Put Me Back On My Bike

A HARD-AS-NAILS BELGIAN weeps in the front seat of a team bus: a fellow cyclist has just died in front of him. A normally ebullient Italian stares into space on the start line. A Swiss vents his anger on photographers who took pictures of the corpse. Black ribbons on sunburnt arms. A teammate points his fingers at the sky to tell the world that he has won a race for a dead man he saw every morning at the breakfast table, yet barely knew. A mass of cyclists promenade in a brightly coloured cortège of grief, too bewildered to compete.

Scenes at the death of a Tour de France cyclist. I remember them when I hear the name Fabio Casartelli; similar things are recalled by those I spoke to about Tom Simpson’s death. Casartelli, a young Italian of 24, riding his first Tour de France, died in 1995 of head injuries after a high-speed fall. No one was left unaffected by the event.

What I felt was nothing abnormal in the face of sudden tragedy: confusion, a desperate search for sketchy information, an unease about intruding on those who were close – in this case teammates and personnel. The worst part was the questioning: was something as frivolous as a cycle race – my livelihood, our livelihood – a worthwhile exercise if a man could die for it? Afterwards came other emotions. There was resentment at anyone who did not understand what had happened, such as the local guests at the next morning’s start, bent on having a good time. The cyclists they had come to see were so shaken they could barely speak. There was a shared, overwhelming sense that the final days of travelling through France should end as quickly as possible. The party was bereft of any festive ambience, but we all had to go through the motions.

I felt this way in 1995, but I had never met Casartelli and would have had trouble recognizing him. I never had time. By 1995, the Tour was a sprawling monster comprising 4,000 people spread over a huge area. In contrast, the race was relatively small when Simpson died, with perhaps 700 people in the caravan. It was so intimate that, the night before he died, Simpson bumped into four English journalists in the street outside his hotel in Marseille and treated them to a show of bargaining with a street pedlar.

Death on the Tour is uncommon, despite the speed at which the cyclists descend mountains and the frequency with which they fall off. In fact, the biggest risks are run by the spectators among the motorcade. Only three Tour cyclists have died on the race: the Spaniard Francisco Cepeda, in 1935; Simpson; and Casartelli.

Simpson’s death was a rare tragedy, in a small event, in an intimate sport. But there was another reason why the shockwaves were far more intense in 1967 than in 1995. Casartelli, for all his Olympic title and worthy talent, was still on the uphill slope towards celebrity. Simpson was established on the plateau, one of the select group at the top of the sport who needed no further introduction.

Simpson’s fellow cyclists found an unprecedented way of expressing their feelings: they chose not to race. The senior riders in the race – Simpson’s colleagues in the elite – met before the start and decided that that day’s stage across the baking roads of Provence to the town of Sète should be a tribute to the dead man. Vin Denson was the man the elite chose to win the stage, according to their leader Jean Stablinski, the stocky little Polish immigrant who had been world champion in 1961. With Simpson gone, Denson was the senior rider in the British team.

Instead of Denson, another Briton, Barry Hoban, rode ahead and crossed the finish line first. The dispute about whether or not he had been designated the winner before the start misses a more important point. His victory struck an emotional chord across Europe and was the strongest possible illustration of the grief and respect felt for Simpson. Nothing similar would be seen again on the Tour until the death of Casartelli.

The 1967 Tour de France riders were in a state of shock. In the British team, Denson felt ‘numbness and disbelief. I was like a zombie.’ On the road to Sète, Denson and his teammate Colin Lewis both imagined that they were seeing their dead leader whenever a white jersey came into view, as did Jean Stablinksi. Denson wanted to go home there and then. So too did the 1965 winner Felice Gimondi. As the riders stood for a minute’s silence on the start line among the plane trees of Carpentras’s Boulevard Albin-Durand, the Italian Gimondi was so strung out that Dr Dumas had to calm him down. The man who was to win the 1968 race, Jan Janssen of Holland, also needed the doctor’s attention.

The senior cyclists who decided that a Briton had to win that day were a close-knit bunch, no more than 15- or 20- strong. They were the men who made the headlines, personalities with massive public profiles. Two of them, Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor, divided the French nation’s loyalties. They fought it out for the victories in the great Tours and one-day Classics, in which they formed their own little alliances; they shared the same trains, planes and cars and attended the same soirées. Simpson had been part of the group.

They were tied together in ways which transcended teams and nationalities. The defending Tour winner that year, Lucien Aimar, for example, was owed £300 by Simpson. It was Aimar’s contract money from a race in the Isle of Man, which had been presented to him in a sterling cheque. Aimar could not change the cheque, so he had given it to Simpson, who had put it in his suitcase. Every time they saw each other, they mentioned it: Simpson was going to give Aimar the cash on the Tour’s rest day, two days after the Ventoux. He never received the money.

Today, Stablinski still does not find it easy to explain their collective grief. He can only manage to repeat this phrase two or three times: ‘We were so traumatised.’ He prefers an anecdote, to illustrate why Simpson was popular, to show how he was one of the boys – the big boys: ‘We rode a criterium at La Rochelle: Poulidor, Anquetil, Rudi Altig’ – the German Simpson beat to win the 1965 world title – ‘everyone. I knew a restaurant there, Chez Jean. We ate there, and were pretty stirred up. We stayed until two or three in the morning. I remember leaving the restaurant, and Altig, who was a bit of a joker, walked out on his hands.

‘Tom wanted to do the same, but he was all over the shop. He kept trying, putting his feet on the wall and so on, but he had loads of small change, keys and papers in his pockets and it all went everywhere. So there he was in the street on his hands and knees picking it all up, but he couldn’t find all the stuff. And the next day he kept saying “I’ve lost this bit of paper, this contract”, and one of us would pull out what he’d lost and wave it at him.’

The image is endearing: the highly paid, celebrated elite of cycling – a five-times Tour winner in Anquetil, world champions in Simpson and Altig – getting drunk, and then scrabbling on their hands and knees to pick lost change out of the gutter in a deserted street in a French provincial town. And Simpson is in his niche, among the best in his sport.

It was not just the best cyclists who felt sick at heart on July 14, 1967, the day after Simpson’s death. The man who organizes the Tour de France today, Jean-Marie Leblanc, told me why. Leblanc raced modestly as a professional and met Simpson just once. At a race in the south of France early in 1966, Leblanc sat down on a bench to put on his racing kit. ‘Simpson, the world champion, sat down beside me. “Bonjour,” he [Simpson] said. “What’s your name?” “Jean-Marie Leblanc.” “Who do you ride for?” “Where do you live?” and so on.’ Even now, Leblanc can hardly believe that the world champion showed such interest in a colleague of his lowly status. He can’t help but think of Simpson as a nice guy, a man who liked to communicate, who could hunt with the top dogs and spare time for the underdogs. The French word Leblanc chooses to describe him comes from Simpson’s England: ‘un gentleman’.

Simpson’s position among the cycling elite had been earned on merit. To win his status, he had achieved results and celebrity far beyond those of any other English cyclist: five victories in the toughest single-day races on the cycling calendar – the world championship, plus four of the one-day Classics. There were many more near misses. On a good day, Simpson was capable of combining leg power, cunning and killer instinct in a way that was irresistible. His racing was a delight to watch, and there was little the opposition could do about him. Such days were not common in the Englishman’s career, but his surprising world professional road race title win, less than two years before his death, exemplified his style at its best.

The English team leader was not expected to win when he broke away with the German Rudi Altig 26 miles from the finish at Lasarte, near San Sebastian in the Spanish Basque Country: Altig was known as a faster sprinter. But Simpson used his experience and his ability to read a race and a rival. Early on he had not hesitated to race across from the main field to the large lead group which was to dominate the event, and he showed similar sang-froid in dealing with Altig in the final miles when the pair had broken clear. They came into the finish well ahead of the chasers and Simpson launched his sprint just as Altig was changing gear, in the split second when he could not readily respond.

There is no evidence to support the claim that Simpson ‘bought’ Altig, as has been rumoured. Unless this is proven, the world title will remain a testimony to Simpson’s self-belief and lucid thinking after seven hours in the saddle. By this point in a race, clarity of thought is directly related to how much energy a cyclist has left. If you are tired, you can’t think as quickly as the other man.

Altig later revealed that Simpson had ‘played dead’, telling him he had no strength left and luring him into a mistaken feeling of security. Such tricks were all part of the game, and the German seemed impressed rather than aggrieved with Simpson’s cleverness. He made it clear that Simpson was no fluke winner.

Simpson’s cunning is frequently overlooked. It won him his first Classic, the Tour of Flanders in 1961, less than two years after he had turned professional. He was up against a faster and vastly more experienced man, the Italian Nino Defilippis, in his 10th year as a professional, with seven Tour de France stage wins to his credit. Defilippis was outwitted when Simpson pretended to sprint for the finish and stuck his tongue out to give the impression that his legs were fading. Once the Italian had made his effort and overtaken him, Simpson attacked on his blind side, to win by inches.

Defilippis, is clearly still frustrated 45 years on that he did not win, and claims that Simpson pretended he was struggling (as he did with Rudy Altig in the 1965 world championship). ‘He said to me, “don’t drop me Nino, you can get 10 metres on me in the spirit.’” The Italian also claims that the finish line was moved 100m after the pair crossed it to begin the last lap. When he crossed the line Delilippis thought he had won, and Simpson agreed, the Italian claimed, although this is not borne out by the Briton’s face in photographs of the finish sprint.

What is clear is that Simpson out-thought the Italian, and he showed similar saugfroid in dealing with the French icon Raymond Poulidor at the finish of Milan-San Remo in 1964. Poulidor was slower than Simpson on paper but three years earlier he had won this race, which the Italians call La Classicissima, the Classic of Classics. Simpson manoeuvred him into the windy side of the road and kept in the shelter. The killer instinct ensured there was no mistake.

Simpson’s single day in the yellow jersey in the Tour de France of 1962 best illustrates the obsessive way in which he would pursue a goal. In this case, the target was the prestige, high public profile and lucrative appearance contracts which would go to the first man from outside mainland Europe to lead the great race.

A cyclist with a speciality – time trialling, sprinting or climbing – can use his particular skill to win the maillot jaune by targeting, say, the first time trial of the race. This tactic would win Chris Boardman the jersey in 1994, 1997 and 1998. For the non-specialist such as Simpson, however, there is only one way to earn the maillot jaune: attack, and gain time on the rest. Then repeat the process if necessary. It is physically tiring because of the repeated efforts on a daily basis, and mentally stressful because there is no time in the race when the yellow jersey hunter can relax.

Early in his debut Tour, 1960, Simpson had missed the yellow jersey by a single stage placing: one day he finished third, when second place would have sufficed. Two years later, 12 stages passed before he took the race lead in the first mountain stage at Saint Gaudens in the Pyrenees. That equates to some 1,500 miles of making moves, following moves, watching the other contenders to make sure none steals a march, and doing daily arithmetic: how many minutes do I need? How many seconds can I lose or gain here?

Simpson wore the yellow jersey for a single day, but that barely matters in the broader context of his place in cycling history. The impact reached as far as his home town of Harworth: his mother recalled the postmistress coming to the house in order to tell her: ‘You must send him a telegram, because he’s the first English boy to do this.’

Each of Simpson’s big wins had its place in the record books: his historic day in the yellow jersey was followed by sixth place overall, making him the first man from outside cycling’s European heartland to come close to the podium in the Tour. He would be the first to win both the world professional road title and one of the great single-day Classics, in the modern era at least.

In the context of what had come before, it was sensational. When Simpson turned professional in 1959, only once had a British team even started the Tour de France: the Hercules squad in 1955. Only one of its number, Brian Robinson, had made the breakthrough into the European circuit, in winning a stage of the Tour in 1958. Of the single-day Classics Simpson won, only Bordeaux–Paris had previously fallen to an Englishman – but that was in the heroic days of the belle epoque 60 years before.

Here too, Simpson captured the imagination of fans in a new way: cycle racing as he understood it – the world of the Tour de France and the great European single-day Classics – had no roots in Britain. When he turned professional in 1959, the only other Englishman on the circuit was Robinson, who was more self-effacing than Simpson on and off the bike. Only the Australian Hubert Opperman, who finished 12th in the Tour and won the Paris–Brest–Paris marathon in the early 1930s, had come from outside Europe and conquered the cycling world in similar style. But no New Worlders followed Opperman’s trail, as other British cyclists would seek to emulate Simpson.

The Briton brought more than novelty value with him. The 1960s were the time of world-beating British exports such as the hovercraft and the Mini, when pop culture was centred on Carnaby Street, when the Beatles and the Stones were shooting to stardom. For all his working-class roots and down-to-earth nature, Simpson brought a small part of the aura of ‘swinging London’ to cycling.

Europe’s affection for the English interloper also had its roots in the Second World War and the Liberation, still recent events in the early 1960s. Simpson was quickly nicknamed Tommy, with all its connotations of the plucky British soldier fighting on a foreign shore. (Ironically, he actually preferred Tom, a name handed down through his family.) L’Equipe’s headline after an early Simpson near-miss in the 1960 Paris–Roubaix was explicit in its D-Day reference: ‘The landing of a Tommy’, using the same word, debarquement, as referred to the Normandy invasion. His Churchillian V-sign after winning the world championship was greatly appreciated, as was the fact that he shared his birthday with the war leader.

At a time when Britain was regarded as insular and aloof, people appreciated the gesture Simpson had made in crossing the Channel to immerse himself in a very un-British sport. Antoine Blondin’s article in L’Equipe on the day Simpson won his yellow jersey was headlined ‘Roule Britannia!’ and made much of the fact that the Englishman was the Frenchman’s ‘beloved and traditional adversary’. But Simpson’s adaptation to his chosen métier had to be total if he was to overcome the obstacles in his path. First, there was the language barrier. From inarticulate loneliness when he first moved to France, Simpson mastered cycling’s three main languages. Initially with the help of his wife Helen, he quickly acquired fluent French: the first step in working out how the sport functioned. He later picked up adequate Flemish and Italian.

Simpson’s best source of information early in his professional career was Robinson, his flatmate and teammate at the Rapha squad between 1960 and 1961. Simpson would constantly ask questions, and sometimes Robinson would take advantage of him. ‘Sometimes I’d fit him up,’ chuckles Robinson. ‘We were in a restaurant once with some French guys and he wanted to say “Where is the toilet?” so I told him “Où est la chiotte?” which means “Where is the shithouse?”, and he yelled it out across the restaurant. Tom got his own back by telling the French lads “The English word for bottle is bollocks”, so when they came over to the Isle of Man they asked for a “bollocks of wine, please”.’

In French, cycling’s lingua franca, he reached a level of fluency where he could earn the admiration of a Frenchman, in this case L’Equipe’s Jacques Augendre, who told me: ‘In 1966 Tom broke his leg skiing, and it cost him a lot of money, so he needed to do a good Tour. “Le Tour paiera la fracture,” he said: the Tour will pay for the break.’ This is a pun on the wordplay between fracture and facture, the French word for bill. It would be sophisticated even for a Frenchman.

The unwritten rules of European professional cycling also had to be learned. These covered the full spectrum, from respecting the moments in a race when it was the convention not to attack – during a collective toilet stop, or at a feeding station – to accepting that in exhibition events the local favourite had to be allowed to win. Simpson had an impulsive nature, which he had to learn to master: early in his career, for example, he would fall foul of promoters simply for competing too enthusiastically.

One incident sums up both Simpson’s shrewdness and the nature of the system he entered: during his first world road championship in 1959, only weeks after he turned professional, he was one of the winning break and was offered money by the eventual winner, André Darrigade, if he would assist the Frenchman. Simpson turned down the cash, knowing that if Darrigade won, as indeed he did, the Frenchman would owe him a favour. Two and a half years later, as his teammate, Darrigade would help him take the yellow jersey in the Tour.

Simpson’s achievement in getting to the very top of cycling can be put in simple perspective. The sport was as distant and alien to the Harworth miners among whom Simpson grew up as Test cricket would be to a fisherman in Saint Brieuc. Five years after welcoming him with ‘Roule Britannia’, Blondin summed up in his obituary the pleasure and satisfaction the Europeans had gained from watching Simpson’s progress: ‘He was our pride.’

There was far more to Simpson, however, than a whiff of Carnaby Street, une belle gueule (a nice face) as the French put it, a place in the history books and a set of results which for a Belgian or an Italian would have been worthy rather than exceptional. Where Simpson touched heartstrings among the press, fans, organizers and his fellow cyclists was in his approach to a race. As the French put it: ‘He left no one indifferent.’

His tactics were straightforward and uninhibited: it was better to try to the utmost, fail and be visible rather than wait and hope. This had been his way even when he had begun racing as a schoolboy. Now, as a professional it guaranteed headlines, and made his public profile higher than that of Robinson, his early mentor. In one of his first one-day Classics, the Paris–Roubaix in 1960, for example, Simpson was a newspaperman’s dream. He led for 25 miles and looked a certain winner until his strength deserted him three miles from the finish. The valiant foreign newcomer, cruelly deprived within an ace of victory, accepted defeat by murmuring the words ‘I nearly got it’. He exemplified le fair-play, the quality so admired in the English. In terms of his public profile, it was a critical afternoon’s work: this was the first race to be shown live on Eurovision, and a whole new audience watched the heroic near miss.

The press would sympathise so much with Simpson’s approach, even if he was unsuccessful, that they sometimes painted him as the moral victor. Pierre Chany, the doyen of French cycling writers in the post-war years, certainly felt that way after the hilly Liège–Bastogne–Liège Classic in 1963. Simpson began attacking 60 miles from the finish, and was swept up within three miles of the chequered flag. He should have won, but finished 32nd, prompting this from Chany: ‘Sensitive souls will have shed a tear for Simpson, caught by an alliance of 30 adversaries when he deserved victory 100 times over. Fellow travellers such as ourselves can only pity the fate of this extraordinary battler, audacious in competition, generous in his efforts, and whose merits are never officially recognized. This man does not receive his due. He is the victim of a curse.’

Throughout cycling and, indeed, sporting history, fans and the press have always found it easier to empathise with a valiant, unlucky battler who gets the occasional big result than with a less charismatic winner. In the 1960s, Raymond Poulidor, who never won the Tour, was more popular than Jacques Anquetil, who won it five times. In the early 1990s, Claudio Chiappucci was preferred to the robotic Miguel Indurain. After his disastrous spring of 1963, Simpson earned the epithet l’eternel malchanceux – the eternal accursed. In cycling it is not a pejorative term.

On the other side of the Channel, there was pride aplenty in Simpson’s achievements, but it was of a different order: he was the lynchpin at the centre of an entire sport. His funeral in his home town of Harworth was attended by 5,000 mourners, both ordinary fans and the elite of the sport. They stood shoulder to shoulder in a thundery downpour on the little knoll around the 12th-century church, listening via loudspeakers to a service which included Psalm 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’.

A vast procession of cyclists wheeling bikes followed the coffin through the village streets. Some 400 wreaths were piled outside the cemetery a little way away from the church. It could not match the crowd which covered a Ligurian hillside seven years earlier for the funeral of Simpson’s boyhood hero Fausto Coppi, but it was a huge turnout for British cycling.

In his editorial in Cycling, Simpson’s close friend Alan Gayfer expressed the anguish felt by British cycling fans at his loss: ‘Tom Simpson, our own Tom, is dead – what on earth shall we do without him? I am still trying to think straight, to conceive of a world of cycling without the lively face and straightforward comments of “Mr Tom” to guide and to lead.’ The final two verbs are key. Simpson was a sporting ambassador for Britain when he was in Europe. In his home country he was both the figurehead and ambassador for the sport.

When Simpson left for Brittany in 1959 to begin his career in Europe, British cycling was just emerging from the internecine dispute of the post-war years between the proponents of road racing, the British League of Racing Cyclists, and the establishment, the National Cycling Union, who felt that large bunches of cyclists on the roads would alienate the police and the car-driving public. Road racing, European style, had been banned in Britain at the turn of the century: time trialling and track racing had developed instead.

In the early 1960s, British cycling was a genteel, pastoral world. As now, Cycling set the tone, for the majority at least, and at the start of the decade the magazine was little changed from the 1930s. Alongside editorials attacking ‘road race madness’ were touring articles by writers with pseudonyms such as ‘Nimrod’ and ‘Centaur’ with titles like ‘A Day on Clare Island’, or ‘An Adventure for Two Lads’.

It was impossible for the establishment to ignore Simpson’s spectacular achievements. He erupted into this tranquil milieu much as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did into the wider world, making a whole generation of British cyclists aware that they inhabited a cycling backwater, cut off from the mainstream. Across the Channel lay money and celebrity: the success of Brian Robinson a few years earlier had hinted at the possibilities, but the level of Simpson’s successes and his near-misses hammered the message home.

When he wore the yellow jersey in 1962, he was greeted in Paris, Cycling reported, by ‘cheering excursionists from as far north as Teesside and as far west as Plymouth’. The fact that large numbers of British fans had gone to France was news in itself. ‘Quite a few made an early start to the social season and for them dawn broke before bedtime’, the magazine said primly.

Jacques Goddet was editorial director of L’Equipe as well as Tour organizer. He was explicit about the wider significance of what Simpson had achieved when he took the yellow jersey in 1962. Goddet wrote in his editorial that day that the English saw the Tour as ‘a funny old thing, a typical invention of a country where they eat frogs’, and called on his readers to ‘rejoice in this historic date for cycling, which will widen its international appeal. Let’s hope this will rejuvenate British cycling and make them consign their black alpaca jackets to mothballs.’

A few months later, Goddet and Simpson appeared at British cycling’s gala night, the ‘Champions’ Concert’, organized at the Royal Albert Hall by time trialling’s governing body, the Road Time Trials Council. They were guests of honour among 4,000 cyclists, entertained by the Moulin Rouge-style Cavalcade Girls – ‘lovelier than ever despite the scanty costumes’ reported Cycling – along with jugglers and ‘dare-devil roller skaters’. Resplendent in his yellow jersey, Simpson pedalled on a set of stationary rollers for a few minutes, ‘amid a crescendo of enthusiastic applause’. Six years earlier such a scene would have been unthinkable, as British cycling fought its civil war and Simpson was banned under NCU rules for six months for failing to respect a ‘Stop’ sign.

The British fans would throng to see Simpson on the rare occasions when he appeared in the UK to race. His feats encouraged British promoters: in August 1964, there were queues a mile long as 12,000 fans turned up at Crystal Palace to watch Simpson ride a circuit race. Two months earlier, the Herne Hill track in London had been packed for a meeting with Simpson and Jacques Anquetil topping the bill.

Simpson’s successes and the sport’s higher profile led to other spin-offs. Peter Clifford’s book Tour de France sold out in 1965. Cycling magazine was prompted to organize trips to the Ghent and Antwerp six-day track races to watch Simpson; by 1967, the Sportsmen’s Travel Club and a rival, Page & Moy, were organizing trips for fans to attend the fateful Tour de France, at 35 guineas a head. The Falcon bike company ran a successful ‘Majorca training camp with Simpson’ in 1966. This was a boom time in British cycling. No fewer than 33 foreign stars – including Stablinski, Altig and Anquetil – were flown to the Isle of Man for the Manx Premier race in 1962. Major sponsors such as Corona, Players and Fyffes entered the sport – the banana company specifically to back the ill-fated 1967 British Tour team. Even the London six-day track race was revived in the year of Simpson’s death, on the back of his success.

Simpson brought a confidence to British cycling which it had never known before. This was best expressed by Alan Gayfer when Simpson won his world championship in 1965, a feat which had always seemed unattainable to British fans. ‘We have waited 38 years for this moment, for the time when we could hold our heads up . . . a young miner’s son has proved that anything a Belgian or a Frenchman can do, we can do better.’

Simpson knew the importance of the home audience. A fellow professional, Michael Wright, remembers missing the plane on the way to ride a race in England with Simpson, Hoban and Denson. Simpson spent all their contract money on hiring an eight-seater to get them there. ‘He absolutely wanted to do it so as not to let the organizer down. We earned nothing, because it all went on the plane.’

British cycling mattered to Simpson in a wider sense as well. He encouraged any British cyclists who came over to his base in Ghent, and in 1964 he began campaigning in the press for a team sponsored by a British company to bring together the best home cyclists to compete in Europe – led naturally by him. By the time of his death he had founded, together with Albert Beurick and the writer Peter Clifford, a subscription fund which was to have supported the team. Simpson had other, wider ambitions as well. He seems to have been determined to restructure the entire sport in Britain after his retirement. Given the effect he had already had, plus his clout, his connections, and his determination, he would have had more than a fighting chance of pushing the sport to a higher level. What he might have achieved off the road, as well as on it, will remain British cycling’s great might-have-been.

When Chris Brasher of the Observer went to interview Simpson in Paris in the early 1960s, he expected to meet a rough-hewn Durham miner’s son. He found the opposite, he told me, a vision of continental sophistication which he would never forget: ‘an impeccable Englishman in a Prince of Wales suit’.

‘I asked if he knew a good restaurant; he did and it was Michelin-starred. I made notes on my paper napkins, brought them home and put them on my desk and the article just flowed, which was a tribute to Tom rather than to me. I don’t know how many interviews I’ve done over 40 years, but that sticks in my mind. Tom had style.’

In Britain, Simpson’s feats were in keeping with the times. Like the country’s other sporting greats, he epitomised a brief period when Britain was riding high. This was the time of confidence which had led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’. In sport, Britain was still used to taking on the world and winning. In 1963, Jim Clark became the youngest Formula One world champion ever, and then, of course, there were the events of the 1966 World Cup. That a Durham miner’s son could conquer a sport as alien as cycling typified a time when anything seemed possible for those who had talent and a dream.

The world championship in 1965 was Simpson’s breakthrough into the wider world outside cycling magazines and sports pages. Classic wins and yellow jerseys were not easy concepts for the British media to deal with: a world title needed no translation. Simpson’s three tabloid exposés in the People were only one way in which his profile was raised. The BBC had shot the half-hour documentary ‘The World of Tom Simpson’ earlier that year – and it was repeated.

As a world champion, Simpson won three separate ‘Sportsman of the Year’ awards: the BBC’s ‘Sports Personality of the Year’, the ‘Sports Writers’ Personality of the Year’, and the Daily Express ‘Sportsman of the Year’. By 1967, five British newspaper sports writers were following the Tour de France to cover Simpson. Four of them drove together in an Austin Maxi, drawing amused comment from their European colleagues. The reports, in the Guardian at least, appeared near the top of each day’s sports page.

At a time when coverage of all sports was limited, Simpson’s attempt to win the Tour was allotted a large amount of space: at least as much as the cricket, and more, proportionally, than the Tour would be given now. Earlier in 1967, ITV’s ‘World of Sport’ had covered the Milan–San Remo classic for the first time. This was the beginning of a 15-year connection with cycling through Simpson’s friend the journalist David Saunders, which lasted until the demise of the independent channel’s flagship sports programme.

Simpson’s acceptance speech at the ‘Sports Writers’ award, delivered in the presence of the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was the classic Simpson mixture of frankness and self-deprecating humour. Simpson noted that the PM was also ‘in the saddle but I hope his bottom doesn’t hurt as much as mine’. He went on to call for British industry to take note of cycling; he hoped that industrialists would wake up to the advertising potential of cycling teams, with the advent of the Common Market and proposals for a tunnel under the Channel. The latter, he added, would be a useful thing, because ‘the kids are always sick on the boat on the way home’.

The speech was a little marvel of deadpan delivery and perfect comic timing, and it was also a perfect example of Simpson’s ability to play to almost any audience. He was clearly aware of the importance of promoting himself in any way he could, in the places it mattered. Sometimes this backfired. In the same autumn that Simpson won the hearts of the British press, he also created a sensation by being one of the first top cyclists to ‘kiss and tell’. In 1965, the new world champion sold his story to the People. It ran over three Sundays: September 19 and 26, and October 3.

All the features were in the first person; the first bore the headline: ‘World champ but they call me a crook’. It dealt with the persistent allegations of race-fixing against Simpson; he revealed that he had offered the Irish rider Shay Elliott £1,100 to help him win the 1963 world championship, which Elliott had turned down, and that he had once taken £500 to help another team. Not noble acts, but these were relatively common practices in cycling.

‘Nobbled by a secret doper’, the following week, gave ‘the whole story’ about drugs. This amounted to little more than that Simpson had once thought he had been given a drugged bottle, and that he used ‘tonics’ provided by his doctors. ‘Nobbling’ was clearly a preoccupation of the paper’s: alongside Simpson’s articles that autumn was an exposé of greyhound doping, involving ‘bent’ races, crooked kennel girls and spiked sausage meat.

The final episode, ‘I blew my top at the champ’, referred to a scuffle between Simpson and a fellow rider, Henri Anglade. This article’s gist, among the hyperbole, was that cycling was a no-holds-barred sport in which it was possible to make a lot of money. Not exactly news, and confirmation that the paper was doing its worst with relatively innocuous material.

Lame and overblown it may all have been, but in Europe, for any cyclist to talk to the press about selling races and the use of drugs was a major event. For the newly crowned world champion to do so was explosive. The articles appeared translated in full in European newspapers; the scandal and the fall-out made the front page of the French sports newspaper L’Equipe for several days.

Simpson’s explanations were inconsistent. First he stood by the articles, then he said he had been misquoted and would sue. His motives were also unclear. His constant need for money had to be one, but he also claimed the exposés were intended to raise the profile of cycling in Britain. This is not as disingenuous as it sounds; the issue was a constant refrain of his, and he was quite capable of merely seeing the end and assuming no one else would disapprove of the means.

However, there was general disapproval. One French newspaper cartoon depicted the world champion as a bell, with bags of money where the clapper should have been. Simpson’s team manager, Gaston Plaud, and his personal manager, Daniel Dousset, condemned his rash conduct. His sponsor, Peugeot, came close to sacking him. He received anonymous letters accusing him of being unworthy of the world champion’s jersey, and was rumoured to have been cold-shouldered by his fellow professionals. ‘Cycling will not pardon him’ thundered a French Sunday paper’s editorial.

Simpson donated the money to a cyclists’ benevolent fund and won his pardon two weeks later with a simply stunning victory in the closing one-day Classic of the season, the Tour of Lombardy. It was a show of strength worthy of his hero, the Italian Fausto Coppi, or any of the greats. He escaped alone and had enough time in hand at the finish in Como to talk to the press before the second-placed rider arrived: a ‘marvellous revenge’ as the headline in L’Equipe put it. Only one man had done the world championship/Tour of Lombardy double before – Alfredo Binda in the 1920s. Any victory by a world road race champion is notable; wearing the distinctive rainbow-striped white jersey, the champion is a marked man whose every move can be followed.

His fellow cyclists’ reaction to the People affair had meant that Simpson was doubly marked. It all made the story even better: the world champion gained several weeks of notoriety. For a man who made his living from appearance money, from drawing crowds to races, this was hardly a disaster.

Simpson’s talent for self-promotion is best shown by his embrace of his alter ego, ‘Major Tom’. The ‘Major’ first popped up after Simpson’s surprise fourth place in his first professional world championship, at Zandvoordt in Holland in 1959. A headline in L’Equipe read: ‘Les carnets du Major Simpson’ (the notebooks of Major Simpson), a reference to a popular book of the time Les carnets du Major Thompson.

The original is a gentle mocking of the French, seen through the eyes of a fictional expatriate English gentleman, written by Pierre Daninos, who also covered the Tour de France for the newspaper Le Figaro. Simpson was the embodiment of Major Thompson as he appeared in a caricature on the cover of the book: slender, sharp-featured, well turned-out, exuding a crisp ‘English sense of humour’. It was a convenient way of pigeon-holing a British cyclist: Brian Robinson had also been compared to the ubiquitous major by the press.

‘Major Tom’ was born after Simpson’s Tour of Flanders win when a journalist from Miroir-Sprint magazine brought a Thompson-style bowler hat and umbrella to the cyclist’s Paris apartment for a photo shoot. Simpson already had the sharp suits. The idea had come from his manager Daniel Dousset, a man with a keen eye for a new way of selling his protégés. Simpson was photographed selecting his morning Times from a bookstall and sipping tea in a café, and a minor legend was born.

British fans would have seen a resemblance to the sardonic, bowler- and brolly-wielding John Steed from The Avengers, which first screened in England in January 1961. The note of ‘swinging London’ played well on the Continent. Simpson was clearly touting his Englishness to the full to a willing Continental audience but it was merely an act: he always seemed perfectly at home in Europe. He eventually decided that the bowler hat had jinxed him, and stopped wearing it, but there was a final curious twist: after his marriage to Helen Simpson, Barry Hoban recycled the bowler and brolly by posing with them for a magazine in the guise of ‘the gent from Ghent’.

Even after the bowler was abandoned, Simpson retained a sartorial edge over the opposition. Typically, he turned up at the start of the 1967 Tour wearing a blue blazer with a red rose embroidered on it. Equally typically, he quipped: ‘I’m not going for stage wins, just the Most Elegant Rider and the Most Unfortunate Rider’s prizes.’

To promote himself to his various audiences, Simpson did more than simply dress up: in the 1960s, double-page articles bearing his byline were a regular feature of Cycling. He gave his inside view of the great races, passed on his training tips, and expounded his arguments for the foundation of a British national professional team. The articles were apparently ghost-written by the editor Alan Gayfer, but they bore the indelible Simpson stamp of brutal honesty and wry humour. His inside view of victory in Milan–San Remo writes off some of the field as ‘the most hopeless lot of cowboys you could ever meet’. In another, a few months before he died, he says of his failed hour record attempt in 1958: ‘I learned nothing. I was too stupid to learn then.’

Simpson was happy to accommodate the clichéd French view of the typical Englishman, but he also knew exactly what his home audience wanted. In his inside account of the 1962 Tour he delivers the perfect homespun touch: ‘The only celebration I had [after taking the jersey] was my pot of tea and bread and jam in bed before my massage.’ The thought of their boy putting away his jam butty in between battles with Johnny Foreigner would have melted the heart of any English cycling fan.

There was a serious purpose to all this self-promotion. As early as the 1960s, the trend for sportsmen to be as much entertainers as athletes had begun, something which would be most strikingly seen later in the decade with Muhammad Ali. As a younger professional, Simpson came across a cyclist called Roger Hassenforder, by then past his best but still legendary as the clown and prankster of the circuit; the man who would, for example, pedal around a velodrome sitting on his handlebars and facing backwards.

Simpson would have observed that Hassenforder gained more and better contracts than his somewhat meagre racing results merited. When it came to making money, a cyclist’s profile and ability to draw a crowd mattered. Indeed, Simpson admitted learning much from him. He did Hassenforder-style stunts of his own, such as the time he grabbed a large stick out of the hedge and pretended to assault a fellow cyclist. ‘He [Simpson] used to laugh and joke about, but it was more calculating than that. He’d see someone in the crowd at the start of a race, go and borrow something and act the fool,’ recalls Alan Ramsbottom. ‘He’d pick up musical instruments, hats and all sorts.’ If the hat looked funny, Simpson would wear it, be it Stetson, bowler, or lofty traditional Breton lace coiffe. ‘It was pure performance,’ says Brian Robinson.

However, this was more than mere imitation of Hassenforder: Simpson was a natural comedian. He could spot the potential in a situation or a prop, deliver a joke’s punchline with pinpoint timing, and come up with a quick retort when required. If he learnt these things anywhere, it was as a small boy, when his parents ran the working men’s club in the Durham village of Haswell, and Tom and his elder brother Harry would lean out of their bedroom window to listen to the comedians working the audience in the evenings.

So quotable was Simpson that, after his death, one magazine devoted an entire panel to his witticisms from the 1967 Tour under the title ‘Tom’s Bons Mots’. On a teammate abandoning, probably reflecting his inner thoughts: ‘That’s a gentleman for you, he quit so there are fewer of us to share the prize money.’ On the contrasting abilities of the British team, ‘It’s so absurd I love it.’

In this posthumous tribute to ‘Simpson’s humour’, the picture in the panel of his bons mots is truly worth 1,000 words. Simpson is holding a huge block of ice on a fork and Barry Hoban has one corner in his mouth; Simpson is licking the other end, his tongue fully extended, his gurning grin a small, and vulgar, masterpiece in itself.

The ways in which Simpson managed to appeal to spectators and promoters were infinitely varied, and usually mischievous. At the Sportpaleis track in Ghent, he was riding a ‘devil-take-the-hindmost’, a race where the last cyclist in the pack is eliminated until the two fastest meet. In the end, Simpson was up against Giuseppe Beghetto, the reigning world sprint champion. Simpson had no chance of winning so, as Beghetto sped past him, he took one hand off the bars, leant over – travelling at 40 mph – and pretended to take a tow on the Italian’s saddle. On another occasion in Ghent, he was part of a panel selecting ‘Miss Sportpaleis’ – and he persuaded the others to choose ‘the roughest girl there’, according to one witness.

Even on the morning of his death, Simpson was fooling around with Hoban in a rowing boat at the stage start in Marseille’s Old Port, dipping his toe in the water for the photographers. This was before the most important stage of the Tour, on which his career depended. Today, prior to such a day, the Tourmen would be cocooned in air-conditioned buses. The notion of playing up to the crowd and the media would be the last thing on their minds.

For any public figure, the key to popularity is genuine emotional engagement. Simpson’s death was a major event because he struck chords right across a wide range of audiences. He offered the complete package: success to attract the aspirational, the Dunkirk spirit for admirers of glorious failure, a humble background for those who liked the homespun, an aristocratic touch for the snobs, off-the-wall humour for fans of the peculiar, wider aims of his sport for the serious-minded.

For the French, Simpson could either play the stiff-backed English major, or the precise opposite: the Englishman ‘who was not phlegmatic’, as one journalist put it. ‘He is ambitious like a Frenchman, selfish like a Spaniard, industrious like a German, talkative like an Italian and versatile like a Fleming,’ wrote the professional cyclist turned journalist Jean Bobet. And there was a final, crucial element in the equation of stardom: a hint of self-mockery in Simpson which meant that he never looked as if he was trying too hard or taking it all too seriously.

In Cycling, Alan Gayfer compared him to the Formula One driver Mike Hawthorne, ‘another laughing cavalier cut off in his prime’, while two of the tributes in the magazine drew a parallel with Sir Donald Campbell, both ‘killed while fulfilling their aspiration to put Britain at the top’. For Jacques Goddet, he was: ‘A champion in his own style, a lover of the peculiar, ambitious to the point of imprudence and collapse.’ For Chris Brasher, an Olympic gold medallist and still one of the country’s leading sports writers, Simpson was more: one of the greatest figures in British sport in the 20th century.

Côte de Dourdan, May 26, 1963

The five small motorbikes putter up the dead straight hill out of the village in the Chevreuse valley, through the crowds lined three-deep. Old men in berets, Brylcreemed fathers, mothers and children in frilly Sunday dresses have turned out to watch cycling’s longest race, the Bordeaux–Paris ‘Derby of the Road’.

The ‘dernys’ are motorised bikes driven by fat men in dark glasses, cycling jerseys and shorts, who pedal slowly to help the engines; behind each one is a cyclist. They are wearing identical kit to the ‘derny’ drivers, but the similarity ends there: the cyclists are slender, athletic, their pacemakers corpulent and varicose-veined.

The cyclists left Bordeaux 14 hours ago, at two in the morning. They rode through the night in a silent, orderly crocodile with their police outriders and support cars, saw the sun rise at Angoulême and began racing near Poitiers, where the ‘derny’ drivers were waiting. The ‘Derby’, 348 miles long, 180 of those miles behind the ‘dernys’, is a throwback to cycle racing in the 1890s, when racers were paced by tandem cycles over inhuman distances; Dourdan, an hour and a half from Paris, is usually decisive, where the distance finally makes itself felt.

Tactics are dictated by the pacer; Tom Simpson’s guide, Fernand Wambst, is a calculating man, chosen by the Peugeot team to master Simpson’s impetuous instincts. He wants to make their move here. His gut wobbling under the black and white Peugeot jersey, he guides Simpson to the front of the little group and accelerates, with Simpson sprinting behind, eyes fixed on the back tyre of the ‘derny’.

Only one man attempts to hold their pace: Edouard Delberghe, in the striped jersey of the Pelforth Beer team, and he is soon 100 metres behind Simpson. He races the final 42 miles to the Parc des Princes stadium with ‘the ease of an English gentleman going to his daily bridge session’, as one writer puts it. After a spring of frustrating near misses, his career is back on track.