Tom Simpson’s tireless ambition was the beginning of his downfall
In the book I wrote with Jaime Mir, I was lucky enough to ask him about the huge number of champions he met and even dedicate a chapter to those cyclists he saw perish, among others, Tom Simpson
July 1967. Carat cycling on both sides of the Pyrenees, mourning cycling, black cycling. In just fifteen days, Jaime Mir watched as two runners lost their lives on the road competing and practicing the sport they loved, exercising their profession. The day was blowing hot, exhaustingly dry on the hills of Mont Ventoux, the mountain that Petrarch described and that the Romans had left bare since ancient times, like a large boulder, alone, in the middle of Provence. Mir was carrying the 600, the only one in the entire Tour caravan, which Joan Plans arranged to continue the test for El Mundo Deportivo.
The race was going fast. Julio Jiménez, already at Bic, was defeating rivals, until Raymond Poulidor was the last to give in. Mir and Plans’ car was a few minutes ahead of the peloton and they followed the events on the radio, not without displeasure, because on the airwaves it seemed that only Poupou was racing, when the watchmaker from Avila was flying uphill and others like Janssen, Gimondi and Balmamion were also in the fray. These French…
Jiménez in the lead was strong, he would crown with more than a minute, but in the opinion of the announcer his style was rough, inelegant, very far from the warm and soft flight of his Poupou. When Pingeon faltered from behind it was due to collusion on the part of the Italians, with Gimondi at the front. Plans was irritated. The words of that French announcer did not portray the greatness of a stage that over the years would become the heaviest legend of the best career.
However, frivolities were left aside when Mir and Plans put their ears to the device. It was reported that a cyclist, the long and lanky Englishman Tom Simpson, had collapsed in the middle of the climb. The news attracted attention from the first moment and took center stage when it was reported that he had fallen off his bicycle again, in the middle of the climb, after a zigzag that foreshadowed the worst.
After the summit, which the first Julito Jiménez crossed, the radio continued to spit out bad news. Dr. Pierre Dumas, the legendary doctor of the race, had taken charge of the situation. After fainting three kilometers from the summit, Tom Simpson fell into a coma. On the same road, at the height of the monolith that would eventually be erected in his memory, the runner was treated, experiencing a slight improvement, but it was just that, slight, and also brief. He was flown by helicopter to Avignon, in whose hospital he died.
Mir and Plans, overwhelmed by the information, did not know the reasons for that fainting and subsequent death. In fact, the journalist narrated the next day, in a report sent by telex service and not sung by Mir via telephone as years before in the Tour de Bahamontes, that the runner had “died in the act of duty” fighting not to lose his options and slipping. of the machine in one of the outbursts they gave him to close the distance with the first. The first readings of that had to be rectified. The doctors, just in case, refused to bury the body until an autopsy was performed, the results of which became part of the black chronicle of sports.
Dr. Dumas himself had some statements about the risks that some athletes took with the slogan of winning, winning, winning. The money that the athlete earned, added to the youth of many of them, was the burden of many competitors who fell into the temptation of being “artificial champions.” There was a lot of that in Simpson’s behavior, and Pierre Dumas, with a generous and elusive mustache, had the fly behind his ear. Cycling had lost one of its best-known athletes.
Crowded in the press room, Plans and Mir scrutinized history to find out who had lost their lives on the road and the name of Francisco Cepeda came up, who during the years of Jaime’s good friend, Mariano Cañardo, left his life in a Terrible accident going down the Col du Galibier towards Bourg d’Oisans.
Simpson was two years away from hanging up his bicycle, from dedicating himself to living life in Australia under the sun that he did not have either in his British Isles or in Ghent, where he learned the trade. Death cut short his plans. The Tour continued and ended in the hands of Jan Janssen with the bell ringing.
What a day that July, what enormous and eternal mourning was deposited in the central section of Mont Ventoux, a memory that is still valid today for the many cyclists who frequent the area and stop at the altar for Tom.
That Englishman was the bomb, a magnetic cyclist before and after his terrible death.
Tom Simpson was characterized by always demanding morea little more, flirting with the limit that that afternoon ended up far exceeding.
That afternoon he was seventh overall and wanted to make some progress to furnish his new house.
A year before he had gotten off the bike in the Galibier because he had gone too fast and couldn’t continue on the machine.
I don’t know if he was aware of what he was exposing himself to, although he was very aware of what was happening in the peloton, that fixing and doping existed.
Signs of its time, when Parisians went to find out about the stage of the Tour, the blackboards in the cafes reported that Roger Pingeon had finished leader that afternoon.
To find out about the death of Tom Simpson, They would have to read it in the press the next day.
2023-12-16 05:51:49
#exudes #normality #present #Tony #Rominger
