Put Me Back On My Bike

A TAPE-RECORDING OF a dead man’s voice, crackling into my ear for three hours as the French and English countryside sped past the high-speed train. A man with his own little ways of talking, a man laughing the occasional guttural chuckle, asking his companion if he had enough to drink, the clink of water jug or wine bottle on the glasses. Dr Pierre Dumas’s voice was there in my ear, still living in the cassette recorder. That, however, was as close as I would ever get to knowing the Tour de France’s former doctor, who fought to save Tom Simpson’s life, who took a large amount of the blame for his death. But I could feel the man’s humour, his relative detachment after 20 years away from cycling, even if I could barely put a face to the deep voice.

In reading an interview or watching it on television, the editing process invariably gets in the way: the writer edits the quotes, the sub-editor cleans them up again. This was different: it was eavesdropping on an uncut conversation, and, like any eavesdropper, I felt I was intruding. And it was frustrating to hear a colleague, Philippe Brunel of L’Equipe, doing something I wished I could do myself. Sometimes I wished Philippe had asked a different question. I would wonder why he had not pressed a point home here, not sought a specific answer there.

In every photograph of Simpson dying on the Ventoux roadside, Dumas is a central figure: stubbled face, mousy hair, his gut bulging under a black string vest, his climbing boots and running shorts spread in a variety of bizarre angles across the rocks as he crouches to blow air into the lungs of the inert cyclist.

As I trawled through back copies of cycling magazines of the time, something else struck me. There were other pictures of the doctor doing the same thing to other cyclists in 1955 and 1965. Both his posture as well as the props – oxygen mask, oxygen cylinder – he used were identical. The cyclists, Jean Malléjac and Lucien Aimar, looked the same as Simpson did – inert, comatose – and had come close to the same fate as Simpson. Dumas looked younger and thinner when tending to Malléjac, but that was the only difference. Obviously, when the doctor ran up to Simpson’s body, took the pulse, and applied the oxygen mask, he had been there before. It was not a new experience for him, until he realized – within a couple of minutes – that Simpson was not going to get up.

Simpson’s death could not be seen as an isolated incident: it was one of a series of collapses on mountains on the Tour during the 1960s. This one happened to end in a fatality. As the doctor responsible for the physical well-being of cyclists at the race from 1952 to 1969, Dumas was the man best placed to put the tragedy in its context. Largely forgotten by the world of cycling, Dumas gave one major interview before he died in February 2000; to Brunel, the chief cycling writer at L’Equipe, a cycling historian who was fascinated by the Simpson tragedy. Brunel had crossed the Atlantic from Mexico in January 1999 solely to meet the doctor, then a semi-invalid living in retirement in the outskirts of Paris.

On my behalf, Philippe had hunted high and low among the piles of cycling magazines and books in his central Paris apartment. What he had found for me were three small tapes of one conversation which connected three different aspects of the Simpson story. There was the visual evidence of men lying prone by the mountain roads, the unseen world of syringes and pills, and the official attempts to stop the cyclists from using drugs. Dumas was the missing link. The young doctor should have been on a climbing holiday in the Alps in July 1952. He was a black belt in judo, an instructor at the ENSEP teacher training college who knew nothing of the Tour de France, and the offer of the doctor’s job on the race came at short notice. He cancelled the trip and was immediately thrust into a small, enclosed world, far removed from the sprawling enterprise of today. The Tour was a rudimentary affair, a hamlet compared to today’s small town: ‘rustic’ is the word the doctor uses continuously to describe it.

The race’s intimacy meant that Dumas could quickly get to know his charges: the riders, the men who looked after them, the tiny press corps, the organizers. Medical back-up was minimal, so he was welcomed by the cyclists. Using performance-enhancing substances was not banned, so the men he looked after had no inhibitions about letting him into their secrets. ‘They told me everything, because they did not have the impression that they were doing anything wrong.’

Dumas arrived in cycling close to the end of ‘the witch doctor time’, as he called it. This had been a period of almost complete ignorance in matters medical and physiological, in essence little changed from the years between the wars. The bike racers came from what he calls delicately ‘a certain milieu: they were country boys, blacksmiths’. His implication is that they were poorly educated.

The men who looked after them were the soigneurs, whose ‘value was in their valise’, as Dumas’s pun has it. Their status and income depended on the magical remedies they carried in their suitcases. These might be medicines bought for one old franc and sold on for 100 with the label scratched off. ‘It was all part of the mystery,’ says Dumas. Among other things, they would provide la topette – a small bottle containing a stimulant. The French word is still used today to mean doping. In one soigneur’s case, the mix was coca, cola and quina – the active agent in quinine.

Attention to hygiene was minimal: Dumas saw riders ‘injecting each other with syringes which had just been used by a friend, with dirty hands’. Saddle sores on the crutch were common owing to dirt from the roads and the lack of basic hygiene; they led to a condition which Dumas called ‘the third testicle’, a large swelling caused by infection of the perineum. Training was rudimentary: if one cyclist had ridden 5,000 kilometres before a race, he was felt to be better prepared than a colleague who had covered a thousand fewer. Diet came down to volume as well and, as a result, the cyclists ate like weightlifters. Dumas would watch the Tour men consuming 20 hard-boiled eggs at a sitting. The more fuel in the machine, the better. There was no understanding of how the body consumed energy. To combat hypoglycaemia, in French cycling slang la fringale, a kilo of sugar or honey might be consumed at a time.

As for stimulants, ‘the cyclists took everything they were offered,’ says Dumas. ‘It didn’t matter what they took, as long as they believed in it.’ In the suitcases and on hotel room tables were numerous arrays of flasks, boxes of pills, suppositories, ampoules and syringes. Dumas’s charges took extract of bee’s or toad’s venom, which were popular cures for rheumatism; pure cola, which was a remedy dating back to the 1900s; and ether, which could be smelt from 60 feet away. Each had his own remedies: Jean Stablinski, for example, would take two egg yolks in a glass of port.

Shortly after Dumas’s arrival at the Tour de France, the philosophy, and, as a consequence, the drugs, gradually began to change, as the cyclists and their advisers became better educated. As the doctor puts it: ‘Then we came to a more civilised period, when they began to read the Vidal [a popular medical directory]. They began to think about the problem, as well as using the information which was handed down.’

Then followed what Dumas calls ‘the semi-scientific period, roughly speaking Jacques Anquetil’s time’. Anquetil raced from 1955 to 1969: Simpson’s career fell within those years. This was a period of transition, when basic medical information was becoming widely available, but its application to cycling was still empirical, and the old philosophy of ‘the more the better’ was still followed. Simpson, with his thirst for knowledge and his drive for the latest remedies, fits into this picture. In place of the witch doctors’ brews came what Dumas terms ‘the Anquetil cocktail’: painkiller, stimulant, sleeping pill. Morphine or palfium, which was given to terminal cancer patients to ease their agony, was injected into the riders’ legs to deaden the muscle pain.

‘During the race?’ asks an incredulous Brunel. ‘Oh! Enormément,’ comes the deadpan answer. Brunel cannot believe what he is hearing: ‘You saw them inject themselves in front of you?’ Dumas doesn’t see the question as shocking, doesn’t take Brunel’s surprise on board. ‘They weren’t embarrassed,’ maintains the doctor, who would have witnessed it from his car or the motorbike he sometimes used, immediately behind the bunch. And there were no rules to prevent it.

The opiates deadened leg pains, but they slowed the rest of the system down: a stimulant was needed in order to counteract this. It was usually amphetamine, produced in vast quantities during the Second World War to keep the Armed Forces awake during operations – 72 million for the RAF, for example – and used in slimming pills by the 1950s and 1960s. Caffeine, in tablets and suppositories, was also used.

The stimulant’s effects might last long after the stage finish, which meant that sleep was often impossible; hence the sleeping pill, usually Gardenal. And there were the ‘lung-openers’, such as Solucamphre, injected to improve the breathing. There were no rules against this, and no stigma about the issue, so drugs could be used in quantity. During one Tour, Dumas intercepted a package addressed to one well-known soigneur, Julien Schramm, who worked with Anquetil. It contained 50 ampoules of 20cc of the popular amphetamine Tonedron, known universally as ‘Tonton’. (Its twin sister, Pervitin, is ‘Tintin’.)

Schramm told Dumas the capsules were for his personal consumption – ironically, the same defence Willy Voet would use 30 years later when he was stopped by customs at the start of the Festina affair. ‘I offered to inject him myself,’ says Dumas. ‘He refused, and I said, “You’re a little shit you are: it’s OK for the other guys, but not for you.”’

Among the cyclists, there was, Dumas maintains, little awareness of the potential risks of doping. ‘If someone won a stage using a certain product, they all wanted it. They had no idea what they were doing. It was like when someone has a toothache and their neighbour says “Ah, I’ve got this medicine in my cupboard, some of that will make you better.”’ Ignorance, the desire to finish the race, and the need for cash overrode any appeals for caution or inner doubts.

The young doctor’s medical skills were put to the test in ways which now seem completely sickening. If one of Dumas’s charges had a serious crash and had to be taken to hospital, he would have to find the soigneur before the cyclist could be treated. It was necessary to find out what drugs the patient already had in his system, to avoid overdoses and bad reactions. ‘It was OK as long as the cyclist was conscious and could tell me; if he was in a coma we would have to work out the dosages ourselves.’

As a smattering of badly applied science entered the minds and methods of the Tourmen, Dumas soon developed the feeling that he had no control over what they did. In 1960, he found the race winner Gastone Nencini lying in his bed with a drip infusing primitive hormones into both arms – and smoking a cigarette. He had a similar shock in 1962 on the day after Simpson lost the yellow jersey at Superbagnères in the Pyrenees, when 20 riders fell ill in an epidemic known as ‘the rotten fish affair’. The mass infection was blamed on eating bad fish; Dumas realized that this was not a credible explanation, and put it down to a single soigneur giving all the riders a drug which had affected their health. On the tape, Dumas’s reaction to the practices he saw leaves nothing to the imagination: ‘I was horrified. All this stuff scared me shitless.’

This is the world in which Simpson arrived as a new professional in 1959. In English racing, by and large, drug-taking did not happen. The financial rewards to make it worthwhile were not there; there was no culture of soigneurs with magic remedies; there was a history of Corinthian amateurism in the sport. All Simpson’s English contemporaries speak of seeing drug-taking going on when they arrived in Europe, and being shocked by it. ‘It was a big jolt, seeing it right in front of you,’ says Arthur Metcalfe. ‘Living in England you didn’t hear much about it. You would hear rumours of lads who were taking stuff, but you never saw anything, you didn’t actually discuss it.’ He adds: ‘I remember a criterium in Belgium, when we were all lined up at the start and the police drove up. I can remember the sound now: click, click, click, click, all the pills dropping onto the ground.

Jean Malléjac was the doctor’s first big scare. The Breton collapsed by the roadside on the lower slopes of Mont Ventoux on an afternoon of searing heat in 1955. ‘It chilled my blood,’ says Dumas. The cyclist remained unconscious for a quarter of an hour, laid out on a blanket on the rocks. Dumas had to prise his jaws apart to save him. He gave him oxygen and injected the stimulant solucamphre to restart his heart. At last he came to in what Dumas described as ‘a state of delirium tremens’.

Placed in the race ambulance to be taken to hospital, Malléjac ‘talked, waved his arms, yelled, asked the way to the finish, and wanted to be let out’, reported the newspaper L’Equipe the next day, adding blandly that he had had to be tied down for his own safety. According to one account, Dumas had to use his skills as a judo black belt to pacify the cyclist.

The Tour organizers empowered Dumas to open an inquiry and issued a statement calling upon teams, their managers and their soigneurs to avoid ‘the use of certain products issued without prescriptions’. The only outcome was that a soigneur who worked for Malléjac’s trade team, Terrot, was requested to leave the race, although the organizers were unwilling to link this to the incident. All Dumas could do was express his concerns and hope that persuasion might work. The men who ran the race preferred to push the issue under the carpet.

Just two years before Simpson’s death came the clearest warning signal of all – events on a baking hot afternoon during July 1965 on the Aubisque pass, in the Pyrénées. André Bayssière and Charles Grosskost, two of the riders in the Tour de l’Avenir, the amateur race run alongside the Tour de France on a shorter course, fell by the wayside. In the Tour itself, the rider who was to win in 1966, Lucien Aimar, and his Dutch teammate, Arie Den Hartog, did precisely the same thing.

In each case, the sequence of events was the same as it had been with Malléjac and would be with Simpson: the riders were climbing strongly when they lost control, zigzagged across the road, and then collapsed unconscious in the gutter. With Aimar, there was a surreal note: he had begun walking up the mountain pushing his bike once he was unable to ride – and he dropped his bike shortly before he fell. The key development was that both Grosskost and Bayssière admitted using amphetamines – Aimar did not and none were found on him. Dumas, reportedly outraged by the whole episode, had examined Grosskost and Bayssière’s baggage, and said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t funny any more.’ The use of drugs had become illegal on June 1 that year, so there were consequences: the two cyclists were given bans.

It is still part of the game for professional cyclists to reach their physical limit in the mountains: drugs do not have to play a part. But physical collapse is rare. The image of Stephen Roche being given oxygen after a stage finish in the 1987 Tour is familiar to most cycling fans; I remember the Italian domestique Giovanni Fidanza being put under the mask after a desperate battle to make the day’s cut in 1994. Eddy Merckx and fellow Belgian Martin van den Bossche had the same treatment on the Ventoux in 1970. But these were precautionary measures: Roche and Fidanza never lost consciousness.

Given what he had seen, and his feelings on doping, it was no surprise that on the morning before Simpson died, Dumas should have a premonition of what might occur. This is according to the veteran journalist Pierre Chany, who met the doctor at about seven in the morning near Marseille’s main street, the Cannebière. ‘The air was warm already. We exchanged a few words and he [Dumas] said something to me which I’ll never forget: “The heat will be terrible today. If the guys start to play about with dope we’re liable to have a death on our hands.”’

There was a context in which recourse to stimulants, for all that it was reprehensible and dangerous, was entirely understandable. Merely consider the demands placed on the cyclists by race organizers in the 1960s. Here too, cycling was on the cusp between antiquity and modernity: the sport still harked back to the pre-war years, when superhuman feats over superhuman distances were the norm. The longest stage in the 1967 Tour de France covered 225 miles, from Clermont Ferrand to Fontainebleu, lasting 11 hours and starting at 7.40 a.m. – at the end of three weeks in the saddle. The following day there were two stages totalling 95 miles. When Simpson’s teammate Arthur Metcalfe finished that year’s race, he was ‘like a skeleton’, he says, with his blood pressure so low that he would black out whenever he stood up.

It was not just the Tour de France which placed extreme demands on the riders: the Bordeaux–Paris one-day Classic, which Simpson won in 1963, was 348 miles, mostly paced behind small motorbikes at high speed, starting at around two in the morning and finishing some 14 hours later. The Corona London to Holyhead one-day race was 270 miles, covered when Simpson won in 1965 at an average of 26 mph and after 11 hours in the saddle. Today, the maximum permitted distance for professionals has been cut to a more reasonable, but still daunting, 175 miles.

The 1967 Tour de France in which Simpson died was 3,000 miles long, one of the longest in the post-war years, and the Tour organizer Jacques Goddet later said that Simpson’s death came as a message to him to make the race shorter. The following year it was reduced by 200 miles, and the Tour would never again reach such distances. In fact, it would rarely break the 2,500-mile mark for the next 20 years. The total distance of the 2002 Tour is exactly 1,000 miles less than in 1967.

The spectacle of cyclists driving themselves to their physical limits and beyond, for entertainment and profit, creates a moral dilemma both for the race organizers, who devise the route, and for the journalists. They can simultaneously admire the men’s courage and yet wonder if the human cost can be justified. Goddet was both organizer and reporter: in his editorial in L’Equipe, he describes the Aubisque stage as ‘a fabulous day’, and waxes lyrical about the ‘pitiless cruelty of cycling, a sport of total effort’. A dozen years earlier, he had described the near-tragedy involving Malléjac, which ended the careers of at least two other riders, in a similar eulogy.

It would be too strong simply to say that the Tour organizers at the newspapers L’Equipe and Le Parisien were blind to the risks simply because of the copy that such spectacles made; Goddet had become aware of the doping problem as early as 1931, when he wrote in the newspaper L’Auto, ‘the riders are addicted to poison’. He told the journalist Pierre Chany of his worries about the issue as early as 1951. The organizers were, however, prepared to take the chance and Goddet admitted later that Simpson’s death ‘posed a grave ethical problem and he felt guilty’.

The Tour had been founded in 1903 in order to make headlines and sell newspapers by turning the participants into supermen who managed feats beyond mere mortals. That was no longer the overt message, as it had been in 1903, but Goddet and Levitan were still at the same time creating the Tour route and profiting from the headlines and sales the superhuman feats in the race brought to their papers. Nowadays, that would be seen as a conflict of interest.

However, the problem was not simply the matter of races over inhumanly long distances. The duration of an event does not cause doping. Athletes still feel the need to take drugs to win a 100-metre sprint lasting 10 seconds. Even when the Tour was a relatively benign 2,000 miles in 1988 and 1989, there were still positive drug tests.

The volume of racing was equally important. The nature of professional cycling at the time, dominated as it was by agents such as Daniel Dousset and Roger Piel, meant that the more often a cyclist raced, the more he earned, as long as he performed. There was little incentive to save energy and prepare carefully for a single objective. Doping was an inevitable consequence of the combination of miles spent in the saddle racing and miles spent at the car wheel between races. This was acknowledged by a group of cyclists approached by Dumas for a random test at a track meeting in 1969. They refused on the grounds that they had used amphetamines to keep them awake while driving, and would test positive – unfairly, they claimed, as there was no law against ‘speeding’ in a car.

One of the greatest Belgian cyclists ever, Rik Van Steenbergen, wrote in a newspaper article in 1967: ‘I’ve had to drive to Paris, then immediately after the race get back in my car for a 10-hour trip to Stuttgart where I had to get on my bike at once. There was nothing to do. An organizer would want this star or that one on the bill. He would pay for it. Another would want the same ones the next day, and the public wanted something for its money. As a result, the stars had to look fresh in every race, and they couldn’t do that without stimulants. There are no supermen. Doping is necessary in cycling.’

Jacques Anquetil summed up the situation perfectly when he said: ‘You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a professional cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants.’ Rudi Altig made the point more simply: ‘We are not sportsmen, we are professionals.’

Dumas was the man who found the little tubes in which Simpson had kept the amphetamines he took during the stage. That is common knowledge. What the tapes reveal for the first time is when he found them: at the start of the desperate attempt to revive Simpson. ‘I began coming across them as we undressed him to give him cardiac massage, and said to myself, “There you are.”’

A photograph taken on the day shows the unconscious cyclist lying there with his white Union Jack jersey pulled up above his waist, revealing the braces he wore to keep his shorts up. The picture Dumas’s sentence evokes is devastating in its clarity: the doctor rolls the jersey up the inert torso, feels the pillboxes through the woollen material of the pockets in the back and thinks, ‘Oh right, I know what these mean.’

Dumas does not sound surprised that he found the drugs. He had seen Simpson drive himself into the ground before. He had watched from his car Simpson’s vain fight to continue in the Tour the previous year in spite of an appalling open wound in his arm. He knew that the rider used stimulants. He was clearly fond of the British leader but that did not mean he was blind. ‘We were very good friends. He told me everything. He’d told me himself that he was taken to hospital during the Tour of Spain [three months earlier]. I’d been obliged to hospitalise him after the finish of a stage of the Tour, a time trial two or three years earlier. He generally recovered very quickly.’ The word ‘generally’ is the giveaway here: this was a regular occurrence as far as Dumas was concerned.

At the hospital in Avignon that evening, the doctor took the three tubes out of Simpson’s jersey and passed them to the head of the Tour’s detachment of gendarmes. One tube was labelled Tonedron, the others unlabelled. One was half-full, the others empty. He showed them to the race organizer, Jacques Goddet, who spoke of seeing ‘little tubes of explosive products, and all empty’. This lends a new weight to Goddet’s editorial in L’Equipe the next day about the tragedy. ‘We had already wondered if this athlete, who when under pressure had a painful look, did not make mistakes in looking after himself . . . Doping? We can fear the public revelation of a tragedy caused by this scourge.’ Goddet knew for certain when he wrote this that Simpson had indeed used drugs. He was effectively preparing public minds for the scandal that would follow.

The gendarmes placed the little tubes under lock and key, and Dumas set off the process of interrogations, medical expert’s autopsy and judicial inquiry which was to result in the ‘Simpson affair’. ‘I said to myself that it wasn’t natural that an athlete in his prime should die in this way, so I refused permission for burial.’

Dumas could have ignored the tubes. He could have failed to put two and two together. He could have thrown them away. He might have done, had he felt that Simpson had a right to privacy in death, or had he considered that the rider’s drug-taking was not an issue; or, perhaps, if he had not had several hours since he came across the drugs in which to reflect, at least briefly, on what steps to take. Had he acted differently, Simpson’s death might have been quietly forgotten like the near-tragedies that had preceded it.

The moment Dumas refused interment was the moment when the Simpson tragedy took on a different dimension. Once Dumas decided to set the investigation in motion, the tragedy merged into the wider history of drug-taking in cycling and in sport in general. In this context, it came at a key moment: the mid to late 1960s were a time of increasing awareness and debate about the issue, with a new willingness among the press to recognize the problem, and a new readiness among the authorities to fight against it.

Dumas played a key role here as well. In 1960, after coming across Nencini and his drips, he had gathered team doctors on the Tour de France to discuss the topic. The Tour doctor spoke at another conference, a Europe-wide one, in the Alpine resort of Uriage-les-Bains, in 1963, held by the French sports ministry to define the problem and ways of combating it.

A year earlier, cycling’s international governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, had thrown out a motion from the Polish Federation to make the UCI responsible for combating doping. Measures against the use of drugs in cycling, when they came, were led by police in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and France. They treated action against sportsmen as an extension of their operations against drug traffickers and behaved accordingly. The sports federations followed, empowered by new laws, such as the one passed by 356 votes to 0 in the French national assembly at the end of 1964, and ratified on June 1, 1965. It prohibited ‘the deliberate use of any substance designed to enhance artificially the physical capability of a sportsman where the substance is known to be harmful to health’. There would be fines from £35 to £350, and prison sentences of one month to one year. Amphetamines, such as Simpson and the other cyclists used, were banned by this law.

Early anti-drug operations at cycle races were crude, did nothing to make cyclists feel well-disposed towards their imposition, and lacked any credibility. In April 1965, for example, ‘medical examinations’ were carried out at the Het Volk one-day race in Simpson’s home town of Ghent. All roads into the city were sealed by police, all cars involved with the race were searched. The first five finishers were tested, apart from two who ‘did not understand the situation’. It was a farce: a vast show of strength which had been easily subverted.

The mix of attempted coercion and official laxity continued through 1966. At Royan in the Tour de France, Dumas accompanied gendarmes as they carried out the first drug tests on the race. They checked pulse rates, looked for needle marks on riders’ arms, and took urine samples. The riders went on strike, marching down the road for 200 metres the next day shouting, among other things, ‘Piss yourself, Dumas!’ But six men, among them the cyclist who finished sixth overall, Herman Van Springel, tested positive for amphetamine and its derivatives. It took over a year for the legal process to result in Van Springel being fined.

Jacques Anquetil, by then a five-times winner of the Tour, and the biggest star that cycling had ever seen, summed up the feelings of the Tour men: ‘We find these tests degrading. Why do cyclists have to be suspected and controlled while any other free man can do what he likes and take what he likes?’ The sentiment that cyclists are unfairly penalised by those who would prevent them ‘looking after themselves’ is one that persists to this day.

Anquetil’s denunciation was countered by Levitan in his editorial in Le Parisien: ‘Was this a revolt? No, it was an admission. An admission of concern about the test and its consequences. An admission of inability to move away from suspicious practices. An admission that minds are troubled by the determination of the authorities.’

There are claims that Simpson, the world champion at the time, did not participate in the strike. In his biography Mr Tom, his nephew Chris Sidwells writes: ‘Tom made a point of not getting off his bike. He was one of the few who rode the infamous 200 metres.’ Simpson’s behaviour during the episode is a central part of Sidwells’ argument that he did not willingly use drugs and supported the authorities, but it is by no means clear what Simpson’s feelings were.

In his book Doping: Cycling Supermen, the journalist Roger Bastide suggests the opposite. Simpson was merely the first to break ranks: ‘After three minutes Tom Simpson got back on his bike and provoked a furious breakaway.’ Pierre Chany wrote that Simpson criticised the strike only because it raised the profile of the issue.

The conflict between testers and tested came to a head at the 1966 world championship in the Nurburgring in Germany, where the first six finishers refused to give urine samples. This was not uncommon: both Jacques Anquetil and Rudi Altig had refused tests in Belgium in the spring, and had forfeited wins in the Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne classics as a result. Anquetil and Altig, that year’s world champion, and the runner-up to Simpson the previous year, were among the Nurburgring six, along with four of the biggest names in cycling: Gianni Motta, Raymond Poulidor, Italo Zilioli and Jean Stablinski, who was world champion in 1961. Stablinski says the strike was over the procedure of the test: there was apparently no doctor present. Poulidor, hilariously, had apparently got lost trying to find where he was to be tested.

What followed was farcical. Stablinski was banned for two months, Poulidor for one month, but the suspensions lasted all of 10 days before the UCI Congress cleared the cyclists. There were no penalties, and the top three finishers retained their medals. It can only have left the cyclists with the impression that the cycling authorities were not consistently prepared to take serious measures against the biggest stars if they refused tests; and that race organizers who wanted the stars at their races would come down on their side.

It was total incoherence, a fist of cotton wool in an iron glove with no coordination of measures or penalties between countries. Anquetil’s fate after the Grand Prix des Nations time trial that October can only have confirmed the impression. ‘Master Jacques’ was the most outspoken of all the top cyclists in his opposition to the tests and told the press: ‘We have to take stimulants for such a race. Yes, I have taken stimulants today.’ He was fined 2,000 francs, but did not receive a ban as ‘a gesture of mercy to the cyclist and his comrades’. This was due to ‘the great honour bestowed on international cycle sport, to wit his [Anquetil’s] Légion d’honneur’. He was saved by the gong.

It is only fair to Simpson to speculate on the effect this climate would have had on him at the time he died. By July 13, 1967, the use of drugs had been banned for two years. Amphetamine use was illegal. Drug tests were being carried out, but not in a way which lent the process the slightest credibility. The sport was in a state of flux. The most senior cyclists of the day, Simpson’s peers and friends, were actively contesting the imposition of drug testing. The arguments for the use of drugs were being at least as strongly put as the arguments against. It was not clear by any means whether the economic weight of the senior riders and promoters would be overruled by the punitive powers of the authorities.

It was not set in stone that if a cyclist like Simpson won a race while using drugs he would be tested, or that he would be punished if he refused a test. Dumas had warned riders and managers before the start of the 1966 Tour that measures would be taken, but the world championship strike had left the issue hanging. If Simpson had become a regular user of amphetamines before the day he died, as seems highly likely, what incentives were there for him to give up the practice?

‘Dear Tom Simpson,’ wrote Jacques Goddet in his editorial the evening before the start of the 1968 Tour de France, ‘You will not have fallen in vain on the stony desert of the Ventoux. Doping is no longer a mysterious sickness, hidden, uncontrollable, uncontrolled. For it really seems that there is a common determination among the riders to be rid of this scourge.’ Sadly, Goddet was wrong: drug-taking in cycling did not cease from the moment Simpson died. There would be a major drug scandal on the Tour roughly every 10 years after, and a constant low-level flow of positive drug tests. What changed was the official attitude to combating the practice.

A month to the day after the Simpson tragedy, Désiré Letort was found positive after winning the French national championships, having taken an amphetamine-based product. A campaign was mounted to have the decision overturned. Delegations from his home region of Brittany lobbied the French Cycling Federation but the gold medal was simply not awarded.

Anquetil remained the most virulent critic of the movement, calling the anti-doping law ‘an idiocy’ in a Sunday newspaper shortly after Simpson’s death. He again tried official will power in September that year, in refusing a test immediately after setting a new hour record in Milan and delivering a sample 48 hours later, by which time it was a meaningless exercise. He and his manager Raphael Geminiani – the same Geminiani who was to be one of Dr Dumas’s fiercest critics – had a furious argument with the doctor conducting the test, and came close to throwing the medic out of the track. But the cycling authorities stood firm: Geminiani was fined, the record was never ratified. The same policy was followed when the track rider Pierre Trentin ‘broke’ the 500m world record, without a test.

As well as the new official line, Simpson’s death came in a period when dirty two-wheeled linen was washed in public with a readiness which would only be matched 30 years later after the Festina scandal of 1998. There were Anquetil’s revelations, followed by the confession of Roger Rivière – ‘I took drugs’ – across seven columns of a daily newspaper. There were the six positive tests out of 30 samples from the Tour de l’Avenir – a ‘contagion’, wrote L’Equipe. There was the string of positive tests at the world championships, and there was the death of an obscure Belgian, Roger de Wilde, in a kermesse. In normal circumstances this would have attracted little comment, but de Wilde died of a heart attack brought on by the use of amphetamines. To lose one cyclist in this way looked like bad luck; to lose two smacked of carelessness.

In late November, the UCI Congress passed new international penalties for doping – a one-month suspension for a first offence, life for a fourth. This may sound lenient in contrast with today’s sanctions, but the Simpson affair had provided the impetus for a key development: consistent rules across the world.

The cycling world which gathered in the sedate little spa of Vittel for the Tour of 1968 was changed for ever, according to Dumas, who notes that the tragedy had, in the most brutal manner possible, made the organizers and the cyclists themselves aware of the potential for disaster. ‘Firstly, they knew what they did wasn’t good; secondly, they had never weighed up the risks before.’ The 1968 Tour was billed as the ‘Tour de Santé’ (the Health Tour) – something which would also find echoes 30 years later when the first post-Festina Tour was sold as the ‘Tour of Renewal’. The ‘Tour de Santé’ was more than a mere label. ‘The Tour of 1968 established certain principles,’ wrote Geoffrey Nicholson eight years later in The Great Bike Race. ‘If a rider took dope he might be caught. If he was caught he would be punished. And if he was punished he could expect no intervention from his fellow professionals.’ One Simpson legacy, then, is the little caravan at bike race finishes bearing the words ‘contrôle anti-dopage’.

When I met Jean Stablinski to discuss Simpson, we talked about the effect his friend’s death had on the discussions of the time about doping. Stablinski felt slightly aggrieved that Simpson’s death had been exploited by the proponents of dope testing, who included Dumas, Monsieur Anti-doping, to the peloton. They had, felt ‘Stab’, used Tom’s tragedy as a vehicle to promote their case. It should, perhaps, be seen the other way round. It is hard to conceive how else the man to whom I listened on the scratchy tape on the Eurostar would have felt. Dumas had saved two of Simpson’s fellows in extremis, and he then put his fingers on the pillboxes even as he tried to bring Simpson back to life. The doctor already felt that doping was a phenomenon he could not control, which endangered the lives of the men he had to look after: here was living, or rather dying, proof of what he had feared for 12 years.

More than three decades after Simpson died, the notion that performance-enhancing drugs can be a health aid is still doing the rounds in cycling. Since Simpson’s death, however, it has been impossible to put the theory forward with any credibility. Any moral argument for the use of banned drugs died on the Ventoux on July 13, 1967.

Col de Montgenèvre, July 8, 1966

The pain is too much for the world champion. The bunch is not climbing fast, but the riders have left him behind early on the steady Alpine ascent which divides France from Italy. Simpson’s right elbow is heavily bandaged, thick padding and gauze over the deep gash with its five stitches.

Last night, after his crash as he chased the leaders at 50 miles per hour down the hairpins of the Col du Galibier, he was close to collapse with the effort and loss of blood. Yesterday, he was trying to win the Tour de France; today he has to survive. Turin lies on the other side of the mountain. There the Tour will rest for a day. He can recover. Perhaps win a stage later in the race.

But he did not sleep last night. His legs cannot turn the pedals quickly enough. He cannot use his arm to pull on the bars to help the legs. He is lopsided on the bike, no strength in his right hand. The mechanic has put padding on the handlebars, but each bump in the tarmac jars the wound. Behind him the photographers gather on their motorbikes: the world champion quitting will be a good picture. The doctor, Pierre Dumas, watches impassively through his Ray Bans, sitting on the car door with one leg dangling in the road as they grind upwards. ‘Tom,’ he says gently as they approach the summit, ‘will you be able to pull on the brakes on the descent?’

Simpson nods slowly, but three miles down towards Italy he pulls to a halt by the roadside and waits for the ambulance. He cannot hold the brake lever. He cannot descend in safety or at speed. He cannot go on. He weeps. This is not a fitting way for a world champion to leave the Tour de France. A journalist asks: ‘What will you do now?’ The answer comes in halting phrases, his voice dull. ‘I don’t know. I’m heartbroken. My season is ruined.’ There is a pause, then he adds: ‘I know I will start again though. You always start again. That’s your job.’