One task of the support riders in a team is to protect their leader from the wind they cluster around him on windy stretches like worker bees protecting the queen. But there is one thing cyclists fear as much as heat: wind. The story goes that on the day Simpson died a thermometer in a café halfway up the mountain exploded when registering fifty-four degrees centigrade (officially, the temperature was in the nineties Fahrenheit). When the tree line runs out, there is nothing up there but you and the weather, which is violent and capricious.
The American Lance Armstrong called the Tour de France “a contest in purposeless suffering” in his autobiography, “It’s Not About the Bike” the climb of Mont Ventoux epitomizes this implacably. Cyclists fear and hate the place, while the fact that the Tour, which follows a different route every year, makes the ascent only once every five years or so increases its mystique, builds its broodingness. There is no reason for going up it except that the Tour planners order you to go up it.
The Ventoux is just a bleak and hulking mountain with an observatory at the top. A few amateur botanists may scour its slopes for polar flora (the Spitzbergen saxifrage, the Greenland poppy), but there is little other recreational activity on offer here. Its appearance is perpetually wintry: the top few hundred metres are covered with a whitish scree, giving the illusion of a snowbound summit even in high summer. Other mountains in the race may be higher or steeper but seem more friendly, or more functional-or at least more routine, being climbed more often. For the Tour rider, it is another matter. For those on foot, it is comparatively welcoming: Petrarch climbed it with his brother and two servants in 1336, and a local hiking firm offers nighttime ascents for the reasonably fit with a promise of spectacular sunrises. Mont Ventoux, which rises to just over nineteen hundred metres, doesn’t appear especially sharp-sided or rebarbative from a distance. His name is still widely remembered in France-more so, probably, than in Britain. Simpson was one of those transplanted stars who won over a foreign public, and his martyrish suffering on a French mountain added to the myth. If sport increasingly becomes a focus for brain-dead chauvinism, it also, at its best, acts as a solvent, transcending national identity and raising the sport, and the sportsperson, above such concerns. A memorial to him near the summit of Mont Ventoux lists his achievements as “Olympic Medallist, World Champion, British Sporting Ambassador,” and the last of these three is no sentimental piety. He also played up cheerfully to the Englishman’s image, posing emblematically with bowler hat and furled umbrella.
He was a strong, gutsy cyclist, popular with fellow-riders, the press, and the public. Thirty-three years to the day of his death, the 2000 Tour was due to climb the mountain again.īack in 1962, Simpson had been the first British rider ever to wear the race leader’s yellow jersey (only three other Britons have acquired it since) he had been World Champion in 1965, and in 1967 had already won Paris-Nice, the early-season classic flatteringly known as the Race to the Sun. This is what Simpson had been wearing on July 13, 1967, during the thirteenth stage of the Tour, when he collapsed on Mont Ventoux, the highest of the Provençal Alps. Chamois-palmed string-backed cycling gloves with big white press buttons at the back of the wrist, and the fingers mittenishly cut off at the first joint. Black trunks with “PEUGEOT” embroidered in surprisingly delicate white stitchwork across the left thigh. A grubby white jersey with zippered neck, maker’s emblem (Le Coq Sportif), big Union Jacks on each shoulder, and discolored glue bands across the thorax indicating the removal of perhaps a sponsor’s name, perhaps the colored stripes awarded for some previous triumph. Halfway around this testament to curatorial obsession, among the velocipedes and the 1896 Crypto Front Wheel Drivers, the passionate arrangements of cable clips and repair-outfit tins, there is a small display window containing the vestimentary leavings of the British cyclist Tom Simpson. In the first week of July, as the Tour de France meandered joustingly down the flat western side of the country, I visited a small cycling museum in the mid-Wales spa town of Llandrindod Wells.
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