Legend who reached for summit but tumbled back down to earth

The clock has ticked past 7pm and the knot of cyclists gathered in the car park of the Harworth and Bircotes Sports and Social Club are starting to get a little jumpy, not to mention wet. "There's only four marshals," one would-be pedal-pusher says, fearful that the final fixture in the Har-worth section of the North Midlands Road Race League might bite the dust. He need not worry.

By 7.30pm all the race officials are in place out on the course and the first group of riders speed off along Scrooby Road. As they do so, in the shadow of the giant concrete pit-shaft, they pass a small memorial stone etched with the outline of a cyclist and the following message: "In memory of a Harworth cyclist, Tom Simpson, Olympic medallist, classics winner, world champion, sports personality of the year, who died in the 1967 Tour de France".

On 13 July, when the 2007 Tour de France, which opens in London next Saturday, enters its sixth stage, it will be 40 years to the day since Simpson came to grief on the slopes of Mont Ventoux. After zigzagging across the road up the extinct Provencal volcano, falling, and being helped back on to his bike by officials from the Great Britain team car, the Harworth man collapsed for a final time about a mile from the summit. All attempts to revive him failed. He was 29, and Britain's greatest ever cycle racer: the first to wear the maillot jaune in the Tour de France (in 1962), the first to win the world championship professional road race title (in 1965) and the first (and still the only cyclist) to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award (also in 1965).

It was on the roads of the Continent that Simpson forged his name. He was the first cyclist from outside mainland Europe to make an impact in the sport, paving the way for the likes of Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong. It was on the byways around Harworth, though, that Simpson discovered his talent for pedal-pushing. He was 13 when he rode his first time trial, around the north Nottinghamshire pit village where his family settled after uprooting from his place of birth, Haswell in County Durham. He used the bone-shaking butcher's bike on which he delivered meat around the area.

Rider No 86 in the North Midlands Road Race League, near the front of the peloton as the field heads off in the direction of the cemetery where the local hero lies buried, Pete Ryalls (below), used to cycle these streets in the company of Simpson. They rode together as teenage hopefuls, when Simpson was a member of the Har-worth and District Cycling Club. They also rode as team-mates in the Tour de France in 1961.

Even at 69, Ryalls' pedigree is clear to see. Over five laps of the six-mile circuit, he finishes in the top 20. In the clubhouse afterwards, a pint of John Smith's in hand, he pauses in the room devoted to Harworth's most famous son: the Tom Simpson Museum.

"That's me there," Ryalls says, pointing to a photograph of his younger self, sucking a lollipop stick as he sits next to Simpson on a grass bank. There are other mementos, most poignantly the jersey Simpson was wearing when he died on Mont Ventoux, still covered in dirt.

Directly below is the front page of the Daily Mirror dated Friday 14 July, 1967.

"Cycling ace Tommy dies in the cruel sun," the headline reads.

Ryalls sighs as he sits down and contemplates what it feels like as an old compadre, 40 years on from that cruel tragedy on the Ventoux. "I suppose what we all feel, really, is a great sense of loss: that Tom died so young, with such a lot still in front of him," he says. "We've never produced anyone in British cycling anywhere near his equal.

"Tom would have been 70 in November. I'm 70 in January. We grew up as juniors together. When we were both 21 we were due for National Service call-ups. Tom, showing his ambition, which shone through all the time, got his papers on the Thursday and went off to France on the Monday [to dodge his draft and make his way as a professional on the Continent]. He never looked back.

"Tom was unique. When we were juniors it was shit or bust for him. It was the same when he was a pro. He was either going out there to win or to blow up in the process."

That uncompromising streak probably added to the fatal cocktail of circumstances on the Ventoux 40 years ago. When Simpson fell for the first time, he ordered the team officials to get him up and going again. His final words were an insistent: "On, on, on."

There were other factors, too: the effects of heat exhaustion, dehydration, a debilitating stomach problem, and the brandy that Simpson swigged at the start of the 13-mile climb up the Ventoux. Then, of course, there was the matter of the amphetamines found in his system.

The autopsy report said: "Death was due to a cardiac collapse which may be put down to exhaustion, in which unfavourable weather conditions, an excessive workload, and the use of medicines of the type discovered on the victim may have played a part.