THE riders in Le Tour de France will be climbing up Mont Ventoux today, almost 46 years to the day after one of Notts' finest athletes died while scaling the Beast of Provence. Here we take a look back at his life...
TOMMY Simpson, one of Nottinghamshire's greatest-ever sportsmen, gave his life on Mont Ventoux in 1967, chasing his dream of success in the world's most famous cycle race.
He had already enjoyed a glittering career, having won the world road race championship in 1965 and collected four of the top one-day classics: the Tour of Flanders, Milan-San-Remo, the Tour of Lombardy and the now defunct Bordeaux-Paris.
Yet it was the allure of the Tour de France which drove Simpson, who still returned home to Harworth every winter.
His desperate desire to prove himself a Tour winner led to him mixing performance-enhancing drugs with alcohol.
The combination of a blisteringly hot day and the sheer brutality of the climb up the Ventoux proved too much for a rider who had already been suffering from stomach trouble for a number of days.
He died less than a mile from the summit — but his legacy lives on. Throughout continental Europe, he is still simply remembered as Major Tom and there is a granite memorial to Simpson near the spot where he died, paid for by British cyclists.
He attended Harworth village school and later Worksop Technical College and in 1954 was an apprentice draughtsman at an engineering company in Retford.
As a cyclist he joined first Harworth and District Cycling Club and later Rotherham's Scala Wheelers, and by his late teens was winning local time trials. He was then advised to try track cycling, and he travelled regularly to Fallowfield Stadium in Manchester to compete, winning medals in the national 4000m individual pursuit discipline.
Still aged only 19, he was part of the Great Britain team pursuit squad which won a bronze medal at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Two years later, he won a silver medal for England in the individual pursuit at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, before turning pro.
