Tom Simpson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Nickname | Tommy |
| Date of birth | November 30, 1937 |
| Date of death | July 13, 1967 (aged 29) |
| Country |  England |
| Team information | |
| Discipline | Road |
| Role | Rider |
| Rider type | All-rounder |
| Professional team(s) | |
| 1959-1967 | Peugeot-BP |
| Major wins | |
| 1961 Ronde van Vlaanderen 1963 Bordeaux-Paris 1964 Milan-Sanremo 1965  World Road Race Champion1965 Giro di Lombardia 1967 Paris-Nice 1967 Two stages of Vuelta a España |
|
| Infobox last updated on: | |
| 20 September 2007 | |
Tom Simpson (30 November 1937 - 13 July 1967) was an English road racing cyclist who died of exhaustion on the slopes of Mont Ventoux during the 13th stage of the Tour de France in 1967. The post mortem found that he had taken amphetamines and alcohol, a diuretic combination which proved fatal when combined with the hot conditions, the notoriously hard climb of the Ventoux and a pre-existing stomach complaint.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Simpson was the youngest of the six children of coalmine worker Tom Simpson senior and his wife Alice, and was born in Haswell, County Durham. Tom senior worked at nearby South Hetton Colliery, while Alice ran Haswell Workingmen's Club. After World War II, the Simpson family moved to Harworth in north Nottinghamshire, another mining village, where Simpson grew up and acquired his interest in cycling. He attended the village school and later Worksop Technical College and in 1954 was an apprentice draughtsman at an engineering company in Retford.
As a cyclist he joined first Harworth and District Cycling Club and later Rotherham's Scala Wheelers. In 1954, still with the Harworth club, he wrote for advice to the former Tour rider, Charles Pélissier, who was running a training camp on the Mediterranean coast in France. Simpson wrote:
- Dear Sir, I am writing to you hoping you will give me some advice on racing and training for the 1955 season. I am 16 years old, and have raced on the track and also massed start road races, competing in between, in time trials. In my first track event I gained 3rd place, in road races I have won 2 prizes and in time trials I have won 4 prizes. My positions in time trials were 11th, 8th, 15th, 7th. I have done 25 miles in 1hr 34 seconds, which is the fastest time for a 16 year old in England this year.
- I would like to know, if you think it is advisable to compete in so many different events, and also what greatest mileage I should race. I have been told that if I race often, I will burn myself out, and will be no good when I get older, do you think this is true. Yours in sport, Thomas Simpson, HARWORTH & DIST. C.C..[1] There is no evidence of a reply from Pélissier, who didn't speak English, although the writer J. B. Wadley of Sporting Cyclist suggested in his magazine in 1965 that he may well have done.
By his late teens, Simpson was winning local time trials. He was then advised to try track cycling, and he travelled regularly to Fallowfield Stadium in Manchester to compete, winning medals in the national 4000m individual pursuit discipline. Still aged only 19, he was part of the Great Britain team pursuit squad which won a bronze medal at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Two years later, he won a silver medal for England in the individual pursuit at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff.
In April 1959, Simpson set off to live in the Breton fishing port of Saint-Brieuc, France, hoping to win enough local amateur races to get noticed by a professional cycling team. It was in Saint-Brieuc that he met Helen Sherburn, whom he later married (on 3 January 1960).
[edit] Professional cyclist
Within two months, Simpson had won five races and in July 1959 was offered terms by two professional teams; he decided to join the Rapha Geminiani team, which already had a British cyclist, Brian Robinson, in its squad. His first event as a professional was a small stage race, the Tour de l'Ouest (Tour of the West) in which he won two stages and finished 18th overall - a major achievement for a new pro who would normally be expected to act as a domestique to the team's leader.
He competed in the 1959 World Championships in the Netherlands in the individual pursuit and professional road race, finishing fourth in both events, just out of the medals. Believing himself not ready for the greatest cycling challenge, he turned down an invitation to ride in the 1959 Tour de France. He did, though, ride the following year, finishing 29th, and taking third place on stage 3. 1960 also saw him compete in his first Classics: he had top ten finishes in La Flèche Wallonne and Paris-Roubaix - he led the latter for around 40km before running out of energy and being overtaken less than 10k from the finish, ending up 9th.
In April 1961, however, Simpson achieved his first Classic victory. After losing at Roubaix the previous year, he demonstrated his liking for races run over rough cobbles by winning the tough Ronde van Vlaanderen after a two-man sprint at the finish. That year he also finished 5th in the early season Paris-Nice stage race, and 9th in the world championship, but he abandoned the Tour de France on stage 3, the season being badly affected by an early season knee injury.
In 1962, he became the first Briton to wear the maillot jaune as leader of the Tour de France (after stage 12) and eventually finished 6th overall (which was to prove his highest placing on general classification, and was the highest final placing by a Briton until Robert Millar's fourth place in 1984), losing his hold on third spot after a crash. Earlier in the season, he again demonstrated his liking for the tough Belgian Classics, finishing 5th in the Ronde van Vlaanderen and 6th in the Gent-Wevelgem.
In terms of Classic performances, 1963 and 1965 were probably Simpson's best years. Riding in the distinctive black-and-white colours of the Peugeot BP team in 1963, he won the gruelling motor-paced event Bordeaux-Paris, was second in Paris-Brussels and Paris-Tours, third in the Ronde van Vlaanderen, 8th in Paris-Roubaix, and 10th in both La Flèche Wallonne and Giro di Lombardia.
Simpson won the Milan-Sanremo Classic in 1964, finished fourth (again) in the world championship and 10th in Paris-Roubaix. He also came close to a stage victory in the Tour de France, finishing second on stage 9, and ending up 14th overall.
In 1965, Simpson became the first Briton to win the world professional road racing crown, outsprinting Germany's Rudi Altig at San Sebastián in Spain after the two had broken away with around 40km to go. He also won the Italian Autumn Classic, the Giro di Lombardia (only the second time that the holder of the distinctive rainbow jersey had also won in Italy - a feat first achieved by Alfredo Binda in the 1920s), and picked up third places in La Flèche Wallonne and Bordeaux-Paris, 6th in Paris-Roubaix and 10th in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Showing that he still had the legs for track racing, he partnered Peter Post to victory in the six-day race at Brussels.
His achievements were also recognised in the UK. Simpson ended the year by winning UK Sports Journalists' Association's award of Sportsman of the Year (following Reg Harris - the only other cyclist to win the honour), and he also won the 1965 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award - and remains the only cyclist ever to have won this accolade. Within UK cycling, Simpson also won the prestigious Bidlake Memorial Prize in 1965.
A stage victory in the Tour de France still eluded Simpson. He twice finished second, on stages 12 and 13, of the 1966 Tour, but eventually abandoned the event on stage 17: he had attacked on the climb of the Col du Galibier but crashed heavily on the following descent and was unable even to hold his cycle's handlebars. 1966, overall, was something of a write-off for Simpson, who missed much of the season due to a skiing injury incurred the previous winter.
Making up for the disappointments of the previous season, Simpson looked in fine form in early 1967. He won the early season Paris-Nice stage race (taking two second places and a third place on different days) and the Tour of Sardinia. He also rode in the Vuelta a España for the first time, collecting two stage victories en route to an eventual 33rd place overall.
[edit] Death
At the start of the 1967 Tour de France, Simpson was optimistic that he could make an impact on the event. After the first week he was sixth overall, but a stomach bug began to affect his form, and he lost vital time in a stage including the Col du Galibier. In Marseille, at the start of stage 13 on Thursday 13 July, he was still suffering the effects as the race headed into Provence on a blisteringly hot day, and was seen to drink brandy during the early parts of the stage. In those years, tour organisers limited each rider to four bottles (bidons) of water, circa 2 litres - the effects of dehydration being poorly understood. During races, riders often raided roadside bars and cafes for drinks, and filled their bottles from fountains.
On the day's main climb, Mont Ventoux, Simpson broke away early, but was soon passed by the eventual stage winner, Jan Janssen, and four others. About two kilometres from the summit, Simpson began to zig-zag erratically across the road, eventually falling against an embankment. His team manager, Alec Taylor, said later in Cycling that he feared for Simpson less then than in the way he expected him to descend the other side of the mountain. The rushing air would revive him but Taylor feared that Simpson, whom he described in his article as a madcap descender, would overdo things and crash.
While his team-car helpers wanted him to retire from the race, Simpson insisted on being put back on his cycle and he continued for another 500m or so before again beginning to falter; he toppled unconscious into the arms of his helpers, still gripping his handlebars. A motorcycle policeman summoned the race doctor, Pierre Dumas, who took over team officials' first attempts at saving Simpson, including mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Dumas massaged Simpson's heart and gave him oxygen. A race helicopter then took Simpson to a nearby hospital but Simpson was declared dead soon after his arrival. Two tubes of amphetamines and a further empty tube were found in the rear pocket of his racing jersey.
Simpson's last words, as remembered by the team mechanic, Harry Hall (d. 2007), and by the manager, Alec Taylor (d. 1997), were "Go on, go on!"[2] The words "Put me back on my bike!" were invented by Sid Saltmarsh, covering the event for The Sun and Cycling, who was not there at the time.[3]
On the next day, the other riders were reluctant to continue racing so soon after Simpson's death and asked the organisers for a postponement. The French rider Jean Stablinski proposed instead that the race would go on but that one of the British riders would be allowed to win the stage. This honour went to Barry Hoban.
[edit] Aftermath
For a while, nothing happened. Then a British reporter, J. L. Manning, broke the news:
- Tommy Simpson rode to his death in the Tour de France so doped that he did not know he had reached the limit of his endurance. He died in the saddle, slowly asphyxiated by intense effort in a heatwave after taking methyl-amphetamine drugs and alcoholic stimulants forbidden by French law. This information was given to me at authorised interviews with senior police officers during a week's investigation in the south of France... Police reports were that three glass tubes were found in his racing jersey satchel at Avignon, where he was taken after his death. Two were empty. The third contained tablets.
- The next day, police at Sète, a port west of Marseilles, found a carton among Simpson's luggage in the British team's baggage car. More drugs were in it. Two of the drugs in the tubes and carton were named by the police as Stenamina and Tonedrin... My conclusion is that Simpson's death can be attributed in part to failure to use French law to discover drugs in sports contests. There has been no official denial that the first dope tests for 15 days on the Tour de France riders were at Marseilles. It was from there that Simpson set out on his last ride. He was not tested.[4]
Manning was a serious and well-respected journalist. His exposure, the first time a formal connection had been made between drugs and Simpson's death, set off a wave of similar reporting in Britain and elsewhere. The following month, Manning went further, in a piece headed "Evidence in the case of Simpson who crossed the frontier of endurance without being able to know he had 'had enough'":
- The question of whether Tommy Simpson's death in the Tour de France might have been prevented has one clear answer. Yes, and it should have been. Three days after this year's race, the French authorities announced that next October and November a French and Italian rider would be prosecuted for alleged doping offences in last year's Tour. France had surrendered the need to rigorously prevent doping to the discreet requirement of not tackling it on a big tourist occasion until a year had safely passed. It takes two days at most to analyse samples: it took a year for France to authorise prosecutions. What devious explanation can be expected? Worse than missing the opportunity of warning this year's riders that the law would be applied, strictly, was the failure systematically to apply it. Thus, those riders in this year's Tour, Simpson among them, who were prepared to take drugs would not have risked doing so if prosecutions were known to be pending and random tests of at least one cyclist from every team had been arranged daily.
- ...Is France trying to hush up the scandals of the Tour? I say yes. The first act of hushing up is not to attempt detection, let alone waiting a year before taking action. How much husher can you get?
One consequence of Manning and those who followed was that the Tour organisers billed the following year's Tour as the Tour of Health, starting symbolically at Vittel, a town which produced mineral water.
In 2001, the magazine Cycling named him Britain's No. 2 rider of the previous century, saying it was the drugs connection that made him come second to Chris Boardman.[5]
[edit] Memorials
There is a granite memorial to Simpson near the spot where he died, paid for by British cyclists. The magazine Cycling opened a memorial fund through its editor, Alan Gayfer, and the managing editor, Peter Bryan, to install a stained glass window in the church at Harworth in Nottinghamshire, which had been Simpson's last home in Britain. When that proved beyond the reach of the fund, Gayfer approached the authorities in Bédoin at the foot of Mont Ventoux for permission to erect a granite monument, sculpted by a local craftsman. Bryan said in the magazine Cycling Plus that the memorial fund had been opened so fast that the usual legal procedures had not been followed, with the consequence that nobody now knew who owned the memorial or the land on which it stood. It fell into a poor condition even though it was occasionally swept clean by bar-owners in Bédoin. It is now in the care of British cyclists and riders who pass the memorial frequently leave tributes such as drinking bottles and caps.
Simpson's body was brought back to Nottinghamshire and interred in Harworth's cemetery. A small museum dedicated to his achievements - opened in August 2001 by Tour de France legend Lucien van Impe - can be found in the Harworth and Bircotes sports and social club. There is also a smaller version of the Mont Ventoux Simpson Memorial on the main road outside the Harworth and Bircotes sports and social club, which was erected after funds were raised by local cyclists, including many members of the Harworth and District Cycling Club (Tommy's first club) to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Simpson's death in 1997.
The documentary Wheels Within Wheels follows actor Simon Dutton (best known as Simon Templar, aka The Saint) on his quest as he meets up with people and places from the life of Tom Simpson. The documentary was made over four years, and chronicles Dutton, who, in a mid-life crisis decides to go off in the tracks of Simpson.
[edit] Achievements: a summary
Simpson's professional achievements include four Classic one-day victories:
- 1961 - Winner, Ronde van Vlaanderen
- 1962 - Maillot jaune for a short time in the Tour de France
- 1963 - Winner, Bordeaux-Paris
- 1964 - Winner, Milan-Sanremo
- 1965 - World road race champion
- 1965 - Winner, Giro di Lombardia
- 1967 - Winner, Paris-Nice
- 1967 - Winner of two stages of Vuelta a España
In addition to these victories, Simpson frequently finished in the top ten of Classics, and won numerous criteriums and other events.
As an amateur he also won an Olympic Games team pursuit bronze medal (1956), silver in the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games individual pursuit, silver (1956) and gold (1958) medals in the British 4000m individual pursuit championship, and was British League of Racing Cyclists hill climb champion in 1957, picking up a silver medal in the same event the following year.
[edit] External links
- Complete Palmarès
- Video of Simpson's final climb (online on April 28, 2006)
- Wheels Within Wheels documentary
[edit] References
- ^ Private letter, 22 November 1954
- ^ Death of a British Tommy, BBC Radio 4, 1987
- ^ Fotheringham, William (2002) Put me back on my bike, Yellow Jersey, London
- ^ Manning, J. L., Simpson was killed by drug, Daily Mail, UK, 31 July 1967
- ^ Cycling, UK, 22 December 2001
- William Fotheringham (2002). Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-224-06187-9.
- William Fotheringham (2002) Put me back on my bike: In search of Tom Simpson (Yellow Jersey Press, London)
"Death of a British Tommy", pres: Les Woodland, BBC Radio 4, UK, 1987
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Mary Rand |
BBC Sports Personality of the Year 1965 |
Succeeded by Bobby Moore |
| Sporting positions | ||
| Preceded by Jan Janssen |
World Road Racing Champion 1965 |
Succeeded by Rudi Altig |
