Two great mountain ranges are always traversed by the Tour, the Alps and Pyrenees, and two solitary volcanic peaks are sometimes climbed. An ideal Tour would include both Puy de Dôme and Mont Ventoux, but the ideal is rarely achieved; the two have only been climbed twelve times each, and only twice, in 1952 and 1967, did the parcours include both. Although not as high as the great Alpine passes, they are both frightening, psychologically as much as physically, leaping up as they do from their surroundings, almost as though defying anyone to climb them, on foot or by vélo.
In summer the searing heat of Provence is tempered by the winds of the Vaucluse where Mont Ventoux stands and where mistral meets tramonte with alarming effect. As Julian Barnes says, the popular etymology in which Ventoux derives from vent or wind is all too appropriate (though false: the roots of ‘ventoux’ are in the Ligurian ven- for mountain, so that ‘Mont Ventoux’ with disappointing pleonasm means ‘Mount Mountain’). The strongest gust of wind ever recorded on Earth was on the peak here in February 1967, at 320 k.p.h. It is an awe-inspiring place seen from afar, let alone as one ascends it.
And it is only dubiously French. Originally a Roman province (Provincia, or the Province, giving that name to the language), it remained a highly distinctive territory for many centuries, and in some ways is so even now. Until the later Middle Ages, the County of Provence ran from the mouth of the Rhône east to Nizza, or Nice, and north into the Alps, and the Margravate of Provence stood either side of the Rhône valley, from Viviers north to Valence: two independent principalities, separate but sharing a name, like Duchy and Free-County of Burgundy further north; while Avignon and the Venaisin, including Mont Ventoux, belonged to the Popes. This history has left the region with many magnificences, from the Classical antiquities of Orange, where I once heard Die Zauberflöte performed in the faultless acoustics of the Roman theatre, and Vaison-la-Romaine, to the grandeurs of papal Avignon. Even after Provence had been absorbed by the kingdom of France, it was a long way from anywhere – or at least from Paris – and it minded its own business.
Then, around 200 years ago, the English discovered the balmy calm of the Provençal coast, to be called the Riviera or Côte d’Azur (they discovered its pleasures in winter, that is, in saner days before people flocked to grill themselves on distant beaches in August). And the aristocrats and rentiers who gave their name to the Promenade des Anglais in Nice enjoyed a kind of literary validation, as the very name Provence acquired its own special resonance, with Keats longing for a draught of vintage tasting of Flora and the country green, ‘Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth.’ Parisians also learned the delights of the south: before the Mediterranean meant ‘sea, sun and sex’ for trippers, Verdi’s Germont could console his son by saying that he would have, if not the last, then at least the other two of those if he left his mistress Violetta for the south: ‘Di Provenza, il mar, il suol . . .’
At the very time that Provence was becoming a playground, it developed almost in reaction its own literary form of national consciousness. Frederic Mistral spent his life in the village of Maillane south of Avignon writing in what he and his friends in the Félibrige thought their true Provençal language. But Provence was destined to be a resting place for the international rich and not so rich, few of them much interested in its history, language or culture. Camus lived just to the north of Aix-en-Provence at Lourmarin in his last years, Somerset Maugham lived at Cap Ferrat, D. H. Lawrence died at Vence; none was concerned with the life of the place. Even though Scott Fitzgerald set Tender Is the Night (with its title from that Keats poem) at Cap d’Antibes, and even though Graham Greene lived in Nice and wrote a polemical book about its politics, neither could be called so much as an adoptive Provençal writer. The final indignity came when a retired English advertising man wrote a series of bestsellers with little discernible of the texture or tang of the place except its name.
Even now coast and hinterland are infested by the rich, as can be seen by the cluster of very expensive, and sometimes even good, restaurants running from Monte Carlo west to St Tropez, and a little further inland, the Bastide St-Antoine at Grasse or Jacques Maximin at Vence, or the excellent and far from ruinous Terraillers at Biot to the west of Nice. Vaucluse is, perhaps mercifully, less luxurious, although Avignon has the delightfully unchanged Hiély-Luculus where the schoolboy Cyril Connolly ate one of the first of what would be very many meals in French restaurants. And Vaison-la-Romaine, whence the fifteenth stage of the 2002 Tour departed, has the enchanting Moulin à Huile, which came close to winning my own culinary maillot jaune.
From there it’s no distance to what Edith Wharton called ‘the sublimest object in Provence’. Mont Ventoux towers in lonesome and awesome solitude at 1909 metres over the plains. The most famous writer to live in its shadow was Petrarch, an Italian from Arezzo who was brought as a boy to Avignon when the papal court was seated there and then, after years in the service of a cardinal, settled at Fontaine de Vaucluse to the south-east of the great peak. In 1336, 631 years before Simpson’s fatal ascent, Petrarch climbed the mountain with his brother, the poet bracing himself with a line from Ovid: ‘To wish is little: we must long with the utmost eagerness to gain our end’, words that might be held up by Tour fans.
On 21 July 2002 the crowds lined the road from Bédoin at the foot of Ventoux all the way up to the summit. Cars and camper vans had been there all night, cyclists had made their own climb hours before the racers, Belgian tricolours jostled with Basque crosses, and fans held up an array of placards and banners that deserved anthologizing and deconstructing at length. Some saluted the champion: ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ (or alternatively and imploringly, ‘Lose 8 minutes please Lance’). Dozens were addressed in grateful valediction to Laurent Jalabert, who had just announced his retirement – ‘Vas y Ja Ja’, or ‘Ja Ja Bonne Retraite’ – while others were a little more ominous or provocative. ‘Il dopo ha gia un nome’, said one, before libellously naming the doper, while another shouted, ‘Jan ohne Dich ist die Tour Scheisse’ (the Tour is shit without you) by way of saluting Jan Ullrich, whose misdemeanours with recreational drugs had enforced his temporary absence. And one more, ‘Virenque – Merci pour Tout’ which made me think: thanks for absolutely everything? It was Virenque, after all, who had been at the centre of the 1998 drugs scandal that brought more discredit on the Tour than anything before.
Finally as the bends climb higher and higher through the tree line comes the bleak peak itself. ‘Lunar’ is an easy word for any barren landscape, but here it’s almost too apt. As the once and future ‘king’ of the Tour, far from losing the suggested eight minutes, climbed relentlessly to the summit that day, one of his adoring compatriots stood in the distance planting a flagstaff with a huge Stars and Stripes on a high ridge of bare pumice; and for some enthusiasts there was sudden visual memory of another American called Armstrong taking one small step for man, thirty-three years to the very day before.
A few hundred feet below the observatory that stands on the pinnacle, a few minutes before the riders reach the finishing line, is the Stèle Simpson, in itself quite modest, though covered with tokens of remembrance and votive offerings to the point that Barnes calls it ‘part Jewish grave and part the tumultuous altar of some popular if dubious Catholic saint’. The main inscription records Simpson’s life and death as an ‘Olympic Medallist, World Champion, British Sporting Ambassador’, but there are supplementary plaques, the most touching of which reads, ‘There is no mountain too high. Your daughters Jane and Joanne July 15, 1997.’ During the Tour the tributes pile high, but flowers, bidons, caps, tyres are there all the year round.
This isn’t just sentimentality, or guilt. Tom Simpson was a rider much liked, by peloton and public, and as far as can be judged was a genuinely likeable man. He was certainly a precociously gifted sportsman. At twenty-one he won a team bronze medal in the pursuit events at the 1956 Olympics, before turning pro in 1959. He had left England in any case when still an amateur in order to avoid his military call-up (something subsequently forgiven or forgotten) and went to St-Brieuc in Brittany, where he met his English wife Helen Sherburn working as an au pair. She tried to keep him on the straight and narrow, knowing his reputation as a tombeur des femmes, before they moved to Ghent, the centre of Belgian cycling and home to a British ex-pat community of cyclists, few of whom enjoyed any real success. Simpson was the great exception. In his first season he won two stages of the Tour de l’Ouest, before he joined the Rapha–Gitane team, winning the Tour du Sud Est in 1960 and a couple of criteriums. That year he rode in his first Tour and finished a very creditable twenty-ninth. He abandoned in 1961, but then in 1962, now riding for VC XII Saint-Raphaël–Gitane–Dunlop, he hit a purple patch. Riding superbly, he was ninth in the first stage, twentieth in St-Nazaire–Luçon, and stayed in the top three until Pau.
And then, on a glorious day in the Pyrenees, Tom Simpson finished in the leading group to become the first Englishman ever to wear the maillot jaune. He ended the Tour in sixth and then, after missing the next year’s race, came fourteenth in 1964, now with Peugeot–BP, as well as winning the Milan–San Remo race, won the Tour of Lombardy and the World Road Race Championship in 1965, and nine Criteriums in 1966. He was near the height of his powers, winning the 1967 Paris–Nice, as well as two stages of the Vuelta.
By this time Simpson was a very popular figure on the continent, and a national hero at home, the first English cyclist of whom that could really be said. He allowed the French to turn him into a stage Englishman, dressing up in bowler and brolly as ‘Major Tom’ to echo the unfunny Major Thompson novels of Pierre Daninos. But if he played the clown, he wasn’t really one. Chris Brasher, the famous runner, who had become an Observer sports journalist, interviewed Simpson in 1960, with a stereotype in his mind of what this bumptious Durham miner’s son would be like, and found instead ‘an impeccable Englishman in a Prince of Wales suit’.
In 1967 it seemed that Simpson was entering his annus mirabilis. He had already won a clutch of ‘sportsman of the year’ awards, including one from the BBC. Accepting this in the presence of Harold Wilson, he made a graceful and amusing speech, observing that the Prime Minister was still in the saddle, ‘but I hope his bottom doesn’t hurt as much as mine’, and asking British business to realize the commercial potential of cycling sponsorship. Even though he hadn’t completed the Tour in the past two years, this year should have been his apotheosis.
But although his health had held up through most of his exhausting races, it wasn’t impregnable, and he was riding this year troubled by intestinal disorders, with acute diarrhoea close to dysentery. Cycling may seem an exciting sport when viewed from a long distance, and when the conquering champion is cheered like a knightly hero. Closer to, it would be euphemistic to talk of the nitty-gritty; ‘down and dirty’ is all too apt. A cyclist eats on the move, sucking liquid rice from a bidon on his handlebar, or snatching up a musette feeding sack at the ravitaillement feeding station, picking out the sandwiches and fruit, and then throwing aside the bag, which can become a prized souvenir. And he not only eats on the move: as Armstrong says, you never stop if you can help it, ‘not even for a piss’. When a rider used to relieve himself too visibly, exposing himself in front of a crowd, it was punishable by deduction of points as an offence against the dignity of the Tour, but riders learned to urinate less indecently, if not very comfortably, without opening their Lycra shorts. They will try to void their bowels before a day’s stage begins, although you can sometimes see a cyclist pull off the road for a couple of minutes, to answer a call of nature, as the commentator discreetly says. At least that means the rider is passing solid stools, unlike Simpson that year. He didn’t need to stop; it was his mechanic who was obliged to begin each evening by hosing down the bike. Not everything about bike racing is glamour.
Nor all simply heroism. The death of any sporting hero is poignant, even if it happens away from the field of play. Any Englishman who like myself was a boy in the 1950s may still feel a pang of emotion at the name of Mike Hawthorn, killed in a road accident in January 1959 a few weeks before his thirtieth birthday and less than six years after his dazzling victory over Fangio in the French Grand Prix at Rheims; and still more at the names of those Manchester United players killed in the Munich air crash in February 1958. And yet, if Simpson’s death was poignant, it wasn’t simply noble, since it was certainly in some measure self-inflicted, through the amphetamines found in his jersey pocket. Many if not most riders took drugs at the time. In fact, the sonorous chorus of the Tour authorities inveighing against illegal substances had for years past had a comical descant in the confessions of cyclists. After his retirement, Coppi was asked whether riders had taken la bomba, as Italians called amphetamines. ‘Yes, and those who say otherwise aren’t worth talking to about cycling.’ Had he taken them? ‘Yes, whenever it was needed.’ And when was that? ‘Practically all the time.’ And in the very year of Simpson’s death, Anquetil told the Équipe, ‘You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.’
In one form or another, stimulants had been used from the beginning of competitive cycling, or the day when an English rider called Linton died on the 1896 Bordeaux–Paris race, having succumbed, it was supposed, to an ill-judged quantity of morphine. Riders had always dosed themselves with alcohol, sometimes in great quantities. On that same race – a horror of endurance, 580 kilometres cycled at a stretch, day and night – a later team gave each rider an allowance of wine, champagne, port and a bottle of eau-de-vie. We have seen several times how riders in the Tour drank wine copiously, sometimes with ill effects, more often it is to be supposed without.
Novices were sometimes puzzled to hear an older rider shouting for ‘la moutarde’, but this was no delicate Moutarde de Meaux or de Dijon, it was slang for a bidon full of illicit stimulant. Tom Simpson cut the mustard in royal style. He told one comrade that his year’s ‘supply of Mickey Finns’ had cost him £800, an enormous amount of money for a small-time pro, who might make £4 a week, or even for a successful rider. But then Simpson wanted nothing but the best. Poorer riders took Benzedrine; the stuff found on him when he died was Tonedrin, the château-bottled claret of amphetamines. Nor did he confine himself to quality rather than quantity: he once cheerfully told a friend that his principle with medication was, ‘If it takes ten to kill you, I’ll take nine.’
All of this has cast a pall over Simpson’s memory, maybe unfairly since he was so far from alone, then or since. The question of what is the wrongful use of narcotics or performance-enhancing drugs – or how to define them – isn’t ever easy to answer. At least until managers like Arsène Wenger told players to clean up their act, alcohol was part of the culture of football, and of most professional sports. Forty years ago, one player with a London team told an interviewer from the Evening Standard (where a pompous sports sub-editor cut it), ‘We have an old saying or maxim in football: Win or lose, on with the booze.’ And there are countless tales of cricketers drinking by day and by night. Sir Garry Sobers, of Barbados, Nottinghamshire and the West Indies, perhaps the greatest cricketer I shall ever see, and in his way a true knightly figure, has described how he played one of his finest innings in a Lord’s Test. He left the pitch in the evening, not out and having already scored a century, went on the tiles, drank until dawn, and until anyone else would have dropped, returned to play in the morning, almost unable to see the ball at first, gradually pulled himself together, and then completed a brilliant innings.
And the very amphetamines that had helped kill Simpson, after they helped him ride, help bomber aircrew keep going on long missions, not only, as was well known, in the Second World War, but also today, as we learned at the inquiry into how American aircraft had come to bomb Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Later that day in 2002, after the race had finished, and when the top of Mont Ventoux was clogged up in one of the vast traffic jams wilfully created when there is an arrivée en altitude, thousands of vehicles queuing for one narrow road downhill, I was flagged down by a young man strung with cameras, a confrère as it turned out. There were no press facilities up there, and even mobiles didn’t seem to work on the peak, so that this amiable chap needed to descend to the foot of the mountain to transmit pics to his paper in Marseilles as urgently as I needed to get to a telephone and ring the Daily Mail in London. We talked about the day, and I compared the way the crowd had booed Armstrong yet again – ‘Dopé!’– with the way the same crowd had actually cheered Virenque, the self-confessed culprit of the great 1998 scandal. My companion was indignant at the idea that Virenque should be singled out: ‘They’re all at it, the whole lot. Tous!’
And it was that emphatic ‘Tous! All of them!’ that was still ringing in my ears when I returned the next morning, on a rest day, to look at Simpson’s shrine without the crowds. Sporting ambassador? Certainly he was. Sporting hero? Surely, in the full Shakespearian sense of a brave man undone by his folly or misjudgement. We who write about the Tour and Tom Simpson should nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice, and every cyclist should visit the Stèle Simpson on Mont Ventoux: such a sublime spot, and such a touching monument to a man who loved his sport not wisely but too well.