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Friday 5 December 2008

PUT ME ON MY BIKE: IN SEARCH OF TOM SIMPSON

The yellow peril of the jersey

In Put Me Back on My Bike, William Fotheringham tells of the life and death of Tom Simpson, who in 1962 became the first Briton to win the Tour de France and five years later shocked the world by conking out completely on the slopes of Mont Ventoux. In this bouncy and well-balanced book, we learn how Simpson, a Durham miner's son, transformed himself from a scrawny youth into a charismatic clothes-obsessed showman widely known as 'Major Tom'. We also learn about his ferocious ambition, financial hunger and reckless use of what he believed were performance-enhancing drugs. When he finally toppled off his bike and collapsed in 1967, cognac was found in his blood and amphetamines in his vest. During his career, he had apparently used any number of secret remedies and fortifiers, strychnine before a big event, cocaine ointment to toughen up his crotch and lashings of a stimulant-laced concoction known as La Moustarde.

Tom Simpson was undeniably popular - 5,000 people attended his funeral at a remote Nottinghamshire church - but the impression that emerges from these head-spinning pages is that he was also deeply flawed, mentally unstable and subject to perennial tummy troubles. Fotheringham refrains from revealing whether or not his hero suffered from a common cyclist's complaint, a swelling of the perineum known as 'the third testicle', but he does not flinch from telling us that Simpson's bike was sometimes found spattered with diarrhoea.

It says much for this author that such details - he also refers to 'toilet stops' without sniggering - do not diminish Simpson's greatness or the strange glamour of his short life.

Breaking the Chain by Willy Voet is a much grimmer story, concentrating on the Festina drugs 'n' cycling scandal of 1998. Mr Voet was not a competitor himself but a soigneur or team helper who in July of that year was stopped by the police on the Franco-Belgian border and found to be carrying a cargo of erythroporetin, growth hormone, testosterone, amphetamines and something called 'Belgian mix'. The resulting fracas, which echoed the controversy surrounding Tom Simpson's death three decades earlier, is said to have brought cycling 'to its knees'.

In this confessional book, Willy Voet indulges in expressions like 'So there I was' and 'I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy', but describes in unsparing detail the tricks of the trade which cheating sportsmen have used in modern times. He tells us how cyclists carried tubes of 'clean' urine hidden up their bums - his expression not mine - which could be used to trick doctors in post-victory tests. He also tells us about sinister-sounding 'fruit bars with eyes' and about a powder called Creatine, one sachet of which has the same effect as eating 30 steaks.

After these depressing revelations, it was a relief to turn to Tim KrabbZ's novel The Rider, first published in Holland in 1978. This story is completely 'clean': our hero sustains himself only with figs during a 150-kilometre race up and down a mythical Mont Aiguoul and the only whiff we get of anything is of honest-to-goodness balsam which some of his competitors rub into their legs.

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