CHAPTER TWO

‘You Don’t Have to be Mad to Go Up the Ventoux, But You’re Mad if You Go Back’

Provençal proverb

ON THE SECOND floor of his neat half-timbered house midway between Manchester and the Peak District, Harry Hall has a small office where he keeps the records of his career. Hall, a tall, slender, white-haired man in his late 60s, ran the biggest bike shop in Manchester for over 30 years. He was a veteran world cycling champion and worked as mechanic on Britain’s national cycling teams in the 1960s and 70s. He was also one of the last men to see Tom Simpson alive.

The office is a neat yet disordered glory hole, an organized chaos of newspaper cuttings, photographs and race manuals. Among the piles are several small notebooks. They are Hall’s diaries from his races with Great Britain, in which he meticulously recorded the work he carried out every day on each rider’s bike: a tyre replaced here, gear ratios changed there.

Hall was mechanic for the British team on the 1967 Tour de France when Tom Simpson died. That year’s notebook is small, red, and unlabelled, and he has had a struggle to find it for the first time since he put it away after returning from the race. On page after page the names Tom, Barry, Colin, Arthur and Vic are written: Simpson and his Great Britain teammates Hoban, Lewis, Metcalfe and Denson, whose name Vin was usually changed to Vic. The notes tell the story of the cyclists’ Tour, as well as Hall’s work each evening: ‘fit silk tyres’, ‘change forks with spare’. His charges’ form can be read in the gears they choose – lower than those of their mates if they feel bad – and their fluctuating morale is indicated by the days on which Hall glues lighter tubular tyres onto their wheels, their misfortunes in the roll-call of punctured tyres and parts damaged in crashes.

Delving into the cupboards that morning, Hall has just rediscovered a road-stained metal number plate, three inches square and drilled so it can be bolted over the top tube of a bike. On either side, painted in white on the black background, is the number ‘49’. It is Tom Simpson’s race number from the 1967 Tour, which was on his bike the day he died.

There is a deep symbolism about cycle race numbers. For all cyclists, putting one on for the first time is a moment of passage in their first race. For most, each time they pin one on their backs for a race there is a little rush of adrenaline. It is always said of the most competitive that their character changes ‘when they pin a number on’, and Simpson was surely numbered among these. In the Tour de France, a cyclist is always referred to by his number, or dossard, when he is mentioned on the race’s short-wave radio as having punctured, crashed or broken away. If he is in a break, it is his number which is marked on the motorbike marshal’s blackboard which keeps competitors informed; Simpson would have been le dossard quarante-neuf. In a certain sense, the man is the number.

The bitterest moment for any competitor in the Tour is if he has to abandon the race and his number is taken off his back and unbolted from his bike. Simpson’s number is still in the little plastic bag where Hall placed it on the evening of the tragedy. The image comes freely to me: Hall outside the British team hotel on the evening of July 13, 1967, undoing the little screws which held the plate on Simpson’s white bike, unfolding the metal. He would have been working like an automaton, going through the motions of his evening routine of cleaning and adjusting the bikes. What to do with the number?

Initially, the plate lived in the toolbox that Hall took with him to races. Then it went missing. When it resurfaced, it went into the drawer, but Hall did not like to take it out. If he came across it while rummaging for something else, he would push it under some papers, not relishing the memories it prompted. It was, he felt, ‘the last bit of Tom’. There it lay now in front of us on the desk, a slightly scuffed souvenir of the fruitless fight to save Simpson’s life in the desperate minutes after Hall had heard him whisper his last words – ‘on, on, on!’

British cycling is a small world; before working as Simpson’s mechanic, Hall had known him for several years from a distance as a young prodigy from Nottinghamshire, a 19- year-old, pigeon-chested slip of a lad. He competed with him at track meetings on the Fallowfield velodrome in Manchester in the 1950s, when stars like Reg Harris would draw crowds in their thousands.

After a meteoric rise, Simpson had disappeared to seek his fortune in France in 1959. Hall rode with him in his last race in England, then over the next years he followed his progress from afar, like the rest of the British cycling public. Simpson had gone to a distant world, with an aura of romance born in part from the scarcity of information about it. Only the biggest races were mentioned in the newspapers. There was one English magazine covering the major races, Sporting Cyclist. French magazines such as But et Club and Miroir-Sprint, with pages of black and white reportage, were bought in a certain shop in Manchester by the fans Hall knew and passed around like samizdat in the USSR.

Like so many others, Hall listened with his mates to a crackly Radio Luxembourg when Simpson became the first Briton to win the world professional road race championship in 1965. He couldn’t understand the French, and, like all British cycling fans, he could barely believe it when the journalist Charlie Ruys turned to him and said, ‘He’s won, the bugger’s won.’ He saw Simpson return as a star to the Manchester track where they had raced together. He watched him banging a leathery steak on the side of his plate at breakfast and complaining lightheartedly about what he was being given to eat before the 270-mile London to Holyhead classic, which, of course, he won.

Then when Hall travelled with Simpson to the 1967 Tour, it was largely unknown territory for the mechanic, as it was for the majority of the British team. The manager, Alec Taylor, was taking time off from running his car-hire business in south London. Hall, and the driver, Ken Ryall, both ran bike shops; his fellow mechanic, Ken Bird, was working in one. For his efforts over the four weeks, Hall was paid the princely sum of £110.

Simpson designated Hall as the man who would look after his bike; he knew him a little, had seen him at other races. The British leader was particular about his equipment – ‘what he had, where it had come from and how it was dealt with’. Having the best components on his bike and the right man working on it was all part of getting an edge over the opposition. Whether by instinct or design, Simpson was clearly canny enough to realize that the better his relations with the man who was looking after his bikes, the better his machines would be kept. He had a similarly close relationship with the team’s chief soigneur, the Belgian Gus Naessens, who looked after his diet and physical preparation.

Simpson had Hall glue his tyres on with special white cement made by the Italian Pastelli company. They were lightweight tubular tyres he had bought himself from the manufacturers, Clément, in Paris. He had wheels built by a young British mechanic in Ghent. His shoes were handmade by a Belgian specialist. He rarely rode the bikes he was given by his sponsor, Peugeot, but had instead bought himself a hand-built machine, like the other top professionals rode, from the Masi company in Italy. It was then painted in Peugeot colours. It’s a small deception, but one that frequently occurs in professional cycling, when a star cyclist feels that his team’s cycle sponsor is not able to produce the goods quite as he wants them.

Simpson had even devised his own saddle by gluing foam onto a plastic shell, and adding a leather cover made out of one of his wife’s crocodile handbags. ‘It wasn’t perfect, because he tried to stick down the edges and they kept coming loose. It was a bit tatty, but he liked it. He was probably the first person to think of it,’ Hall notes. In fact, Simpson was 30 years ahead of his time: virtually all racing bike saddles are now made in this way, comprising a thin leather cover, foam padding, and a plastic base.

When the brief details in the notebook from the 1967 Tour jog Hall’s memory, Simpson’s obsessive competitive drive springs back to life. On the rest day early in the race, Hall changed all three of Simpson’s bikes from five- to six-speed – gear changers, sprockets, spare wheels and all. It was a long job and he worked late into the night in the market square at Belfort. The story behind the day’s work speaks volumes about Simpson’s urgent need to gain any advantage, however small, in any way he could. The British leader had been annoyed 24 hours before when the 1966 winner Lucien Aimar ‘ripped his legs off’ on the first big mountain of the race, the Ballon d’Alsace. Aimar had six gears, which gave him an extra ratio, lower than that ridden by the others. He could continually change pace, accelerating, waiting for the others to catch up, then accelerating again. It gave him a huge psychological advantage.

That evening, Simpson contacted a friend in Belgium, who brought the parts to Belfort immediately for Hall to work on the very next morning. He told Hall as he worked: ‘If anyone comes snooping around, hide it [the bike] away.’ He added: ‘I can get the buggers back. When they sit on my wheel I’ll blow their brains out. I’ll get the bastards.’

Simpson had worn the yellow jersey of Tour leader for one day in 1962. He was the first Briton to pull the most coveted prize in cycling over his shoulders, and deservedly made headlines. However, he had lost third place that year when he crashed, and finished only sixth overall. That was to remain the best British finish for 22 years but in fact it was neither nowt nor something: good enough to permit him to hope for better things, but not convincing or lucrative in the long term.

The Tour of 1967 was a 3,000-mile loop, starting in the Loire valley and heading east through Normandy, across northern France and into Alsace for that first rest day. South it went through the Alps to the Ventoux, and across to the Pyrénées, before the run north through the Massif Central for a stage finish on top of an extinct volcano, the Puy de Dôme, then up to Paris for a final time trial. The day before that Tour, which began in the town of Angers, a ballot was held among the journalists on the race to predict the possible winner. The verdict was brutally clear: they rated Simpson only 11th, with a mere nine votes, compared to 54 for the 1965 winner, Felice Gimondi of Italy.

The Tour had frustrated Simpson for the five years since his single day in yellow. He had never won a stage. In 1966 he had abandoned in tears while wearing the rainbow jersey of world champion. His all-or-nothing bid for victory in the Alps had backfired when a dramatic attack on the Col du Galibier was followed by a spectacular crash on the descent, which left him unable to hold the handlebars.

Simpson’s other Tours were tributes to his ability to drive himself beyond his physical limits. In 1965, he rode himself to a standstill with a blood infection, caused by a septic hand which had debilitated his entire system. The year before he had struggled through for 16th place while weakened by a tapeworm, and he had finished an exhausted 29th at his first attempt, in 1960. As well as the press, some of his fellow cyclists doubted whether Simpson had the stamina to last through the Tour. If he had doubts himself, he hid them, and he made no secret of what he wanted to do. When his wife Helen put him on the train for Angers at Ghent’s Sint Pieters station, his final words to her were ‘see you in Paris with the yellow jersey’.

Hall was the only person Simpson would allow to work on his bike, and in the evenings he would sometimes come and talk to the mechanic as he stuck on tubular tyres, altered gear ratios and washed off the day’s grime. Simpson seemed relaxed, but he was playing for high stakes. ‘He said to me’ – and the memory makes Hall laugh – ‘I’ve got to win a lot of money. I’ve put down a deposit on a Merc in a showroom in Ghent, and when I come back I’ll buy it, so I’ve got to earn some good money.’ This is the ‘something to aim at’ of Pascoe’s film.

To the young mechanic, he came across as a man ‘whose mind was always one step ahead’, who felt keenly the need to profit to the full from a career which had a limited span and could be cut short at any moment. ‘He was a bright lad, commercially. It was quite simple: “you’ve got to make money, because how long do we have?”’ recalls Hall.

Four days before he died, as he lay on his bed in a hotel room in Metz, Simpson summed up his position to Geoffrey Nicholson of the Guardian. He could only get a better contract, he said, ‘if I can prove I’m a Tour man, prove that I can be a danger, and I’ve never done that yet . . . I’ve got no more excuses. I can’t say next year I’ll be better. The only person I’d be kidding is myself.’ A good Tour, he said, meant finishing in Paris in the top three, or holding the yellow jersey for five or six days, or winning a couple of prestigious stages and finishing in the first 10. Nothing less would do.

Simpson would also explain his strategy for the race to Hall. It was dictated by the weakness of his team. A potential Tour de France winner needs eight or nine strong support men, or domestiques, around him. They can offer spare wheels or give up their bike if a tyre punctures, pace him back to the field after a toilet stop, offer their slipstream if a rival goes ahead, or simply give moral support by their presence.

For most of the Great Britain team, the Tour was a matter of survival rather than helping their leader. Of Simpson’s nine teammates, five had not ridden the Tour before. Three were not even racing full-time as professionals. Simpson was riding his own race. ‘His idea was that the lads were fine, but they weren’t a support team,’ says Hall. ‘All he expected from them was to see a few faces around him, a few voices in the bunch, maybe a wheel or a bike change. If he was going to do anything, it would be an individual effort.’

As Hall describes how Simpson approached the 1967 race, he suddenly switches, in the middle of the flow of words, into the first person. The effect is uncanny. Is he quoting his dead leader verbatim, from memory, or is it as if, in mulling this over for more than three decades, he is paraphrasing several different conversations he had with Simpson? ‘“The plan is, and it sounds daft, I want to try and win the Tour, but I haven’t got the advantage of the strength some teams have. The plan is to pick one or two points in the race where I’ll really attack it, critical points where time can be won and lost. I don’t want to be in the [yellow] jersey, but I don’t mind what position I’m in as long as I’m within three minutes at the time trial [the final stage]; I can win it.” That was his belief: “I can take three minutes out of any of these buggers.” That was his whole plan.’

Simpson had three target stages: the Alpine stage to Briançon, over the Col du Galibier, stage 13 from Marseille to Avignon via Mont Ventoux, and the leg through the Massif Central to the top of the Puy-de-Dôme, three days from Paris. Each included one of the hardest mountain climbs in the race at or near the finish.

Alongside Taylor in the British team car, Hall watched Simpson’s progress each day. After a strong first week, he was handily placed in sixth overall when they went into the Alps, but that was as good as he would get. The first of his ‘hit days’, over the great Galibier pass, with its one in eight slopes, its snowdrifts and desolate scree slopes, did not go to plan. Simpson’s health problems were brought home to Hall after the stage, when he cleaned Simpson’s bike: it was ‘covered in shit’. The British leader had been unable to keep his food down, he had diarrhoea and stomach pains. The mechanic and Taylor sat behind in the car as Simpson stopped at the foot of the Galibier to evacuate his system and then spent 15 miles of ascent chasing the leaders.

‘When he got back to the field the leaders had gone, so he rode all the way up on his own. You could see them in front, you could see he was catching them, but the top came too early. He did go hell for leather down the other side, took a few chances’ – on the same descent where he had ruined his Tour the previous year – ‘but he ran out of steam and lost time,’ remembers Hall.

Simpson was convinced that, had it not been for the stomach trouble, he would have stayed with the leaders according to his plan, rather than dropping to seventh overall. Perhaps this was true, but stomach trouble on the Tour is simultaneously a symptom and a cause of weakness: it drags the body down into a spiral of gradual decline. His teammate Vin Denson also noticed Simpson’s physical troubles. ‘I remember when we finished [one stage] in the Alps we had to carry him up the stairs. He was ill and couldn’t eat. I was telling him “have some soup, some broth”; he just said “I’m going to be sick” but the next morning he was as bright as a button.’

Three days later, Simpson was at the foot of the Ventoux, a sick man with minimal team support, but driven on by his intensely competitive mind and his need to make money. The consensus from those in the team is that he was strung up, but outwardly relaxed. He still had the stomach trouble: he had had a bout of it the previous evening, and talked then of seeing the race doctor about it the next morning.

Hall prepared Simpson’s bike meticulously that night, wrapping new tape round the handlebars – an old mechanics’ trick to boost a rider’s morale: when he looks down, he sees a bike which looks new. In the little red notebook, Hall listed the extra low gears he fitted on the bikes of what remained of the team: Denson, Colin Lewis, Barry Hoban and Arthur Metcalfe. By now, the other five team members had abandoned. He tinkered with Simpson’s machine until one o’clock in the morning outside the team’s hotel in Marseille. When he took it out for a test ride he was stopped on a deserted backstreet by the old port by a gendarme who thought he had stolen the bike. Then as now, the words ‘Tour de France’ can work wonders, and Hall was quickly let off the hook.

For most of stage 13, Hall, Alec Taylor and the driver, Ken Ryall, went through their usual daily routine in the Great Britain team’s Peugeot 404 saloon. After the early morning start in Marseille, they followed the main bunch of riders. They listened to Radio Tour, the short-wave radio station which provided news of what was happening up ahead, and were on the alert to deal with punctures or any mechanical trouble. They overtook the field before the feeding station in the town of Carpentras, where the race was to finish after a loop up the thirteen-mile climb to the top of the Ventoux and down the other side. The heat was intense, the air filled with the high-pitched whirring of the cicadas, the little grasshoppers which are everywhere in Provence. The whole field was feeling the heat. Liquid food in the cyclists’ bottles curdled and they regularly dived into bars and ran to roadside fountains to get drinks.

In Carpentras, Hall, Taylor and Ryall handed the riders their musettes – cotton bags with food and bottles of water – and then they drove hard to catch up the peloton again. Shortly after they got back behind the main group of riders, by now on the lower slopes of the Ventoux, Hall saw the first of a number of things that would later strike him as peculiar. Hall liked to make home movies of the major races, which he showed to his cycling clubmates in the winter, and he knew Simpson ‘was destined to do a ride that day’. So as they rolled slowly along the lower slopes of the Ventoux in the blistering heat, he was sitting on top of the car getting his cine-camera and film ready. ‘It was just before we started the Ventoux, an area where you are going through some trees, beginning to climb quite steeply. We got onto a quiet stretch of road and all of a sudden I saw Tom’s bike in the grass on the right. I said to Alec, “Hang on, that’s Tom’s bike,” and Tom came running out of a wooden hut. He was just banging the top of his bottle to put the cap on.

‘I remember what I said to him. He came round the back of the car, got on his bike, and I said something like “Hey, Tom, that’s naughty, you shouldn’t be doing that,” and he just winked at me and put his bottle in his cage and pedalled off.’ Afterwards, Hall was told that Simpson had put cognac in his bottle; a commissaire – race referee – who witnessed the incident, Jacques Lohmuller, confirmed this.

The incident would not have been notable had it not been for the tragedy which was to follow. Until the 1970s, la chasse à la canette – the hunt for water – was common on the Tour on baking days like this when the riders would soon exhaust the two small bottles they carried on their bikes. They were not permitted to take bottles from the support cars, as they do today, so they would grab water from anywhere they could.

Hall went back in later years and tried to work out where the building was; it was no longer there. But what he had seen was another ingredient being added to the fatal cocktail swishing around the British leader’s system. Simpson had already emptied two of the three tubes of amphetamines in his back pockets and he had already drunk part of a bottle of brandy grabbed by his room-mate Colin Lewis in another café raid earlier in the stage.

Simpson’s ‘guts were queer’, he told Lewis. He had not been able to drink the liquid rice which Naessens usually gave him in his feeding bottle and had thrown it away. To one teammate, Vin Denson, he ‘looked as if he was grimacing, pulling his face, rolling his head a bit, as if he was trying too hard’. Clearly, when he arrived at the mountain and saw the observatory 5,000 feet above him to his left, he felt he needed a second dose.

Hall and Taylor stood in the front seats of the cut-down car, looking up the mountain as they went past the also-rans being spat out on the first section of the climb, through the Bedoin forest. They could just make out what was going on at the front of the race, a couple of hundred yards up the slope, and occasionally glimpsed the white-clad figure of Simpson, who escaped early on but could not hold the pace set by Julio Jimenez, one of the finest climbers in the race. Simpson slipped back, to be overtaken by five other riders four miles from the top, where the road swings left past the café at Chalet Reynard and across the mountainside on the final approach to the summit. One of the five, Lucien Aimar, noticed that Simpson was in a peculiar state. ‘I offered him a drink but he couldn’t hear me. His look was empty. The bizarre thing was, he was trying to get away from me. He got about two and a half metres ahead and I said, “Tom, stop fooling about,” but he didn’t answer. His behaviour was completely bizarre.’

About one and a half miles from the top, Hall captured the start of the drama on his cine-camera, as Simpson began to zigzag, first almost going over the edge and down the scree to the left, then coming close to falling up the slope to the right. ‘He was out of control for a moment or two. I thought he was going to go over the edge – if he’d gone over the left side he’d have gone and gone. He pulled himself up a couple of times, jerkily,’ Hall recollects. Initially, the mechanic was worried about how Simpson might fare on the descent. ‘I said “he’s not going to get down”, or something like that, because he was losing his control.’ Taylor realized that Simpson’s chances of winning the Tour were slipping away and shouted to him to concentrate.

When cyclists are at the point of exhaustion, any minute physical peculiarities in their riding style – a weak shoulder, a slightly bent knee – will become exaggerated as they fight the bike. Simpson’s head had twisted towards his right shoulder at an angle of 45 degrees, like a bird with a broken neck. This was the posture he automatically adopted when he had one of his jours sans, as the French call a day when a cyclist is drained of physical strength.

This is where Hall’s home movie ends – the moment when he realized something was horribly wrong. Part of the brief sequence is on Something to Aim At. So too is Hall’s footage of Simpson making his way back up to the bunch on the lower slopes after his café stop. Hall speculates ironically on what he might have made in royalties. But he felt the same about the film as the number plate: it was ‘a thing I didn’t want to look at for years and years’.

Simpson fell for the first time roughly a mile from the summit. ‘It isn’t like it is now,’ says Hall. ‘It was a narrower road, with no room for a car to pass, cut into the bank with quite a drop down onto the grey-white stony stuff. I thought he’d just blown. He fell more or less against the bank.’

When Hall jumped off the car, he thought Simpson had simply overdone it. ‘He [Simpson] was leaned up against the bank, and I undid his toe straps and said, “Come on, Tom, that’s it, that’s your Tour finished.” I was going to help him off, because he was just leaning against the bank, still on his bike, then of course he started protesting, “No no no no no, get me up, up.” He was a bit incoherent but he knew what was going on. “I want to go on, on, get me up, get me straight.” Alec had stopped the car and he came over. I said, “He wants to go on, Alec,” and Alec said, “If Tom wants to go, he goes.” So I just pulled him off the bank, and we wobbled him into the middle of the road, between us we were pushing him, and he said “Me straps, Harry, me straps”, so he knew that his toe straps were undone. So I had to quickly tighten them up for him, and we pushed him off.’

Here, Hall’s reaction to the events seems to change. He was now being taken beyond anything he had ever experienced. He had seen riders pedal themselves into a state of exhaustion or hypoglycaemia before, but of Simpson collapsed against the bank telling him to put him back on his bike, he can only say, ‘At that moment I don’t know what I thought. I just don’t know.’ What Hall does know is that Simpson’s last words were murmured, in a rasping voice, just as he was pushing him off: ‘On, on, on.’ He could have been exhorting the mechanic, or telling himself to keep going; Hall seems to think it was both. This probably explodes the idea that Simpson’s final words were ‘Put me back on my bike.’ Hall does not remember Simpson using the expression at any point.

Credit for ‘Put me back on my bike’ should perhaps go to the Sun’s man on the 1967 Tour, the late Sidney Saltmarsh. The writer used to claim to fellow journalists that, after Simpson’s death was announced, he was asked by foreign colleagues what his last words were, and he told them ‘Put me back on my bike.’ He uses the quote in his report of the stage in Cycling Weekly. Saltmarsh used to say that he made the quote up; if he did, it was a good guess. Equally, he might have asked Hall, Taylor or Ryall what Simpson said, and recieved the reply ‘He told us to put him back on his bike.’ Then, he simply translated their paraphrase back into direct speech.

Taylor and Hall felt that Simpson might still make it over the climb. It was, after all, only just over a mile to the summit. ‘We got back in the car, we said “he’s managing now”, he was going quite straight, quite steady, bobbing away. He went straight for maybe 500 yards, it seemed a fair way. We thought he might just get over the top, if he gets to the top he’ll be OK.’ Suddenly, Simpson started to wobble again. Aware of what was coming, Hall and Taylor jumped out of the car and ran forward to catch him, and Simpson began falling as they got to him. Taylor supported Simpson on the left, Hall to the right, with three spectators also trying to keep him moving and upright as he zigzagged across the road

Taylor and Hall, in their shorts and T-shirts, stumbled as Simpson’s weight pushed them across the road to the left, almost into the gutter. Then the three men veered to the right, with Simpson now completely unable to support himself as he was laid down on the roadside. The fight to keep him upright barely lasted a few seconds but Hall describes it as he might a process which took several minutes.

‘He was on his side,’ says Hall. ‘I was undoing his straps. I’d lifted him up. I’d slipped my body under his. I was trying to put him on my back and get him off the road, as you’re always aware that there’s stuff [the other cars and cyclists] coming and you’ve got to get out of the way, whatever you’re doing.’

Now the long pauses between words begin, as if Hall is still trying to get a grip on the tragedy, still can’t quite figure out how to describe it. Thus far, he has looked me in the face, but his eyes now have a faraway expression. He no longer seems to be entirely in the same room. ‘The last terrible thought I had was . . . he wouldn’t release the bars. He was hooked on the bars. I had to say to Ken Ryall, “Get his hands off” and Ken had to peel his fingers off so that I could let the bike go and carry him.’

Simpson’s fingers were locked on the bars as if in rigor mortis, which has convinced Hall with hindsight that by then he was dealing with a dead man. Simpson, he feels, died somewhere between the moment when he was put back on his bike, and his second fall. There was no sign of life when he was carrying him off the road: like a sleeping child, Simpson was not supporting himself. He was a dead weight.

They laid Simpson on the stones, with his legs in the road, with ‘a bit of a wet tea towel or something under his head’, and his bike thrown down any old how on the rocks between the bumpers of two cars parked up on the slope. Hall loosened his jersey and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with one of the nurses from the Tour’s medical team, taking it in turns to apply pressure to the lungs and do Simpson’s breathing. Taylor and Ryall had gone to watch for the team’s other riders, to ensure they did not stop and see their leader dying.

Again he searches for words. ‘He was a sort of a yellowish colour . . . He was . . . It was hard to understand what was happening, because you were getting air into him when you were pumping him, and the air was coming out again.’ Gruesomely, he mimics the sound the air made as it left Simpson’s lungs: a drawn-out slobbering bubbling, like the tail end of a deflating balloon. Hall cannot remember how long his part in the fight for Simpson’s life lasted. He has no idea how many cycling fans had rushed over to watch. ‘I was taking no notice. You’re in your own little world. There was a load of people, it was a matter of [saying] “Keep back, keep back, give him air.” You’re thinking “He’s dead”, “No, he can’t be.”’

Standing on the car, a breeze had kept Hall cool, but as soon as he got down, the heat struck him: merely breathing in the air was uncomfortable. ‘It was terrible, very glaring, because it’s all white stones it just seemed to intensify the heat. It’s the stillness . . . When I carried him to the side of the road it was oppressive, hot, like being in a cauldron, no air at all.’

As he leans forward in his comfortable armchair in his sitting room, Hall can make a little pit form in the bottom of your stomach as you share in some of the adrenaline, feel the totality of the involvement. He can still see Simpson’s face. ‘He had a yellowy transparency – my lasting memory is of his eyes, just staring eyes. There was no sweat on his face. The sweat had gone. It had a waxy transparent look, with no colour on the top of his skin.’

They had to leave Simpson there. The tour’s doctor, Pierre Dumas, had just brought an oxygen mask when Taylor, who wanted to get to the finish, came up to Hall and dragged him away. In the car, as they went through the steep succession of hairpins on the Ventoux’s north side, Hall, Taylor and Ryall were stunned. ‘You’re in a bit of a daze, wondering what’s going to happen. You think, well, maybe they can save him. You’re telling yourself, “Perhaps he isn’t [dead], perhaps there’s something they can do, perhaps they can give him an injection in the helicopter, he’s in good hands.”’ And so down the mountain: hoping against hope, but knowing inside.

The British team were staying in the village of Malaucéne, on the descent from the Ventoux observatory to the finish in Carpentras. Taylor had to go to the race headquarters to find out what had happened to Simpson. Hall was left to deal with the team in the Hôtel du Ventoux, a three-storey building among the main street’s lime trees and shady squares.

The two soigneurs, Naessens and Rudi Van der Weide, got drunk, locked themselves in their hotel room on the hotel’s first floor, and would not come out. Hall will not say what he said to calm them down: ‘I got to them eventually and what happened then is between me and the lads.’ Naessens had been close to Simpson for several years and regarded him as a son. He had looked after Simpson before this and other major races, and now, as well as being devastated by the shock, he probably felt responsible to some extent. In the light of their close relationship, it is almost certain that he knew that Simpson used drugs, although it is perfectly possible that he did not know precisely what Simpson was using and in what quantities.

The race finished at about 4.30 p.m. in the tree-lined centre of Carpentras. Simpson’s absence had passed almost unnoticed. When the announcement had been made that no more riders were left to finish and he had still not arrived, the three British journalists on the race tried desperately to find out what had happened. No one knew what had happened to Simpson beyond the fact that he had fallen.

The Tour’s press room that evening was the chapel of the Collège des Garcçons in Carpentras. The building is an imposing, domed, 17th-century Jesuit church, built of honey-coloured limestone in a backstreet close to the old centre and used today to house art exhibitions. At 6.30 p.m., the communiqué written and signed by Dumas was read out by Félix Levitan, the editor of the Parisien Libéré newspaper, a dapper little man who jointly directed the race with Jacques Goddet: ‘On arrival at the hospital in Avignon, Tom Simpson was in a state of apparent death. Specialist services at the hospital continued attempts at reanimation, without success. Tom Simpson died at 17.40. The doctors concerned have decided to refuse permission for the corpse to be buried.’

Simpson’s body was placed in cell 3 of the hospital’s morgue, where a few reporters went and found him to pay their last respects. ‘The trolley glided slowly, the white sheet seemed endless,’ wrote Miroir-Sprint’s man on the race, who seemed to find the business gruesomely fascinating. ‘At last his face appeared. Tom looked to be sleeping. He seemed peaceful, his lips pink, his eyes half-closed. His half-open mouth still seemed to be gasping for air. The sheet accentuated his tan.’ One journalist hid his face in his hands but a photographer kept shooting away, saying ‘I’m sorry’ after each exposure.

Hall did not know that three tubes of amphetamines had been found in Simpson’s jersey and handed to the police; only the Tour organizers and the police were aware of it. ‘We knew there was going to be a hoo-ha about drugs, knew we had to keep that side of things quietened down,’ he says. To add to the feeling of unreality, Taylor, Naessens and Van der Weide spent the night in the police station in Malaucène answering questions. The following day the hotel was searched, more drugs found, and Hall too was arrested, in farcical circumstances. Together with his fellow mechanic Ken Bird, he was taken to the police station in Sète, where the stage finished, and the British car was impounded. They were in a panic, but eventually the two of them merely waited for the gendarmes’ attention to be diverted, and then jumped in the car and drove away. That was the last Hall heard from the French police.

The Tour has a strict daily routine: eat, race, eat, sleep. Sticking to it is a prop in adversity. This was how it was for Hall and the team. He recalls the remaining 10 days of the Tour as a matter of survival, of numbly going through the motions. Members of the Motorola team in the 1995 Tour said the same thing about the days after the death of their team member Fabio Casartelli. Hall has no memory of what was said at meals between the riders and staff. He does not even remember meal times ‘although we must have had them, and I must have been there as there wasn’t much work to do’. Taylor did his best to keep the team together: Hoban, who had won the stage the day after Simpson died, tried for a second victory; and Lewis and Metcalfe struggled through. ‘We said we’d get to Paris whatever, for Tom.’

Hall’s race notebook also offers insights into the demands on this numbed little group of men. It records how they had to dispose of their dead leader’s possessions, even while they were coming to terms with his loss, coping with an emerging drug scandal, and of course competing in the world’s most demanding cycle race.

In the back pages is an inventory of Simpson’s kit and a list of the people who came to take it away: three pairs of lightweight 28-spoked wheels, around 40 tubular tyres, including the ones he had had specially made in Paris by the Clément company, four bikes. Glued onto one page is a receipt signed by a representative of Peugeot who was sent to take the bikes back. Another page towards the end of the notebook records that Simpson’s suitcase with his belongings has been put in a certain lorry, and that two wreaths for the funeral have been organized on behalf of the team.

The tragedy affected Hall far beyond the point when he went home and laid flowers at Simpson’s grave in Harworth. Taylor and Ryall are now dead, so journalists or film makers now come to Hall’s door whenever they want a first-hand account of Simpson’s death. As with so many involved with Simpson, one way in which Hall came to terms with the trauma was to ride up the mountain. He did not steel himself to return for a quarter of a century, but then rode up it twice in one day. He found it tough: ‘The second time I said, “Come on, Tom, you’ll have to move over.”’

In his dreams, he would have flashbacks of his team leader dying in front of him. He was disillusioned with cycling for several years after Simpson’s death due to the revelations about drugs: ‘I wasn’t going to do the job again. I didn’t want to go abroad on professional races, the continental scene . . . that it could end in someone killing themself for it.’

Hall had seen where the sport he loved could take a man if he was desperate enough: ‘You always know other people that could be that way. There’s a report from a London polytechnic which says that cycling and rowing are the two most dangerous sports for that. The individual is pushing a machine which doesn’t know when to stop. It always asks for another pull of the oars, another pedal stroke.’

Not everyone shared this view of the dead champion as a victim of an implacable machine, however. Hall still remembers Taylor’s words when the manager came back to the hotel in Malaucène. Taylor had spent the brief trip tuning in the car radio to stations across Europe, all discussing the death of the man he had hoped would win the Tour de France. ‘He [Taylor] came in and said “he’s dead” and then he said “the stupid bastard.”’

Saint Brieuc, August 2, 1959

A baking day on the ‘pink granite coast’, the sumptuous seaboard of northern Brittany. The holidaymakers have left the beaches in force to cheer the cyclists in the Tour de l’Ouest as they pedal along the cliffs and through the fishing villages. At the front of the peloton, Tom Simpson is puzzled. He is wearing the leader’s jersey in his first stage race as a professional. Two days ago, in Quimper, on his first day riding for the Rapha-Geminiani squad, he won. He was trying to tow his team leader, Pierre Everaert, to the front of the race, but Everaert could not hold his pace. So Simpson kept going, across to the lead group and on to the finish, arms raised in the air, the other five cyclists yards behind.

Yesterday, just to make the point that he is the strongest here, he won the afternoon time trial around Brest. 26 hilly miles in under an hour. Everyone was tipping Jean Forestier, who has won the Paris–Roubaix and Tour of Flanders classics, but he was almost two minutes slower. Two wins in two days: not bad for a 21-year-old in his first pro race.

Today, though, something funny is going on. There is a group of cyclists ahead, but the Rapha team won’t make the pace, to keep that group within reach, so that the peloton can catch up by the finish. They keep telling Simpson the front-runners will slow down, but that’s not how it looks to him. ‘Job Morvan’s in there,’ they keep saying, ‘so we have a rider from the team in the group.’ By the finish, Morvan and his little group are five minutes ahead, and Simpson has lost his leader’s jersey.

Later, Simpson will learn how he has been betrayed. Morvan is a local rider. He is retiring at the end of the year. He has tried to win the Tour of his home region five times. It’s a bigger story for the local press, more exposure for the sponsors. Even if he is not a worthy victor, the team would prefer a Breton to win, rather than an unknown Briton.

It is Simpson’s first lesson as a professional: being the strongest in a race carries no guarantees.