The Tour de France climbed Mont Ventoux yesterday, and the British riders found their way to pay their respects to Tom Simpson, the British cyclist who died on the climb in 1967, a mile short of the summit, suffering from a mixture of heat exhaustion, dehydration, stomach problems (he’d been ill for several days), amphetamines and alcohol. The best account of that fateful day is in William Fotheringham’s biography Put Me Back On The Bike, which makes it clear there were other causes as well; professional insecurity and Simpson’s burning desire, which quite often pushed him beyond his physical limits.

Simpson was the first British cyclist to make a real impact on professional cycling, and is probably still Britain’s most successful racer, winning among quite a lot of others the World Championships, Paris-Nice, and classic one-day races such as the Milan-San Remo (not won by another UK rider until Cavendish’s win earlier this year). The first, too, to wear the leader’s yellow jersey in the Tour, with a best finish in sixth place.

Yesterday David Millar threw an inscribed Garmin team cap to the foot of the memorial, while Charly Wegelius added a water bottle. Mark Cavendish removed his helmet. Bradley Wiggins, who had gone past at the business end of the stage about half an hour before, Twittered afterwards that he’d had a photo of Simpson taped to his bike.

Shed a tear today for Tom. I had a little extra strength today from somewhere. Had a photo of the man on my top tube.

And I hadn’t realised until yesterday that Simpson’s daughter, Joanne, had shared the same house as Bradley Wiggins’ dad, Gary, when Gary Wiggins was competing professionally in Belgium.

The most exact epitaph for Simpson came earlier this year from David Millar, who’s had his own problems with drugs. In his introduction to Simpson’s recently re-published autobiography, Cycling is my Life, he described the memorial as a poignant reminder of “how close he got and how far he fell – Tommy Simpson, cycling’s very own Icarus.”

I’m never sure about posts which are basically lists, but I have been mulling this one over for a few months now, and there will never be a better moment than this year’s Tour de France ‘Grand Depart’ in Monaco to share them. So here it is:

Best introduction to the Tour de France: Inside the Peloton by Graeme Fife.  Fife – a prolific cycling writer – manages to combine both the sense of the sport and how it works, as well as the history of the race and most of the ‘grands’, the riders who have dominated it.

Best inside account by a professional: Paul Kimmage’s book A Rough Ride. Kimmage, now a sports journalist, was a successful amateur who never won a race as a professional. His book, published in 1990, was the first to break ranks on the sport’s drugs culture in the ’80s, and he was ostracised for most of the ’90s. But the book does more than this; it gives a feel for the life of the journeyman pro (in the same way, say as Eamonn Dunphy’s Only A Game did for football in the ’70s).

Best Insight Into being a team domestique: Domestiques are the team riders who can’t win for themselves, but ride for their leaders, preventing breakaways, chasing them down, keeping the pace high in the mountains, and so on. A Significant Other by Matt Rendell (based on Victor de la Pena’s diaries of the 2003 Tour) catches this better than any other. There’s a splendidly geeky section on the physics of the peloton, and a fine chapter in which de la Pena explains his team role in detail on one particular stage.

Best fictional account: Tim Krabbe’s The Rider – a novella about an amateur race, seen from the perspective of one of the riders. Almost existential.

Best book written by an insider about a pro team: A tie here, and both are about professional British cycling teams, about fifteen years apart. In Wide Eyed and Legless, Jeff Connor (a former fell-running champion-turned-journalist) is sent to ride the Tour stages ahead of the race and also report on the ill-fated ANC-Halfords team, under-prepared and under-financed, as it falls apart during the race. Team on the Run is written by John Deering, the press guy of the Linda McCartney team, funded by the vegetarian food company, and by Paul, who comes out of the story well. There are some highs – an unexpected win in the Giro d’Italia, for example – before the money goes astray.

Best book about racing as an amateur - or maybe just the best book about racing: The Escape Artist by Matt Seaton, a wonderful account of the slightly obsessive nature of the amateur rider. It sets the tone with a well-judged description of a tricky but exhilarating part of a favourite training run, and also of his first experience of riding fixed wheel at the Herne Hill velodrome (which ends calamitously). This is about cycling as a way of life – which comes up hard, later, against his wife’s illness and early death. I’d say it’s the best of all of these books.

Other cycling posts:
Reaching the heights, touching the void

In praise of Mark Cavendish

Cycling and painting

Doping, cycling and the Olympics

Sporting records, limits and technology

Although I love professional cycling, despite its flaws, I have delayed reading Matt Rendell’s biography of the Italian climber Marco Pantani, who won the Tour de France and the Giro in 1998, and died of a massive cocaine overdose in a hotel room six years later, dogged by (well-founded) drugs scandals. The book got fine reviews, and Rendell knows the sport well (he is (co) author of one of the best books about being a team domestique). The reason I put off reading it was that I knew it would depress me.

The best way to summarise this is through a couple of lines in the final chapter:

Looking back, Marco’s successes, like any number of world records, gold medals, and winning sequences in recent sporting history have a phantom quality. … They weren’t events at all, but phantasmagorical experiences with no clearly definable reality that existed chiefly in the emotions they caused in millions of indivdual minds. The emotion most associated with Marco is euphoria, yet we know now that it was triggered by the poisons that flowed through his veins and made his flamboyant style possible.

It’s worth exploring this further. One of the most exciting sights in cycling is a climber attacking the field and gaining the minutes he needs to win – and Pantani’s stage win at Les Deux Alpes in 1998, when he attacked on a climb in atrocious conditions, descended recklessly, then climbed again, to make enough time on Ullrich to seal his Tour victory – was one of the most exciting days of racing in my lifetime.

But in a (literally) forensic analysis, Rendell demonstrates that Pantani had been blood doping through the use of EPO almost from the start of his professional career. At the same time, he kicks away one of the cycling fans’ supports. Almost all of the successful cyclists in the 1990s used EPO (Bjarne Riis, tour winner in 1996, has admitted it; Ullrich hasn’t but the evidence is against him, there are still questions over Armstrong’s win in 1999). So the fan’s defence is that EPO use must  have levelled the playing field – while quietly disregarding the talented but non-using Charly Mottet, who never finished the Tour higher than fourth. Rendell suggests that athletes respond differently to EPO, and that Pantani’s success might just suggest that his body was better attuned to the drug.

So far, this ia familiar story about 90s cycling – or even modern professional sport. But there are two other stories in Rendell’s narrative as well. The first is about the nature of cycling in Pantani’s native region of Emilia-Romagna, with its strong Communist traditions. The first chapter of the book places cycling, and Pantani, deep in their social milieu.

The second is perhaps more revealing. Rendell suggests that Pantani’s sporting success disguised a pattern of mental illness that might have otherwise been recognised more clearly – and which seemed to be inherent in his growing cocaine abuse after 1999. More: this might have been part of his make-up as a sportsman which enabled him to take the risks on descents which contributed to some of his victories, and also to some of his crashes. The other half of this, of course, is that some of the experts who tried to help Pantani identified this problem – but the cyclist’s fame and wealth, and some of his advisors who lived inside this bubble and benefited from both, meant that it was always impossible to address it.

The initial newspaper article, which led to the book, can be found here.

I was thrilled that Chris Hoy won the sports personality of the year award last night, for lots of reasons. Partly because I’m a cycling fan, and it’s about time (Nicole Cooke should have won it a couple of years ago, and this year her achievement in becoming the first rider ever to win both the World Road Race and the Olympic Gold in the same year got completely lost in the BBC’s ‘Olympics’ narrative).

Partly because it might have been Lewis Hamilton otherwise: I know he’s the youngest ever winner of the world championship, but Formula 1 isn’t a real sport – if you take Hamilton and Massa out of their ultra-competitive McLarens and Ferraris and stick them into the other team’s cars, they won’t win any more.

Partly because Hoy’s achievement – three track golds – was world class, and he’d been winning at World Cup events through the year as well.

Partly because the discipline he won his gold medal in at Athens was scrapped, and he had to reinvent himself as a competitor in new events, including the tricky keirin. Partly because he seems, at least off the track, to lack ego (the other GB cyclists all say how much he gives to the team as a a whole).

And partly for the excuse to reprint this great quote from the Olympics, which kind of sums up the last point:

Asked, “What does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?”, he replied, “Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy refers to Chris Hoy in the third person is the day that Chris Hoy disappears up his own arse.”

There’s a good profile from the Times, published during the Olympics.

What’s not to like about Mark Cavendish, the young cyclist from the Isle of Man who has exceeded all expectations by topping the unofficial sprinters’ league this season with more wins (17) than anyone else – six of them against the best riders in the ‘grands Tours’.

All sprinters need a bit of ego, and when Cavendish announced in June that he was the fastest rider in the peloton over the last 200m of a sprint it was difficult to tell if it was youthful arrogance or not. Four stage wins in the Tour de France – when he was untouchable in the bunch sprints – suggested it wasn’t.

But it has been his demeanour in winning that has made him so likeable. When he won his third stage in the Tour his first response was to look for Bernhard Eisel, a Columbia team-mate who shepherded him through the Pyrenees after Cavendish had crashed. Invited to compare himself with Barry Hoban, the British sprinter who won eight Tour stages in the 70s, he was respectful, saying that Hoban didn’t have as good a team as he did. In the Giro d’Italia, by all accounts, having won two stages he was well-placed to win a third, but instead marked one of his competitors and let a team-mate take the victory. After a stage in which he had crashed and struggled, he was asked about his day by an interviewer. His reply was to the effect that he had worked in a bank when he was younger, and he never forgot that he was now getting paid to ride bikes for a living.

The icing for me came in an interview in Pro Cycling magazine, where the interviewer asks him about his time as a national level child dance competitor. His mum has a dancewear shop, which is why he ended up on the dancefloor. It seemed that he had been teased about this.

“To me it was a competition, and a competition is a competition in my book. And the best thing of all was that I met my girlfriend through it. So people can say what they like – I got the best thing in my life out of it.”

Let’s face it, it’s not the sort of reply you’d get from Ronaldo.

If you have seen my futures blog, the next wave, you may know that I am a fan of cycling and cycle racing. So imagine my surprise when reading an obituary of a painter I didn’t know of, Simon Black, to see it illustrated by a wonderful picture of a local race meeting.

There’s a description at the gallery that represents his work of how the picture came about:

“This was commissioned by a collector of mine with a particular interest in cycle racing. The subject was a gift to me in terms of its inherent dynamism and indeed its bizarre qualities. After observing and photographing a race, my desire was to encapsulate a number of different facets of the activity in the painting. I enjoyed the details, costumes and colours of the cyclists and set them against an expansive perspective leading to the horizon to accentuate the drama and dynamics of the event. The composition and size of the canvas was particularly inspired by Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (National Gallery).”

Worth clicking through to the Uccello picture to see what he means by this, by the way.