Cycling: A climb that holds tragic memories

There are few places in sport as evocative as Mont Ventoux - or, as cyclists simply say, The Ventoux.

The climb from Bedoin to Ventoux's peak is 21.5km of sheer agony followed, when compos mentis reimposes itself, by the euphoria of beating one of sport's most extraordinary challenges.

It's not the steepest mountain on the regular Tour de France trails (the Col de Soudet in places pitches at 15 per cent compared to Ventoux's 11), nor the highest (that honour goes to the Col du Galibier at 2646m). But only the climb to L'Alpe d'Huez has a comparable catalogue of stories and none that can match the tragedy of Ventoux.

In a move that could either be described as inspired or sadistic, Le Tour will this year effectively end 1912m above sea level, on the peak of Ventoux.

Whoever is wearing the maillot jaune on top of the mountain in the early hours of Sunday, July 26 (NZT), will almost certainly be drinking champagne in it 24 hours later when the cyclists hit the Champs Elysees for what is usually a ceremonial final stage.

The stage is, therefore, set for drama - as if Ventoux needed any excuse for putting on a show.

Slightly more than 2km from the summit, riders will pass a plaque commemorating the most harrowing chapter in the Tour's rich history. It was here sallow-faced, hopelessly dehydrated Briton Tom Simpson came to rest.

Fuelled by a cocktail of crude amphetamines and alcohol that inhibited his body from telling his brain that it was rapidly expiring, he rode on in tar-melting heat up the slopes in 1967, his internal organs slowly cooking while his heart raced at more than 200 beats per minute until it suddenly stopped, unable to beat again.

The footage is as stark as it is despairing: Simpson starts to weave. He falls once but is helped back in the saddle by those, including his mechanic Harry Hall, who bought into his pathetic exhortations of "on, on, on".

A few more yards and he stops, quite possibly dead on his bike, before first a few members of the crowd, then the medical staff, begin hopeless resuscitation efforts.

The popular rider's death had a profound effect on an emotional level but, sadly, few far-reaching consequences. You only need to read this passage from a contemporary report to realise how badly cycling missed this opportunity to grab a nettle that would continue to scratch and infect the sport to this current day.

"Was it doping? The doctors will tell us whether he was using drugs ... but the fact that they refused to issue a burial certificate leads us to presume the worst. We dread, therefore, the public revelation of a tragedy caused by this scourge ...

"Simpson's case comes at a time when all the legal, moral and spiritual and scientific communities need to join forces to restore the moral order. But today let us weep for Tom Simpson, a decent chap who probably simply feared defeat."

Moral order? If organisers, fans and the wider cycling community thought Simpson's death was the apogee of a drug culture they were sadly mistaken. To be jet-propelled up a mountain stage now - like a Merckx, Indurain, Pantani, Landis or Armstrong - is to invite suspicion.

Merckx, the brilliant Belgian whom many consider the tour's greatest rider, was the first man up Ventoux when the tour next visited there, in 1970, following Simpson's death.

He tipped his cap to the monument as he passed on his own and then, in a twilight zone moment, he began to pedal irregularly and looked on the point of collapse as he lurched the final kilometre to the summit. Afterwards he was administered oxygen.

When, in a preview for Le Tour website, he was asked what he remembered of that legendary stage, he made light of his obviously distressed state.

"It was very hot but we reached the climb up the Ventoux rather late so it was a lot cooler. [Joaquim] Agostinho was the last to hang on. I then distanced him to finally win on my own at the top. When going past Tom Simpson's memorial, I took the time to take my cap off and had a thought for him, my former team-mate.

"It [the collapse] was just that I was tired of waiting, tired of all the reporters around me. I wasn't feeling great and there was a lack of oxygen, but the thing is that I really wanted to leave that place. I left in an ambulance to be able to get to my hotel earlier.

"It is indeed prestigious to win at the Mont Ventoux, in that amazing lunar landscape. It remains a great memory. The Ventoux remains the Ventoux."

To which all those who have passed over its peak will nod in acknowledgment. To those of us who never will, however, this rider gives a more graphic description.

"[The Ventoux is] a great mountain stuck in the middle of nowhere and bleached white by the sun. It is like another world up there among the bare rocks and the glaring sun. The white rocks reflect the heat and the dust rises clinging to your arms, legs and face."

The author of those words?

Tom Simpson.