Riding high: the triumph and tragedy of Tom Simpson

When asked how he remembers his legendary uncle, Chris Sidwells immediately cracks into a wide grin.

"As a broad Geordie", he says, with a fond tingle in his eyes. 

Chris has agreed to talk at Harworth Sports Pavilion. The venue is like many you can find in former colliery towns across north Nottinghamshire. Football pitch. Astro turf. Bar. Function room. Warm and unassuming welcome. But not much time for nonsense. 

The link with international sporting history is an immaculate display cabinet between the two main rooms. It acts as both a museum and a piece of cycling archaeology. Programmes, jerseys, bike parts, photographs and trophies carefully arranged capture what one local lad meant to the world before he was snatched away aged just 29. 

Tom Simpson arrived in Nottinghamshire as a boy in 1950 after his father, also called Tom, and mother Alice moved the family to the area from Haswell in County Durham, as many mining families did when pits in the north-east began to struggle.

One of six children, Tom joined the local Harworth and District Cycling Club aged thirteen, and at first found himself often ‘dropped’ – left lagging behind – on long club rides around north Notts.

His first race as a junior was at the Forest Recreation Ground in Nottingham. In his late teens he became a serious contender in track cycling.

A bronze medal was delivered at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 – but his burning ambition was road racing on the continent and the prestigious Tour de France. So in 1959 Simpson borrowed £100, packed a rucksack and took two bikes on a bus from Harworth to Doncaster Station. A day later he was entering his first race in France.

At the time, no British rider had ever won the right to wear the coveted yellow jersey worn by the leader of the most famous race in cycling. The gruelling annual July stage race and the ‘Maillot Jaune’ remain the sport’s most recognisable crossover icons. After enjoying immediate success from the moment he set foot in France, Simpson seized the golden jersey as leader of the Tour de France for a single day during the 1962 edition, eventually finishing sixth overall that year.

Simpson’s fateful relationship with cycling’s Superbowl had begun. So had the legend of ‘Major Tom’ – a charismatic Brit who knew the importance of learning French yet attended press photoshoots sporting a bowler hat.

Sat a few feet away from Simpson’s museum, back in rainy Harworth, nephew Chris Sidwells remembers his uncle as a slender, tanned, graceful man who would visit home often between races. 

“He was working class, his dad was a coal miner, but he had this suaveness, you know, he dressed very well,” Sidwells says.

“Christopher Brasher was a great journalist with the Observer and a gold medallist himself. He met him in Paris in 1961 and expected to see a young man going around Europe with a rucksack and sleeping on people's settees.

“Instead, he turned up to meet him in an Armani suit and driving an Aston Martin. So, he looked the part.”

While in France he met Helen Sherburn, an English au pair, and they went on to marry and have two daughters, Jane and Joanne. 

After making his historic mark on the 1962 Tour de France, Simpson won some of Europe’s most famous one-day races – known as ‘monuments’ – including Milan-San Remo in Italy in 1964 and Il Lombardia, also in Italy, in 1965. 

That same year he became Britain’s first male cycling world champion, outsprinting Germany’s Rudi Altig on the line in Spain. Simpson’s star was now soaring at home and abroad. Later in 1965 he was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

In 1967 he was determined to improve on his Tour de France record and started well, lying in seventh overall as the race entered the Alps. But by stage twelve he’d caught a stomach bug and couldn’t keep anything down. Simpson was in a weakened state as stage thirteen started. The day’s route was a long, gruelling climb up Mont Ventoux in Provence.

Advised to pull out of the Tour by friends who could see the state he was in, Simpson instead decided to carry on during intense heat, trying to stay with the stage leaders. Photographs of him on the way up show his eyes wide and cheeks sunken as he tries to grind on.

Around 1km from the summit Simpson began to wobble and collapsed off his bike, but bystanders helped him climb back on. Shortly afterwards he keeled over again, in a harrowing moment caught on a television camera. 

Simpson had lost consciousness. Despite efforts to resuscitate him, he died on the remote roadside in full view of spectators and sporting press. He was 29. 

“My grandparents have a really horrific story of this,” continues Sidwells, who was six at the time. “There weren’t many phones in 1967, so the authorities are told, and the French police are told, and they will tell the British police and eventually, it gets through to family, but it's just after it had got through to the BBC. 

“So the number one item on the six o'clock news – my grandfather, sat down to watch the television, sees Tom’s picture, and he and my grandmother immediately thought he'd won the stage. 

“They knew he was really ambitious with this Tour de France. The stage was on the same day as my mum’s birthday and he’d said to my mum, ‘For your birthday, I'm going to win it for you’. 

“They didn't know he'd been ill, and when they saw his picture on the TV they thought he'd won the stage. Instead, he’d died. That was the way it was from the telling. 

“My grandma never really got over it. My dad was working at the colliery here, and he was told and had to come out. Then he came to my mum and he told her.”

When I meet him, Sidwells, now 68, is in the middle of running events for the Tom Simpson Cycling Festival, held across Harworth through a week in mid-September. In part it raises money for the Tom Simpson Memorial Fund – set up at first to help maintain the stone monument installed in 1969 which still stands close to the spot on the Ventoux where Simpson died 870 miles from home. 

It bears the silhouette of a racing cyclist, with an inscription in French that reads: ‘In Memory of Tom Simpson, Olympic medallist, world champion, Ambassador of British sport. Died 13th July 1967, Tour de France. From cycling friends in Great Britain.’

Today the fund and annual festival have much wider significance – providing a focal point for hardcore cyclists old and young who still gather to celebrate Simpson’s achievements. Simpson’s short but searing life is often cited by the likes of Sir Bradley Wiggins – whose signature is in the museum’s visitors’ book – as the inspiration for British road cyclists trying to make it in a sport which holds its biggest races on the continent. 

Simpson’s death also took on new meaning for some following the news in years after that traces of amphetamines were found in his body following a French post-mortem. His death was caused by a heart attack, and how much of an additional role the amphetamines played alongside the heat and stomach bug is debated across cycling and sport science to this day.

As such the memorial events and festival help ensure Simpson’s sporting legacy is not drowned out by the other long arguments. Simpson eventually went on record as saying he had taken amphetamines – as other riders did at the time – many years before controls and perceptions would be transformed by the likes of the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Lance Armstrong scandal. 

While the presence of amphetamines in Simpson’s system did turn up the volume, elite cycling’s relationship with performance enhancing substances would infamously go on to become a practical marriage of convenience in the 1990s.

Sidwells is pragmatic when answering questions about his uncle’s death and whether it could – or should – have led to earlier improvements in drug controls. His expression tells me he’s been asked this many times before. 

Sidwells is now a cycling journalist and author who’s written 27 books on cycling, including some on the life of Simpson.

As such, he could be forgiven for being tired of answering the amphetamines question. But he’s as impassioned and detailed in his responses as he is when describing his uncle’s race wins.

“You've got to be in their shoes, and you've got to be faced with the decisions they're faced with [in the 1960s],” he says. “These are young men who haven't got the skills to make decisions. And they are surrounded by people they trust. 

“Another quote I read from an eighties French pro - he was doing very, very well. He says, ‘can you imagine my friends if I gave up this life? 150,000 Euros a year. I've got a Porsche. I came from a sink estate. And if I quit my friends are going to say, ‘Why did you give all that up?’ - ‘Oh, because I had to take drugs’."

Simpson, Sidwells says, found himself faced with a difficult choice once he’d immersed himself in the continental racing scene of the 1960s. He could join the burgeoning arms race of competitive post-war cycling – amphetamines and all, and stay in the game – or risk dropping down in the results and go home.

After raising enough money to restore and secure the Simpson memorial in the 1990s, the fund, also supported by other relatives including Tom’s daughter Joanne, has branched out into supporting young British cyclists his achievements paved the way for. It awards grants to promising juniors from the local area who use it to pay for kit and travel to races. 

Older cyclists too are still driven on by the Simpson story. Dave Marsh is also at the Pavilion in Harworth. Now 75, he clearly remembers hearing of Simpson’s death while gathered around a car radio. 

“As a kid I idolised him,” he says. “We all wanted to be Tom Simpson when we were kids. I remember it was all over the news and there were photographs of Tom everywhere.”

Marsh has brought along a bike from his collection at home in Maltby, near Rotheram. It’s a gleaming 1960s Carlton Flyer, which looks ready to roll again along the damp roads of Harworth. 

It turns out to be the same one ridden by Simpson at the Commonwealth Games and Olympics, lovingly looked after by Marsh. 

The care involved in keeping a sixty-year-old bike looking like new sums up how strongly so many people feel about the stringy, smiling man who shines through in so many books, stories, photographs and now-grainy films. 

Amid it all Simpson simply comes across as a normal lad with dreams who dared to ride out of a Nottinghamshire town in pursuit of glory without looking back for too long – yet who somehow always remembered where he came from.

But the manner of his death can also make the story complicated. His tragic but public end on the Ventoux seemed to freeze his hero status in time. Simpson’s image is also of the rider seemingly willing to risk death to win – a moment of British sporting tragedy forever young, flying high up in the clouds above Provence. 

Encouraged by his pragmatism, I ask Sidwells what his uncle might think of the emotions he still stirs. 

Sidwells grins broadly again, perhaps knowingly, even.

“I think he'd be proud,” he says. “I also think he'd find it quite funny and a big compliment, and a rewarding one. He'd be very satisfied. 

“He wanted to make his mark.” 

The Tom Simpson Cycling Festival happens every September in Harworth.