On Sunday Joanne Simpson cycled away from her home in Saint Amandsberg, a quiet, terraced suburb of the Belgian city of Ghent, and began a two-wheeled pilgrimage that will end on July 21 on top of a vast limestone mountain, Mont Ventoux, high above the vineyards and oak woods of Provence.
When her father Tom, Britain’s greatest cyclist, died there from heat exhaustion caused in part by his use of amphetamines 35 years ago in the Tour de France, Joanna was four. Riding from her father’s adopted home to the place of his death is her tribute to the father she barely knew.
When the Tour finishes a stage on top of the “Giant of Provence” on July 21, there will be many others who will scale the great mountain, climb the few metres of footworn stones to the memorial, and leave a souvenir — a racing cap, a tyre, or a stone marked with the admirer’s name.
Simpson will not just be in the minds of the fans. On that day, at some point during the 200km of stage 14 of the Tour, the peloton will crest a rise and suddenly they will see the Ventoux on the horizon. It will be perhaps 55km or 65km away, a pimple of white, and they will feel a little shiver of fear at the effort ahead of them. The mountain’s reputation goes before it, and Simpson’s end will be in their minds.
It is even feared by triple Tour winner Lance Armstrong, who begins his try for a fourth consecutive win in the great race this Saturday.
The Simpson story has been told again every time the Tour has revisited the Ventoux, and as happens so often with the famous dead, Simpson has been hijacked over the years. The story has been boiled down to three things: Mont Ventoux, drugs, tragic death. The anti-drug lobby have used him as a symbol of all that is morally wrong with the sport of cycling. The character of the man has been overtaken by the way he died.
An investigation of why he died was long overdue. Sports doctors showed how and why amphetamines do contribute massively to heat exhaustion, which is what caused Simpson’s death. I knew there would be more to Simpson than an untimely, controversial death.
Unpublished letters showed a man with a lively, sometimes dirty sense of humour, obsessed with how much money he could make as the great new world of professional cycling opened up to him, a confident man who could admit to loneliness and a thirst for news from home.
He was a man of wild dreams, who dreamed up elaborate property ventures, who wanted to restore a vintage train to live in. He was obsessed with diet — and his wife Helen still has the little book of vegetable-based cures by the dietician Raymond Dextreit he took with him everywhere he went.
Schoolfriends told of a youth who was capable of cycling himself into the ground, who collapsed at work after training too hard one weekend.
Cycling up the Ventoux takes two hours for a mere mortal, a single hour for the supermen of the Tour.
Apart from the physical effort, the sweat and heat, there is an eerie little frisson from following in the dead man’s tyre marks, sharing some of the pain in the legs and lungs that he must have felt. But it led to another thought, which is that, in death, Simpson actually annexed the mountain.
What better memorial could there be than one of Europe’s greatest natural landmarks?