Anquetil remained the most virulent critic of the movement, calling the anti-doping law ‘an idiocy’ in a Sunday newspaper shortly after Simpson’s death. He again tried official will power in September that year, in refusing a test immediately after setting a new hour record in Milan and delivering a sample 48 hours later, by which time it was a meaningless exercise. He and his manager Raphael Geminiani – the same Geminiani who was to be one of Dr Dumas’s fiercest critics – had a furious argument with the doctor conducting the test, and came close to throwing the medic out of the track. But the cycling authorities stood firm: Geminiani was fined, the record was never ratified. The same policy was followed when the track rider Pierre Trentin ‘broke’ the 500m world record, without a test.
As well as the new official line, Simpson’s death came in a period when dirty two-wheeled linen was washed in public with a readiness which would only be matched 30 years later after the Festina scandal of 1998. There were Anquetil’s revelations, followed by the confession of Roger Rivière – ‘I took drugs’ – across seven columns of a daily newspaper. There were the six positive tests out of 30 samples from the Tour de l’Avenir – a ‘contagion’, wrote L’Equipe. There was the string of positive tests at the world championships, and there was the death of an obscure Belgian, Roger de Wilde, in a kermesse. In normal circumstances this would have attracted little comment, but de Wilde died of a heart attack brought on by the use of amphetamines. To lose one cyclist in this way looked like bad luck; to lose two smacked of carelessness.
In late November, the UCI Congress passed new international penalties for doping – a one-month suspension for a first offence, life for a fourth. This may sound lenient in contrast with today’s sanctions, but the Simpson affair had provided the impetus for a key development: consistent rules across the world.
The cycling world which gathered in the sedate little spa of Vittel for the Tour of 1968 was changed for ever, according to Dumas, who notes that the tragedy had, in the most brutal manner possible, made the organizers and the cyclists themselves aware of the potential for disaster. ‘Firstly, they knew what they did wasn’t good; secondly, they had never weighed up the risks before.’ The 1968 Tour was billed as the ‘Tour de Santé’ (the Health Tour) – something which would also find echoes 30 years later when the first post-Festina Tour was sold as the ‘Tour of Renewal’. The ‘Tour de Santé’ was more than a mere label. ‘The Tour of 1968 established certain principles,’ wrote Geoffrey Nicholson eight years later in The Great Bike Race. ‘If a rider took dope he might be caught. If he was caught he would be punished. And if he was punished he could expect no intervention from his fellow professionals.’ One Simpson legacy, then, is the little caravan at bike race finishes bearing the words ‘contrôle anti-dopage’.
When I met Jean Stablinski to discuss Simpson, we talked about the effect his friend’s death had on the discussions of the time about doping. Stablinski felt slightly aggrieved that Simpson’s death had been exploited by the proponents of dope testing, who included Dumas, Monsieur Anti-doping, to the peloton. They had, felt ‘Stab’, used Tom’s tragedy as a vehicle to promote their case. It should, perhaps, be seen the other way round. It is hard to conceive how else the man to whom I listened on the scratchy tape on the Eurostar would have felt. Dumas had saved two of Simpson’s fellows in extremis, and he then put his fingers on the pillboxes even as he tried to bring Simpson back to life. The doctor already felt that doping was a phenomenon he could not control, which endangered the lives of the men he had to look after: here was living, or rather dying, proof of what he had feared for 12 years.
More than three decades after Simpson died, the notion that performance-enhancing drugs can be a health aid is still doing the rounds in cycling. Since Simpson’s death, however, it has been impossible to put the theory forward with any credibility. Any moral argument for the use of banned drugs died on the Ventoux on July 13, 1967.
Col de Montgenèvre, July 8, 1966
The pain is too much for the world champion. The bunch is not climbing fast, but the riders have left him behind early on the steady Alpine ascent which divides France from Italy. Simpson’s right elbow is heavily bandaged, thick padding and gauze over the deep gash with its five stitches.
Last night, after his crash as he chased the leaders at 50 miles per hour down the hairpins of the Col du Galibier, he was close to collapse with the effort and loss of blood. Yesterday, he was trying to win the Tour de France; today he has to survive. Turin lies on the other side of the mountain. There the Tour will rest for a day. He can recover. Perhaps win a stage later in the race.
But he did not sleep last night. His legs cannot turn the pedals quickly enough. He cannot use his arm to pull on the bars to help the legs. He is lopsided on the bike, no strength in his right hand. The mechanic has put padding on the handlebars, but each bump in the tarmac jars the wound. Behind him the photographers gather on their motorbikes: the world champion quitting will be a good picture. The doctor, Pierre Dumas, watches impassively through his Ray Bans, sitting on the car door with one leg dangling in the road as they grind upwards. ‘Tom,’ he says gently as they approach the summit, ‘will you be able to pull on the brakes on the descent?’
Simpson nods slowly, but three miles down towards Italy he pulls to a halt by the roadside and waits for the ambulance. He cannot hold the brake lever. He cannot descend in safety or at speed. He cannot go on. He weeps. This is not a fitting way for a world champion to leave the Tour de France. A journalist asks: ‘What will you do now?’ The answer comes in halting phrases, his voice dull. ‘I don’t know. I’m heartbroken. My season is ruined.’ There is a pause, then he adds: ‘I know I will start again though. You always start again. That’s your job.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘It is Not Natural’
WHEN IT CAME to working out why Tom Simpson died, I faced a dilemma. ‘My’ Tom had begun life as a set of racing results, some black and white images, and a strip of cine film showing a man wobbling up a hill and dying. Over time, with each fresh or rediscovered clue, he became far more tangible and three-dimensional. Every so often I would feel a connection with the man, his life and his mind: the smutty postcard he sent to George Shaw from training camp, the little diet book in the Hobans’ kitchen, the race number in Harry Hall’s study, the waste ground on the canal corner in Ghent which he never managed to build on, the pranks he played as a schoolboy.
I began to understand his sense of humour, some of his likes and dislikes, and could imagine the kind of person he must have been. He became stressed when the pressure was on between races. He loved to drive too fast. He had wild dreams, firm ambitions and dirty thoughts. He liked to talk. Life at his home revolved around catering for his thirst for success.
There seemed to be a bit of every cyclist I have known in the man. The wheeler-dealer with an eye for a bit of extra cash here and there. The cyclist who would custom-build bits for his bike. The expat professional at the top of his game who would go out on club runs with the lads when he visited home. The Jack the Lad with an eye for a pretty girl and a way with a joke. The top dog with the vicious sense of humour. The cyclist who took drugs because that was the way of cycling. The driven competitor who would never admit defeat. The teenager who was the apple of his mother’s eye. The planner who was constantly pondering his next move and the four or five after that.
I could also find little bits of myself in Simpson’s story. None of the distinguished parts struck a chord but the homesickness in France and the teenage ambition certainly did, as did the Geordie accent of his parents, who sounded like my grandparents. He had been dead for almost 35 years, but I ended up liking him and laughing with him. This did not make it particularly easy or palatable to turn myself into an amateur pathologist. Tom would be reduced to an imaginary corpse on the slab, with a set of symptoms which needed to be explained. But it had to be done, because of the ambiguities and unanswered questions which stem from his death.
The first issue was Albert Beurick’s assertion at the film show that Simpson received the wrong treatment from Dr Pierre Dumas and his colleagues, an accusation which I’d seen repeated elsewhere. There had also been the allegation that Harry Hall and Alec Taylor effectively killed Simpson by putting him back on his bike. And there were, and still are, the claims from members of the cycling community that Simpson’s death had nothing to do with amphetamines.
The starting point had to be the brief report into Simpson’s death released by the autopsy team on August 4, 1967. ‘Death was due to a cardiac collapse which may be put down to exhaustion, in which unfavourable weather conditions, an excessive workload, and the use of medicines of the type discovered on the victim may have played a part.’ The report continues: ‘The dose of amphetamine ingested by Simpson could not have led to his death on its own; but on the other hand it could have led him to go beyond the limit of his strength and thus bring on the appearance of certain troubles linked to his exhaustion.’
Behind the French legal jargon is a simple enough statement: Simpson died on July 13, 1967, because he rode up a mountain on one of the hottest days of the summer under the influence of amphetamines. That would seem self-evident, but it is all that most people have had to go on for more than three decades. The inquest was closed on September 3, 1968, with a non-lieu: there was no case to be answered by any of the people involved. The full report seems to be lost in a miasma of French bureaucracy.
Simpson’s dying actually began during the first Alpine stage three days before his collapse. Here he showed the first signs of gastric trouble, when Harry Hall had to clean his diarrhoea-spattered bike and when Colin Lewis and Vin Denson had to try to make him eat. Vomiting and diarrhoea involve considerable fluid loss from the body, causing the depletion of vital electrolytes – potassium and sodium for example – which assist the body in functioning normally. Potassium deficiency, in particular, has been linked to heart dysfunction – something which I will discuss later. The only cure is rest, accompanied by regular intake of fluids and minerals to restore the balance.
Rest has never been available in any great quantity on the Tour and, in the 1960s, liquid replacement was at a primitive stage. In Simpson’s day, dehydration was common among the cyclists, who were not even permitted to take on bottles of water from the support cars driving behind the race, because the organizers were worried that they might take illicit tows. The cyclists would start the stage with two small bottles – bidons – carried on their bikes, and they would get another two with the feed bag, the musette, which was handed up midway through. Otherwise they had to rely on kindly fans at the roadside bearing hoses, quick visits to roadside fountains, and bar raids of the kind in which Colin Lewis and Simpson himself stole brandy on that fateful day. Barry Hoban, for example, would finish stages of the Tour feeling ‘as if he’d just ridden across the desert’ and would see his fellows pouring down bottle after bottle of the free Perrier at stage finishes.
As we have seen, Simpson had a habit of running out of steam close to the end of races. He himself put this down to what the French call la fringale and English cyclists call ‘the bonk’: hypoglycaemia due to failure to eat sufficient food during the race. It is just as likely to have been dehydration or heat exhaustion: the symptoms he describes – dizziness, physical weakness, nausea, mental confusion – can be caused by either.
Among professional cyclists in the 1960s, there was a widely held belief that drinking too much water was damaging. For example, it was recommended that cyclists train in hot weather without drinking water, and that they should take salt fish with them to condition their bodies to working without water in the heat. At the training camp Simpson held for British amateurs in Belgium in April 1962, the top Belgian trainer George Ronsse offered the following advice: ‘Avoid drinking when racing, especially in hot weather. Drink as little as possible, and with the liquid not too cold. It is only a question of will power. When you drink too much you will perspire, and you will lose your strength.’ Simpson had received similar advice from George Berger back in 1958.
Brian Robinson recalls his team manager limiting him to ‘four small bottles for a long stage [of the Tour], it was frowned upon to drink more’. Nowadays, it is recognized that staving off dehydration is vital if heat exhaustion is to be avoided: eight or ten small bottles during a stage would be the norm for a Tour cyclist, together with ‘pre-loading’ – an increased intake of fluid before the start.
Simpson’s stomach trouble continued as far as the Ventoux stage – he had bouts of diarrhoea the night before – and he must already have been dehydrated when he arrived at the mountain after five and a half hours on his bike in the heat of Provence. If, as Jean Stablinski maintains, he had been advised by his soigneur to put pure carrot juice in his bottles, that would not have helped matters: carrot juice is high in vitamins, but is too concentrated to offer much in the way of fluid replacement. During the stage, he would have become even more dehydrated by drinking Coca Cola and brandy en route, from the bottles stolen in the café raids. He was looking to caffeine as a stimulant and alcohol as a painkiller, but both are also diuretics, stimulating the body to lose water. To sum up, Simpson’s dehydration would have been a key factor: his body would have been unable to produce the sweat he needed to cool down as he rode up the mountain.
Cyclists of the time seem to have been half-aware of the dangers of extreme heat: there was an unwritten convention that they did not use amphetamines or other stimulants in such conditions. The professional cyclists of the 1960s cannot have known it, but this corresponds with what science says about ‘speed’. Amphetamines have a double whammy effect on body heat: their use leads to a temporary increase in the body’s core temperature and at the same time it also impairs the body’s capacity to regulate this internal heat. The body gets hotter, but it becomes unable to deal with this efficiently. This would be unsafe under any conditions, but it is a highly dangerous state in extremely hot weather.
There is a third reason why amphetamines are unsafe. They are not physical stimulants but a mental pick-me-up which distorts the central nervous system to produce a feeling of euphoria, self-confidence, alertness and invincibility. Amphetamines do not give the body more energy, or increase physical capacity in any way, but merely make the mind push the body harder. They distort the user’s perception of reality, overriding physical and mental warning signals from the body. A threat of external danger or physical damage is observed, but ignored. This is perhaps why so many of them were produced for British airmen during the Second World War, and why in some quarters they were credited with having won the Battle of Britain. It is also, of course, precisely why a tired cyclist would take them.
As heat exhaustion sets in, you experience symptoms such as nausea, muscle weakness, lightheadedness and headaches. They are warning signals that the body’s heat regulation mechanisms are being dangerously overloaded. An undrugged person will usually have no choice but to slow down; the amphetamine-taker is more likely to attempt to continue in spite of these symptoms, or will simply not notice them.
Alcohol, too, affects a person’s judgement. If Simpson had taken the ‘half of a half bottle’ described by Colin Lewis, he would probably have come up positive in a police breathalyser test. If, as seems likely, he topped up at the bottom of the mountain, he would have been climbing under the influence of two mood-altering drugs. This would have been on top of the ability to ride himself into a state of collapse which he had shown from an early age.
The first of Simpson’s ‘troubles’ would have been an increase in his internal body temperature as he rode up the mountain. Core body temperature rises during sustained intense effort. When a cyclist rides up a mountain in hot weather, the effect of the heat is made worse by the slow pace, which means there is less air flowing over the body and sweating is less effective as a means of controlling temperature. No official records are available for the heat on the mountain that day, but there is a much-quoted apoch
ryphal report of a thermometer reaching 54 degrees centigrade and bursting at Chalet Reynard, the large café-restaurant two-thirds of the way up the mountain. The heat would have been intense, and on a hot day in Provence that means at least 40 degrees.
The body of a trained athlete is usually able to deal with conditions such as this. On his first ascent of the Ventoux during the 1965 Tour, on a slightly cooler day than he would encounter two years later, Simpson himself noticed how much he perspired. ‘It was the only time I have got off my bike and my pants have fallen down. They were soaked and heavy with sweat and I had to wring out my socks because the sweat was running into my shoes.’ This perfectly illustrates the copious sweat which the body produces to counter its temperature rise caused by cycling up a mountain in the afternoon heat. July 13, 1967, was a far hotter day but, in contrast, when Harry Hall laid Simpson by the roadside, he noticed that his skin was dry. Sweating is the most important way in which the body loses heat: by the time he keeled over, Simpson was no longer able to produce any sweat at all.
The human body needs a stable environment to function properly and remain alive. This is maintained by a process of delicate reactions known as homeostasis, which keeps the internal workings of the body within certain limits, enabling it to counter external factors such as heat, cold, dehydration and altitude. But what the body cannot cope with are extremes – very low or very high external temperatures, or the rarefied air of high altitude, for example – or a combination of factors all at once. As he climbed up the wooded lower slopes of the mountain, desperately trying to stay with the early leaders, Julio Jimenez and Raymond Poulidor, Simpson’s body overheated like a car engine with a malfunctioning radiator. The effect would have been devastating.
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