[Closed] 42 years ago today

[i]text lifted from wikipedia[/i]

At the start of the 1967 Tour de France, Simpson was optimistic he could make an impact. After the first week he was sixth, but a stomach bug began to affect his form, and he lost time in a stage including the Col du Galibier. In Marseille, at the start of stage 13 on Thursday 13 July, he was still suffering as the race headed into Provence on a hot day, and was seen to drink brandy during the early parts of the stage. In those years, Tour organisers limited each rider to four bottles (bidons) of water, about two litres - the effects of dehydration being poorly understood. During races, riders raided roadside bars for drinks, and filled their bottles from fountains.
The day started hot. The Tour doctor, Pierre Dumas, took a stroll at dawn. Near his hotel, the Noaille at Cannebière, he met other race followers at 6:30am. "If the riders take something today, we'll have a death on our hands," he said.
Pierre Chany wrote:
The race was quiet until the foot of the sugar-loaf [colloquial name for Mont Ventoux] where Julio Jimenez attacked, checked by Raymond Poulidor. The heat was torrid, 45C in the shade on this eve of July 14. The followers were bare-chested or in short sleeves and the climb looked like being extremely painful. The Ventoux is 21km of stone slopes, a ramp hors mesure with no shade in its last section or even before it. Behind Jimenez and Poulidor, a group formed around Roger Pingeon, Felice Gimondi Balmanion and Jan Janssen, a group from which Simpson disappeared, suddenly weak, dropping back to a second group led by Lucien Aimar, Désiré Letort and Noël van Clooster.
Aimar said: "I came back up to him after having punctured. Van Springel and Letort were with us. The heat was suffocating. I offered him a drink but he didn't hear me. He had a totally empty look, and the extraordinary thing was that he tried to jump me! [il me flinguait la gueule!] He took 250 metres out of me. I said to him: 'Tom, don't play the bloody fool!' [Tom, fais pas le con!] But he didn't respond. A moment later, he was on my back wheel. I heard a cry, I didn't see him fall."
Chany continued:
Three kilometres from the summit, in a landscape of stone, where the mountain becomes most arid, the Briton began to wobble. The drama was imminent and it came a kilometre further on. Simpson climbed in slow motion, his face blank, his head tilted towards his right shoulder in his familiar manner. He was at the end of his strength. He fell a first time. Spectators went to him, putting him back in the saddle and pushing him. He went another 300m, helped by unknown arms, then fell again. This time, nobody tried to pull him upright: he had lost consciousness.
His team manager, Alec Taylor, said in Cycling that after the first fall he feared for Simpson less for the way he was going up the mountain than for the way he would go down the other side. The rushing air would revive him but Taylor feared that Simpson, whom he described as a madcap descender, would overdo things and crash. The team mechanic, Harry Hall, said he worried the moment Simpson started to zig-zag. "He was riding like an amateur then, going from one side of the road to the other [to lessen the gradient] and sometimes he went dangerously close to the edge of the road. And there's no barrier there. Once you go over, you go over." He tried to persuade Simpson to stop when he fell, saying "That's it for you, Tom." "But he said he wanted to go on. He said 'My straps, Harry, my straps!' Meaning that his toe-straps were still undone. So we got him upright and we pushed him off again."
When he fell again, his hands were locked to the handlebars. Hall shouted for the other mechanic, Ken Ryall, to prise them loose and the pair laid Simpson beside the road. A motorcycle policeman summoned Pierre Dumas, who took over team officials' first attempts at saving Simpson, including mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Dumas massaged Simpson's heart and gave him oxygen and an injection. Dumas found that Simpson was not breathing even in an oxygen mask. He, his deputy Macorig and nurse, took turns massaging his heart and giving mouth-to-mouth. A police helicopter took Simpson to the St-Marthe hospital at Avignon but Simpson was declared dead soon after arrival. Two tubes of amphetamines and a further empty tube were found in the rear pocket of his racing jersey. The official time of death was 5:30pm, the verdict that he had died of a heart attack.
Dumas refused to sign a burial certificate and a poisons expert from Marseille was commissioned to conduct an autopsy. It confirmed five days later that Simpson had traces of amphetamine in his body.
Simpson's last words, as remembered by the team mechanic, Harry Hall (d. 2007), and by Alec Taylor (d. 1997), were "Go on, go on!" The words "Put me back on my bike!" were invented by Sid Saltmarsh, covering the event for The Sun and Cycling, who was not there at the time and in a reception blackspot for live accounts on Radio Tour.
The origin of the phrase is in Saltmarsh's report in Cycling:
He slowed until he began to stagger, and as he left the comparative shelter of the forest, and reached the desert portion of the Ventoux, he was stricken by the blazing sun, which had brought the shade temperature up to nearly 100F - only there was no shade. When about a mile from the top he fell, and on being reached by mechanic Harry Hall, was still conscious enough to insist 'Put me back on my bike.' But he was all-in, his body a raging furnace of fever, and could not keep the machine moving, even when pushed off.
Gently, he was lifted from the bike and kiss-of-life resuscitation was tried in an effort to bring him round, but after about 40 minutes' work he was carried away in a helicopter of the French gendarmerie.
Saltmarsh acknowledged he wasn't present when he wrote:
We did not see him on that last day, only for a brief moment at the start, exchanging a brief hallo. According to practice, particularly on a mountain stage, we drove in front listening to the progress of the race on the Tour Radio and by chance we had one of the occasional blank spots at the time the drama was unfolding.
We had heard that Tom was up with the leaders climbing the Ventoux, then as we accelerated ahead down the tricky descent in front of Jimenez the reports began to come through again with no mention of Tom. Only when we reached the finish to await the riders did we learn that he fallen, assuming it was a crash. Then the team car came in and we knew that he had collapsed, but still with no inkling that the end was to be so tragic, for though they had been the first to go to him, the medical staff had taken over and they had had to continue their responsibility to the rest of the team. Gradually, the rumours grew, defying belief, until we had the official announcement that despite all that had been done to revive him on the scorching stones of the Ventoux and in the helicopter he was dead when the hospital was reached.
On the next racing day the other riders were reluctant to continue racing so soon after Simpson's death and asked the organisers for a postponement. The French rider Jean Stablinski proposed instead that the race would go on but that one of the British riders would be allowed to win the stage. This honour went to Barry Hoban.

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