Tom Simpson lives

Put me Back on my Bike - in search of Tom Simpson: William Fotheringham. Yellow Jersey Press 2002. 242 pages hardback, £15.99. ISBN 0-224-06186-0

Writing about Tom Simpson is dangerous in England: the subject is not one where rationality is considered an appropriate response. When in 1992 Barry Hoban wrote: 'Be under no illusion – Tom never cheated anybody', I felt compelled to disagree, and brought down a hail of abuse. A letter in Cycling Weekly threatened me with physical violence. Following the publication of articles, Colin Lewis and Pierre Brunel both received angry letters from Simpson's widow. At the Riverside film show in 2001 Albert Beurick called Barry Hoban 'a prick' in front of 200 people, because the day after Simpson's death Hoban 'stole' the stage that should really have gone to Vin Denson – who is still angry about it. As with Diana, the dignity just goes on and on.

'How many Vietnam veterans does it take to change a light bulb?' goes the joke. The answer is: ' You don't know – you weren't there.' In the same way, it is implied, only a member of the inner circle is qualified to comment on the Simpson myth. Three years ago my review of Chris Sidwells' book Mr Tom produced more irrational abuse, because I'd dared to ask for 'the life of a man honestly presented, warts and all', instead of adolescent hero-worship. Now, somewhat to my surprise, I've got just what I asked for.

William Fotheringham has several advantages: he's of another generation, unencumbered by the baggage that Simpson's cycling contemporaries carry around; he's a good writer; he obviously has courage, otherwise he wouldn't be attempting it; and he recognises that big issues underlie the death of a single individual which 'broke hearts and turned lives upside down.'

These issues lie at the heart of professional sport: 'To what degree is an athlete who takes performance-enhancing drugs at fault for his actions? How heavily do we weigh the fact that he has taken drugs against the magnitude of his achievements and his status? How far up and down the sporting food chain does the responsibility extend? Does it go as far as the organisers who devise the courses? Team managers who want their men to perform? The press and the fans who love the spectacle?' And, we might add, the sponsors who pay for it all and expect a handsome return for their money.

The truth is that, whatever the pressure, it starts with an athlete seeking to gain an unfair advantage. The use of drugs is forced on no-one. Ben Johnson was not competing in an inhuman sport. The Tour makes enormous demands – but they take drugs to compete in a 30-mile time-trial or a 1000 metre sprint. A psychological dependence develops: they can't hack it without their fix.

Tom Simpson was a sporting giant. The impact he made on British and European hearts and minds remains unequalled. He was not only a great champion: he was, quite literally, a sporting ambassador. The substance was there, all right, but it was the style that charmed them. Under it all lay a an unrivalled ambition, a determination amounting to obsession to succeed in his field. Everyone who knew him agrees that he would do anything to win. Chris Sidwells and others describe him as 'a driven professional', and though some of us might not regard that as unqualified praise, it's true. In pursuing his sport he was the most professional of professionals, paying attention to every detail, even to wrapping his individual amphetamine tablets in foil.

Our reactions, depending on our own natures, were respect, admiration, adoration, worship. He was British cycling. We sat, soaked to the skin for four hours in the stands on the Glencrutchery Road, to see him win the Manx Grand Prix. We wept, literally, at his death. We were stunned, bereft. And cycle sport has never really recovered.

Was Tom Simpson a victim of a bad system? Yes of course he was. It was a buyer's market. Like most of the others he was cheated by his agent, the ruthless Daniel Dousset, part of the European cartel in which the rider was totally dependent and the agent was free to exploit him. If anyone emerges as a villain it is Dousset, a man who had no hesitation in pushing his meal-tickets to the limit. The day before Simpson's death he warned the Briton that his poor showing in the Tour so far would mean a drop in his appearance money. Simpson had expensive tastes, was anxious to make and invest money in what must be a relatively short career, he had a sponsor to satisfy, mouths to feed: he had to maintain his earning power. Add to this his own win-at-all-costs mentality. Should it surprise us that he would stop at nothing to get there? As early as 1960 Simpson told Chris Brasher: 'I am up there with the stars, but then suddenly they'll go away from me. I know from the way they ride the next day that they're taking dope. I don't want to have to take it … but if I don't win a big event soon, I shall have to start taking it.' He had been a pro for less than a year.

This is a real biography. It has an intricate time scheme, starting with an arcane event in London in 2001 and moving backwards and forwards, but all the bare factual information is there. Much better is the sense of the man himself, barely glimpsed in the subject's own autobiography of 1966, and absent completely from Chris Sidwells' book. Or, more precisely, the men themselves: they're all here: the jack-the-lad, wheeler-dealer, I'll-show-em young go-getter too ashamed of his lack of linguistic competence to say anything more than 'bugger off' when his future wife speaks to him for the first time in French; the fully-fledged pro, exhausted from the Tour stage but carefully arranging his kit for tomorrow before anything else; the budding businessman, buying up property, proposing far-reaching schemes to his potential partners; the fearful mortal putting down a deposit on a Mercedes, 'to have something to aim at'.

Team manager Alec Taylor, mechanic Harry Hall, and Tour doctor Pierre Dumas were all blamed for Simpson's death by such as the notoriously intemperate Raphael Géminiani, Anquetil (who admitted using amphetamines), the gross Gus Naessens (an unqualified quack posing as a trainer) and the generous Albert Beurick, who must forever hide from himself the truth about his hero. The accusation against Dumas, brought by a Dr Philippe Decourt, still lies (in any sense you like) on Géminiani's website: amphetamines, he says, played no part in Simpson's death, and proper treatment would have saved him. The drugs lobby want it both ways. They scorn those who are clean as naïve and foolish – of course professionals have to use drugs, how else can we do what we do, what did you expect? – and then deny that their 'heroes' were using them and make the would-be abolitionists the villains. Creatures like Naessens were called 'soigneurs' , though few sane people would trust themselves to the care of a man who put boiled-up cattle feed in their bottles. So closely associated is the word soigneur with drugs that it was removed from official usage after the Festina affair.

William Fotheringham has got as far as anyone is ever likely to in his quest for the real Tom Simpson. Not everyone will like what he has to say. The nearest he comes to offering a judgment is this: ' Tom Simpson was a victim of the system of exploitation and insecurity, but he had no illusions about what he was doing, and cannot be held up as an innocent. He was working the system as hard as he could, and it backfired.'

Beyond this the man must stand for himself, quintessentially human, full of contradictions, impulsive and calculating, loveable and ruthless, hardboiled and vulnerable, cocky and insecure. Sometimes we like what we find, sometimes not; but respect and admiration for his achievements will be wrung from us.

Do we now know the truth? Up to a point. We can at least be sure about some things. For years before his death Tom Simpson was habitually using amphetamines (particularly Tonedron), and possibly other drugs. In 1967 they cost him £800 a year, four times Colin Lewis's annual salary, thus giving the lie to the claim that they were all on a level playing field. He argued that it was more harmful not to take them. Amphetamines did not kill him, but were a factor in his death. Others were alcohol, dehydration, heat, illness (he had severe diarrhoea) and pure ignorance. By the time he collapsed it was too late to save him, and it is a monstrous calumny to attempt to blame those who tried. Ever since, those closest to him have attempted to conceal, or minimise his use of drugs. Even those with no personal axe to grind fall into the trap: John Wilcockson, in the excellent Penguin Book of the Bicycle (1978) writes of 'an unwise ( and uncharacteristic ) use of stimulants'.

All tragic heroes are victims of their own flaw. For Tom Simpson it was the need to win at any cost: 'he chose to join others in cheating and got caught out in the most dramatic manner imaginable.' His death did not even bring about the elimination of dangerous drugs from cycle sport. What a waste.

I noticed only one factual error – Stablinski's world title was in 1962, not 61 – but there are a couple of oddities. No-one would recognise a 'tall and slender' Harry Hall – Fotheringham must have been thinking for a moment of someone else. And Colin Lewis's memory is playing him false: the occasion when Simpson contemptuously dismissed the finishers of a Milk Race stage as 'a bunch of tired old men' was in 1964 (not 1965), and at Herne Hill, not Crystal Palace. I was one of them. We'd averaged 27 mph for the 60 hilly miles from Brighton in a bitterly cold downpour, falling off in bunches at greasy roundabouts on the run-in, and we all shared Colin's opinion of the great man: 'A miserable bastard, very egotistical.' I felt particularly aggrieved, because I'd stayed at the track for half an hour, wet and shivering, rooting for Simpson who was performing in an omnium with Anquetil and Jo de Roo. So this is a bit of the baggage I carry around with me.

Incidentally, Simpson's last words were 'On, on, on'; he never said 'Put me back on my bike' – Sidney Saltmarsh seems to have concocted the phrase from what Hall and Taylor told him. And there was an earlier 'bad fish' affair on Stage 15 in 1956 (Dumas refers to a 1962 episode) when the whole Belgian team (surprise!) were wiped out.

Apart from anything else this is a fine book, seen as an artefact, handsomely printed, twenty photos, and an excellent 20-page index. And it's the best book on cycling I have read since Geoffrey Nicholson's Le Tour eleven years ago. If you buy one cycling book this year, this has to be the one.

Put Me Back on my Bike is a considerable achievement. It seeks the truth, it probably gets as close as we ever will, and best of all it brings the man to life. Surely even the most besotted fan must recognise that this is better by far than the cosmetically-daubed corpse which has been lying in state all these years: Tom Simpson lives.

Ramin Minovi