Fotheringham - Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson

Contents

About the Book

Tom Simpson was an Olympic medallist, world champion and the first Briton to wear the fabled yellow jersey of the Tour de France. He died a tragic early death on the barren moonscape of the Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour.

A man of contradictions, Simpson was one of the first cyclists to admit to using banned drugs, and was accused of fixing races, yet the dapper Major Tom inspired awe and affection for the obsessive will to win which was ultimately to cost him his life.

Put Me Back on My Bike revisits the places and people associated with Simpson to produce the definitive story of Britains greatest ever cyclist. This revised edition of William Fotheringhams classic biography, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Simpsons death, features a new foreword and postscript further exploring the truth behind the legend.

About the Author

William Fotheringham writes for the Guardian and Observer on cycling and rugby. A former racing cyclist and launch editor of procycling and Cycle Sport magazines, he has reported on sixteen Tours de France as well as Six Nations rugby and the Olympic Games. He lives Herefordshire with his wife and two children.

Also By William Fotheringham

A Century of Cycling

Fotheringhams Sporting Trivia

Fotheringhams Sporting Trivia: The Greatest

Sporting Trivia Book Ever II

Roule Britannia: A History of Britons in the

Tour de France

This book is dedicated to the late Geoffrey Nicholson, whose vision of the Tour de France inspired me as a teenager and guided me as a journalist.

William Fotheringham

PUT ME BACK ON MY BIKE

In Search of Tom Simpson

Epilogue

A Pile of letters sits on the table in Helen and Barry Hobans farmhouse high on a mid-Wales hillside: three big bundles, perhaps 150 or 200 of them. Every kind of envelope, postmarks from around the world Arizona, France, Tahiti, Germany, New Zealand, Britain. They arrived at Helen and Tom Simpsons house in Vijverstraat, Mariakerke, in the weeks after his death, as cycling fans around the world shared in Helen Simpsons grief. The message is overwhelmingly universal: the writer does not know what to do, and finds an outlet in writing to Helen.

Some letters are addressed simply Mrs Tom Simpson, Mariakerke, Belgium. One has been sent to the Saint Martha Hospital in Avignon. Another is directed care of the French Cycling Federation. They are from fellow cyclists, old ladies in rural France, the British consul in Brussels. Collectively, they are a more eloquent expression than I could ever provide of why Tom Simpson mattered and still matters.

The first one Helen and I opened was written on July 13, 1967, within hours of Simpsons death being announced, from Tony Dickson of the Catford Cycling Club in south London: Cycling is going to stand still for us all. Although fully grown I keep getting watery-eyed and would not try to conceal it. Its partly sadness, disbelief and partly pride at having been here when Tom took the world and put Britain on it too. I respect and almost love him without ever having met him.

Foreword

Put Me Back on My Bike closes with a brief look into a bag of letters. The bag belongs to Helen Hoban, Helen Simpson as was, and contains the hundreds of messages she received after her first husbands death. As a whole, there could be no better expression of how Tom Simpsons public felt about him 40 years ago.

Another batch of letters, those prompted by the publication of this biography, underlines how the emotions Simpson engendered among cycling fans have endured for four decades: amusement, admiration, love, frustration, annoyance, grief.

Such is the power of the Simpson story that it has its own momentum. In the five years since this book originally appeared, the story has moved on, with new revelations from fresh sources, and new investigations into his life and death.

Inevitably, in exploring subject matter so controversial, the book led to a few arguments on its own account. Equally inevitably, the Simpson story was not one that I could leave behind once I had finished typing. For all that he has been dead for 40 years, Simpson gets under your skin, and interviews for a later book, Roule Britannia, often led back to Tom. For the sake of completeness, all this is worth looking at, and the new material appears in a fresh final chapter.

When writing this book, I occasionally pondered the value of looking into the death and life and character of a man who had died so long ago, under such controversial circumstances. The poems, press cuttings, tall tales, rants and recollections that have arrived on my doorstep since June 2002 leave me in no doubt that it was worth the effort.

Simpson clearly still matters, immensely, to a huge number of people, and not solely to cycling fans. That vindicates my original decision to portray him as a three-dimensional character, the less likeable qualities as well as the good. Anything else would have been a disservice; as with the film that inspired this book, it is a choice between seeing the man in colour, or leaving him in black and white.

CHAPTER ONE

Something to Aim At

IT IS NOT the average Sunday afternoon at the movies. For one thing, there is something unusual about the audience at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith on a dark day in January 2001. Im perhaps the youngest of the two hundred of us. Were nearly all men, mostly aged over 50, thin and with a healthy glow, the same men you will see in the lanes of the Home Counties on Saturday mornings pedalling immaculate bikes to garden centre cafs to drink tea and gossip. Veteran cyclists.

What we have come to see is not the normal Sunday afternoon matine either. Something to Aim At has never gone on general release, and its name would mean nothing to normal members of the public or to cinema critics. It is unpolished, amateurish in places. That reflects both its budget, and the fact that it is as much a 75-minute labour of love as a piece of cinema. It is part enthusiasts film, part work of art. It tells the story of Tom Simpson, Britains greatest ever cyclist, and was made by a lifelong fan of Simpsons named Ray Pascoe. In 1967, when his hero died on Mont Ventoux in the 13th stage of the Tour de France, Pascoe set out with his camera and tape recorder, seeking out old newsreel footage, interviewing Simpsons associates and family.

The films name comes from an anecdote told by Simpsons mechanic. Simpson was out to win that Tour de France and before it started, he went into the Mercedes showroom in Ghent, where he lived. He put down a deposit on the best car they had, the one on the turntable going round in the window. He knew the thought of the car and the cash he needed for it would stay in the back of his mind and motivate him. As he said: It gives you something to aim at.

Pascoe is a balding, earnest-looking man, a former racing cyclist who saw Simpson race, loved his style, his aggression, his charisma. He can remember first meeting Simpson in 1961 when he was an awestruck young cyclist racing in Ghent, staying where all the British cyclists stayed, in Simpsons friend Albert Beuricks guest house. They met a few times over the next few years, exchanged a few words now and then. That was enough to feed Pascoes passion.

A film enthusiast and technician, Pascoe has gone through 30 years of emotional effort, a bank loan, five-figures worth of his own money, and countless unpaid hours in making his two films about Simpson: