La Vie en Rose

Mr Tom - the True Story of Tom Simpson: Chris Sidwells. Mousehold Press 2000. 266 pages paperback, £13.95. ISBN 1-874739-14-5.

It is very difficult to speak or write about Tom Simpson in British cycling circles. The truth is that he died of heat exhaustion and amphetamine abuse. To mention this is to open old wounds, but it has to be said. To the charge that to use performance-enhancing drugs taints the performers achievements, because he's a cheat, the defence usually offered is that since everyone else was doing it, then no one was cheating. If everyone is guilty, then everyone is innocent. For some of us the charge of cheating is taken for granted – there are no degrees. It's black or white – you can't cheat a little bit. More important is that no others shall suffer death or damage as a result.

With this in mind we see Tom Simpson as a victim of a disastrous system, in which sponsors and team officials, at the very least, condone or turn a blind eye to what their riders (all relatively young men, remember) feel obliged to do in order to remain competitive. Nevertheless, it all starts with an athlete wanting to gain an advantage over his rivals.

But Chris Sidwells is, partly because of his relationship (he is Tom Simpson's nephew) driven into denial. He opens with a preface in which he denies that Simpson was either cheat or victim. Instead he was 'a talented, driven professional who paid the ultimate price for pushing a bad situation too far'; which to me sounds like the precise definition of a victim. To deny these things does no service to the man or the sport. He goes on:

As for being a victim, forget it! Tom knew what he was doing. It was not something he did lightly, too often or without professional advice.

Simpson was not the first victim of amphetamines to suffer on the Ventoux, though the others (like Jean Malléjac and Ferdi Kubler) escaped with their lives. The whole point is that they didn't know what they were doing, nor did they do it with professional advice . The British team management have always denied they knew anything about Simpson's private way of 'taking care of himself' – how bitterly cynical the phrase sounds now. And 'too often'? What was often? How often is safe? How much is cheating? The frequency with which professionals used dexedrine is well-established. Even in the amateur world it was widely known that certain people in official positions could get substances for you if you needed 'help'.

One of the problems with this book is that the author tries so hard to convince us that his idol was immaculate, that we're constantly reminded that no man is. A couple of examples will have to suffice.

At the 1957 RTTC hill-climb the 19-year-old Simpson was told he had no lock-ring on his fixed sprocket. He abused the timekeeper, got one from a spectator and fitted it, muttering (he tells us in Cycling is My Life ): 'No one else has got one, why pick on me?' Sidwells transforms this into:

Fair enough, it was in the rules, though most of the other competitors hadn't, but they weren't the new BLRC champion, were they? Things like that happened in those days.

For Chris Sidwells the assertion that 'most of the other competitors hadn't' is established fact. As a competitor in hill-climbs at that time, I can assure him that it's not true, a mere product of Simpson's adolescent tantrum. In his book Simpson apologises for it, and comments wonderingly on the timekeeper's extreme forbearance. Nor does Sidwells go on to point out that Simpson was allowed to start.

I have never heard it said that Tom Simpson bought the 1965 Road Championship. Sidwells takes it for granted that the accusation is commonplace. He himself was nine years old at the time but feels himself able to write:

He didn't buy that title. I know that for an absolute, 100-per cent certainty because I know what was said between them when they were alone on the last lap.

In all fairness, you can't offer 'The True Story' as a subtitle and then include something which neither you nor anyone else could possibly know. That 'I know that …' is just teenage hero-worship, embarrassing even to read.

Chris Sidwells is to be commended for his industry – writing a full-length book is hard work; but he is not a natural: the writing doesn't flow easily, and fatally, he lacks the objective viewpoint which is vital to a biographer.

However, it is fair to say that, with the aforementioned qualifications, this is an adequate biography of a sporting hero, and there is no doubt that he was a hero. No British cyclist except Reg Harris has so captured the imagination of the British public, and only Simpson, Reg Harris and Beryl Burton have ever been Sports Personality of the Year, nor is anyone going to deny Simpson's immense determination and courage. The book covers the ground, and the extensive road and track palmarés is a valuable record. Unfortunately it lacks the essential objectivity of Jean Paul Ollivier's accounts of other European riders (read his Hugo Koblet story). Much of the central part of the book from the mid-50s to 1965 comes pretty well wholesale from the subject's own autobiography Cycling is My Life , published in 1966. It's long out of print, but on the whole it's a crisper, more economical and more honest account. Mr Sidwells adds little but the revelation of his own idolatry. The more interesting bits are snippets like Norman Sheil's account of how the penurious Brits at the 1965 World's, unsupported by the BCF, survived by nicking race food from the other teams – coaches take note.

Like all my contemporaries, I admired and respected Tom Simpson. When on 13th July 1967 the barman of a Birmingham pub told me the news, I too wept. But Chris Sidwells idolises him, and idolatry is not an approach likely to produce the 'true story' that this claims to be. Instead, what we have here is a hagiography which adds little to what we already knew. Most of us would prefer the life of a man honestly presented, warts and all; what we've been given is a soft-focus view through rose-tinted glasses.

Ramin Minovi