredo Binda, 38 years ago. Few have won it in such style. Among the crowd is Simpson’s wife Helen. Five weeks ago she broke the sofa in their house in Ghent as she jumped for joy when he became world champion. She rarely sees her husband race, but today she can share in the most crushing win in his career.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Past is a Foreign Country

  A TAPE-RECORDING OF a dead man’s voice, crackling into my ear for three hours as the French and English countryside sped past the high-speed train. A man with his own little ways of talking, a man laughing the occasional guttural chuckle, asking his companion if he had enough to drink, the clink of water jug or wine bottle on the glasses. Dr Pierre Dumas’s voice was there in my ear, still living in the cassette recorder. That, however, was as close as I would ever get to knowing the Tour de France’s former doctor, who fought to save Tom Simpson’s life, who took a large amount of the blame for his death. But I could feel the man’s humour, his relative detachment after 20 years away from cycling, even if I could barely put a face to the deep voice.

  In reading an interview or watching it on television, the editing process invariably gets in the way: the writer edits the quotes, the sub-editor cleans them up again. This was different: it was eavesdropping on an uncut conversation, and, like any eavesdropper, I felt I was intruding. And it was frustrating to hear a colleague, Philippe Brunel of L’Equipe, doing something I wished I could do myself. Sometimes I wished Philippe had asked a different question. I would wonder why he had not pressed a point home here, not sought a specific answer there.

  In every photograph of Simpson dying on the Ventoux roadside, Dumas is a central figure: stubbled face, mousy hair, his gut bulging under a black string vest, his climbing boots and running shorts spread in a variety of bizarre angles across the rocks as he crouches to blow air into the lungs of the inert cyclist.

  As I trawled through back copies of cycling magazines of the time, something else struck me. There were other pictures of the doctor doing the same thing to other cyclists in 1955 and 1965. Both his posture as well as the props – oxygen mask, oxygen cylinder – he used were identical. The cyclists, Jean Malléjac and Lucien Aimar, looked the same as Simpson did – inert, comatose – and had come close to the same fate as Simpson. Dumas looked younger and thinner when tending to Malléjac, but that was the only difference. Obviously, when the doctor ran up to Simpson’s body, took the pulse, and applied the oxygen mask, he had been there before. It was not a new experience for him, until he realized – within a couple of minutes – that Simpson was not going to get up.

  Simpson’s death could not be seen as an isolated incident: it was one of a series of collapses on mountains on the Tour during the 1960s. This one happened to end in a fatality. As the doctor responsible for the physical well-being of cyclists at the race from 1952 to 1969, Dumas was the man best placed to put the tragedy in its context. Largely forgotten by the world of cycling, Dumas gave one major interview before he died in February 2000; to Brunel, the chief cycling writer at L’Equipe, a cycling historian who was fascinated by the Simpson tragedy. Brunel had crossed the Atlantic from Mexico in January 1999 solely to meet the doctor, then a semi-invalid living in retirement in the outskirts of Paris.

  On my behalf, Philippe had hunted high and low among the piles of cycling magazines and books in his central Paris apartment. What he had found for me were three small tapes of one conversation which connected three different aspects of the Simpson story. There was the visual evidence of men lying prone by the mountain roads, the unseen world of syringes and pills, and the official attempts to stop the cyclists from using drugs. Dumas was the missing link. The young doctor should have been on a climbing holiday in the Alps in July 1952. He was a black belt in judo, an instructor at the ENSEP teacher training college who knew nothing of the Tour de France, and the offer of the doctor’s job on the race came at short notice. He cancelled the trip and was immediately thrust into a small, enclosed world, far removed from the sprawling enterprise of today. The Tour was a rudimentary affair, a hamlet compared to today’s small town: ‘rustic’ is the word the doctor uses continuously to describe it.

  The race’s intimacy meant that Dumas could quickly get to know his charges: the riders, the men who looked after them, the tiny press corps, the organizers. Medical back-up was minimal, so he was welcomed by the cyclists. Using performance-enhancing substances wa
s not banned, so the men he looked after had no inhibitions about letting him into their secrets. ‘They told me everything, because they did not have the impression that they were doing anything wrong.’

  Dumas arrived in cycling close to the end of ‘the witch doctor time’, as he called it. This had been a period of almost complete ignorance in matters medical and physiological, in essence little changed from the years between the wars. The bike racers came from what he calls delicately ‘a certain milieu: they were country boys, blacksmiths’. His implication is that they were poorly educated.

  The men who looked after them were the soigneurs, whose ‘value was in their valise’, as Dumas’s pun has it. Their status and income depended on the magical remedies they carried in their suitcases. These might be medicines bought for one old franc and sold on for 100 with the label scratched off. ‘It was all part of the mystery,’ says Dumas. Among other things, they would provide la topette – a small bottle containing a stimulant. The French word is still used today to mean doping. In one soigneur’s case, the mix was coca, cola and quina – the active agent in quinine.

  Attention to hygiene was minimal: Dumas saw riders ‘injecting each other with syringes which had just been used by a friend, with dirty hands’. Saddle sores on the crutch were common owing to dirt from the roads and the lack of basic hygiene; they led to a condition which Dumas called ‘the third testicle’, a large swelling caused by infection of the perineum. Training was rudimentary: if one cyclist had ridden 5,000 kilometres before a race, he was felt to be better prepared than a colleague who had covered a thousand fewer. Diet came down to volume as well and, as a result, the cyclists ate like weightlifters. Dumas would watch the Tour men consuming 20 hard-boiled eggs at a sitting. The more fuel in the machine, the better. There was no understanding of how the body consumed energy. To combat hypoglycaemia, in French cycling slang la fringale, a kilo of sugar or honey might be consumed at a time.

  As for stimulants, ‘the cyclists took everything they were offered,’ says Dumas. ‘It didn’t matter what they took, as long as they believed in it.’ In the suitcases and on hotel room tables were numerous arrays of flasks, boxes of pills, suppositories, ampoules and syringes. Dumas’s charges took extract of bee’s or toad’s venom, which were popular cures for rheumatism; pure cola, which was a remedy dating back to the 1900s; and ether, which could be smelt from 60 feet away. Each had his own remedies: Jean Stablinski, for example, would take two egg yolks in a glass of port.

  Shortly after Dumas’s arrival at the Tour de France, the philosophy, and, as a consequence, the drugs, gradually began to change, as the cyclists and their advisers became better educated. As the doctor puts it: ‘Then we came to a more civilised period, when they began to read the Vidal [a popular medical directory]. They began to think about the problem, as well as using the information which was handed down.’

  Then followed what Dumas calls ‘the semi-scientific period, roughly speaking Jacques Anquetil’s time’. Anquetil raced from 1955 to 1969: Simpson’s career fell within those years. This was a period of transition, when basic medical information was becoming widely available, but its application to cycling was still empirical, and the old philosophy of ‘the more the better’ was still followed. Simpson, with his thirst for knowledge and his drive for the latest remedies, fits into this picture. In place of the witch doctors’ brews came what Dumas terms ‘the Anquetil cocktail’: painkiller, stimulant, sleeping pill. Morphine or palfium, which was given to terminal cancer patients to ease their agony, was injected into the riders’ legs to deaden the muscle pain.

  ‘During the race?’ asks an incredulous Brunel. ‘Oh! Enormément,’ comes the deadpan answer. Brunel cannot believe what he is hearing: ‘You saw them inject themselves in front of you?’ Dumas doesn’t see the question as shocking, doesn’t take Brunel’s surprise on board. ‘They weren’t embarrassed,’ maintains the doctor, who would have witnessed it from his car or the motorbike he sometimes used, immediately behind the bunch. And there were no rules to prevent it.

  The opiates deadened leg pains, but they slowed the rest of the system down: a stimulant was needed in order to counteract this. It was usually amphetamine, produced in vast quantities during the Second World War to keep the Armed Forces awake during operations – 72 million for the RAF, for example – and used in slimming pills by the 1950s and 1960s. Caffeine, in tablets and suppositories, was also used.

  The stimulant’s effects might last long after the stage finish, which meant that sleep was often impossible; hence the sleeping pill, usually Gardenal. And there were the ‘lung-openers’, such as Solucamphre, injected to improve the breathing. There were no rules against this, and no stigma about the issue, so drugs could be used in quantity. During one Tour, Dumas intercepted a package addressed to one well-known soigneur, Julien Schramm, who worked with Anquetil. It contained 50 ampoules of 20cc of the popular amphetamine Tonedron, known universally as ‘Tonton’. (Its twin sister, Pervitin, is ‘Tintin’.)

  Schramm told Dumas the capsules were for his personal consumption – ironically, the same defence Willy Voet would use 30 years later when he was stopped by customs at the start of the Festina affair. ‘I offered to inject him myself,’ says Dumas. ‘He refused, and I said, “You’re a little shit you are: it’s OK for the other guys, but not for you.”’

  Among the cyclists, there was, Dumas maintains, little awareness of the potential risks of doping. ‘If someone won a stage using a certain product, they all wanted it. They had no idea what they were doing. It was like when someone has a toothache and their neighbour says “Ah, I’ve got this medicine in my cupboard, some of that will make you better.”’ Ignorance, the desire to finish the race, and the need for cash overrode any appeals for caution or inner doubts.

  The young doctor’s medical skills were put to the test in ways which now seem completely sickening. If one of Dumas’s charges had a serious crash and had to be taken to hospital, he would have to find the soigneur before the cyclist could be treated. It was necessary to find out what drugs the patient already had in his system, to avoid overdoses and bad reactions. ‘It was OK as long as the cyclist was conscious and could tell me; if he was in a coma we would have to work out the dosages ourselves.’

  As a smattering of badly applied science entered the minds and methods of the Tourmen, Dumas soon developed the feeling that he had no control over what they did. In 1960, he found the race winner Gastone Nencini lying in his bed with a drip infusing primitive hormones into both arms – and smoking a cigarette. He had a similar shock in 1962 on the day after Simpson lost the yellow jersey at Superbagnères in the Pyrenees, when 20 riders fell ill in an epidemic known as ‘the rotten fish affair’. The mass infection was blamed on eating bad fish; Dumas realized that this was not a credible explanation, and put it down to a single soigneur giving all the riders a drug which had affected their health. On the tape, Dumas’s reaction to the practices he saw leaves nothing to the imagination: ‘I was horrified. All this stuff scared me shitless.’

  This is the world in which Simpson arrived as a new professional in 1959. In English racing, by and large, drug-taking did not happen. The financial rewards to make it worthwhile were not there; there was no culture of soigneurs with magic remedies; there was a history of Corinthian amateurism in the sport. All Simpson’s English contemporaries speak of seeing drug-taking going on when they arrived in Europe, and being shocked by it. ‘It was a big jolt, seeing it right in front of you,’ says Arthur Metcalfe. ‘Living in England you didn’t hear much about it. You would hear rumours of lads who were taking stuff, but you never saw anything, you didn’t actually discuss it.’ He adds: ‘I remember a criterium in Belgium, when we were all lined up at the start and the police drove up. I can remember the sound now: click, click, click, click, all the pills dropping onto the ground.

  Jean Malléjac was the doctor’s first big scare. The Breton collapsed by the roadside on the lower slopes of Mont Ventoux on an afternoon of
searing heat in 1955. ‘It chilled my blood,’ says Dumas. The cyclist remained unconscious for a quarter of an hour, laid out on a blanket on the rocks. Dumas had to prise his jaws apart to save him. He gave him oxygen and injected the stimulant solucamphre to restart his heart. At last he came to in what Dumas described as ‘a state of delirium tremens’.

  Placed in the race ambulance to be taken to hospital, Malléjac ‘talked, waved his arms, yelled, asked the way to the finish, and wanted to be let out’, reported the newspaper L’Equipe the next day, adding blandly that he had had to be tied down for his own safety. According to one account, Dumas had to use his skills as a judo black belt to pacify the cyclist.

  The Tour organizers empowered Dumas to open an inquiry and issued a statement calling upon teams, their managers and their soigneurs to avoid ‘the use of certain products issued without prescriptions’. The only outcome was that a soigneur who worked for Malléjac’s trade team, Terrot, was requested to leave the race, although the organizers were unwilling to link this to the incident. All Dumas could do was express his concerns and hope that persuasion might work. The men who ran the race preferred to push the issue under the carpet.

  Just two years before Simpson’s death came the clearest warning signal of all – events on a baking hot afternoon during July 1965 on the Aubisque pass, in the Pyrénées. André Bayssière and Charles Grosskost, two of the riders in the Tour de l’Avenir, the amateur race run alongside the Tour de France on a shorter course, fell by the wayside. In the Tour itself, the rider who was to win in 1966, Lucien Aimar, and his Dutch teammate, Arie Den Hartog, did precisely the same thing.

  In each case, the sequence of events was the same as it had been with Malléjac and would be with Simpson: the riders were climbing strongly when they lost control, zigzagged across the road, and then collapsed unconscious in the gutter. With Aimar, there was a surreal note: he had begun walking up the mountain pushing his bike once he was unable to ride – and he dropped his bike shortly before he fell. The key development was that both Grosskost and Bayssière admitted using amphetamines – Aimar did not and none were found on him. Dumas, reportedly outraged by the whole episode, had examined Grosskost and Bayssière’s baggage, and said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t funny any more.’ The use of drugs had become illegal on June 1 that year, so there were consequences: the two cyclists were given bans.