Cycling’s annals are littered with stories of defying pain and riding on to glory. Bernard Hinault won the 1980 Liège-Bastogne-Liège in a blizzard of snow, in conditions so cold that he suffered permanent nerve damage to his fingers. That’s thought of as heroic. Geraint Thomas fractured his pelvis on stage one of the 2013 Tour de France and finished the race, three weeks later, despite the agonising pain. What a legend.
Even tragedy, like the death of Tommy Simpson, has a perverse allure to it, taken as proof that a rider should stop at nothing to reach the finish – Simpson’s apocryphal last words “put me back on my bike” have endured.
