Barry Hoban assumed his fellow Briton was momentarily beaten by the heat when he rode past the prone figure of Tom Simpson as the 1967 Tour de France snaked its way up the sweltering slopes of Mont Ventoux. But the 29-year-old’s collapse was fatal, caused by a combination of heatstroke, dehydration, a stomach illness, alcohol and amphetamines. The death in Provence of his teenage hero turned friend and rival proved a defining event in Hoban’s life.
The following day the peloton decided to pay tribute to Simpson by letting a British rider win the next stage. Though it appeared they had Simpson’s close friend Vin Denson in mind, amid the fog of grief it was Hoban who emerged at the front for his maiden Tour stage win — not that he counted it as a victory given the circumstances. The calamity imbued Hoban with patriotic purpose. “Now that they’ve let me win this stage I have got to uphold Tom’s name,” he decided, according to an account by the journalist William Fotheringham. “I’ve got to keep the flag flying for Britain. I’ve got to take over Tom’s role as British cycling’s ambassador on the Continent.”
The Yorkshireman slotted impressively into the status of standard-bearer. His eight Tour de France stage wins from 1967 to 1975 were the most by a British rider until Mark Cavendish took the record in 2009 and he completed 11 Tours, a British record before it was surpassed by Geraint Thomas last year.
Hoban wins the 19th stage of the Tour de France in Brive, 1968
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Simpson, the first British professional cyclist to win the road world title, was only two years older but turned professional in 1959, more than four years before Hoban. Both were noted for their exceptional speed. “He could win time trials and he could win road races and so could I. He was good on the track, I was good on the track … I thought, ‘If Tom Simpson can do it then I can do it’,” Hoban told the author Giles Belbin.
Peter Barry Hoban was born in 1940, to Joe and the former Ruth Jones, in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. His father, a colliery bricklayer, was an amateur cycle racer and built his son a bike from spare parts. He joined the local club and began racing time trials and track pursuits while working as a trainee coal-mine electrician.
He began practising his signature in readiness for future autograph hunters, though a professional career in a sport dominated by Europeans seemed a pipe-dream for an Englishman; stars such as the Belgian Rik Van Looy (obituary, January 6, 2025) were distant figures glimpsed only in magazines found in cycle shops. However, the success of Simpson and another Yorkshireman, Brian Robinson (obituary, October 26, 2022), who in 1958 became the first Briton to win a stage of the Tour de France, widened the horizon.
Hoban competed in the team pursuit at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and a cycle shop owner from Harrogate with French connections facilitated a move abroad in 1962. “In those days, just crossing the Channel was an adventure,” Hoban told Cyclist magazine in 2014. Travelling with a friend in a Morris Minor 1000 van, he settled in the mining town of Lapugnoy, about 30 miles southwest of Lille.
Hoban spent the first fortnight eating omelettes, as it was the only word he recognised on café menus. “Nobody spoke English,” he said. “We met a guy at the First World War cemetery who we thought was French — he had stubble, a beret and Gauloises in his mouth and they called him André — but it turned out his name was Andrew and he was from Nottingham. He became our interpreter. The boss said, ‘What races do you want to ride?’ I said, ‘The ones with the most money’.”
Now a road-racing specialist, he gave himself two years to turn professional. That goal was accomplished when he signed a deal to race as a domestique for the Mercier team after winning more than 35 races over two years as an independent, often in the face of hostility from spectators and competitors alike.
“I was the first foreigner to do anything and they didn’t like it,” he told Cyclist. “One rider said, ‘Hey, Barry! You want to go back to England!’ I said in my best French, ‘Excuse me, if it wasn’t for my father you’d be speaking German!’ I would go for the jugular, me.” He continued: “In one race all hell was let loose, the wind was blowing and the riders wouldn’t let me into the echelon [a riding formation to reduce wind exposure]. I shouted, ‘Right, you bastards, which ditch do you want — the right or the left? I’m going to take you all in!’ One of the guys said, ‘Hey, Brit! All good! Come in!’”
Though possessed of a broad grin, Hoban could grit his teeth when necessary. His new target was to earn £1,000 but it was gruelling work: he rode more than 30,000 miles in 1964, his first year with Mercier. He won two stages at the Vuelta a España but contracted hypothermia during a Paris-Nice contest. In Spain in 1967 he required hospital treatment for an abscess, sepsis and a groin injury after crashing on a road carpeted with donkey dung.
Hoban, right, with fellow cyclists Neville Veale, left, and his hero and friend Tom Simpson, in San Sebastian, 1965
ALAMY
Still, it was a thrill to compete where cyclists were revered. “In Britain, in Yorkshire, we used to finish up on the moors with no one there. You didn’t finish in towns — they wouldn’t let you. So getting to the Continent, it was, ‘Wow, the roads are closed, the police have stopped the traffic’,” he told Belbin. “It was a magical place.”
His first Tour de France, in 1964, was a desperate disappointment: he was set to win a stage that ended in the Bordeaux velodrome only to be narrowly beaten by André Darrigade, a Frenchman who received a literal helping hand from a teammate who slung him over the line.
Hoban moved to Belgium in 1965, living near Simpson in Ghent, and hitched a lift down to San Sebastian in northern Spain for that year’s road world championships after a Paris-Luxembourg race, sleeping in the rear of a friend’s Ford Zodiac. “In those days, British Cycling [the federation], they had no money at all,” he told Belbin. “They never, ever paid one penny of my expenses at the Worlds. Nothing. You had to sort everything out yourself.”
Knowing that a sustained fast pace would aid the strong and quick Simpson, Hoban pushed hard for most of the 166-mile race, helping Simpson to victory. Exhausted, Hoban faded and finished 19th, ten places ahead of the future Belgian superstar Eddy Merckx.
Hoban slotted impressively into the status of standard-bearer
SHUTTERSTOCK
In 1968 he took a mountainous Tour de France stage from Grenoble to Sallanches by more than four minutes and fondly remembered winning £700 for his efforts — plus a cow named Estelle, which he sold for £200 (but kept her bell). The next year he became the first Briton to win successive tour stages. More stage wins followed in 1973, 1974 and 1975. There was a notable triumph over Merckx at Gent-Wevelgem in 1974, a one-day, 152-mile contest: Hoban is the only British winner of the race first held in 1934.
He retired as his 41st birthday approached and applied to become the national coach for British cycling’s governing body but was rejected. Instead, he moved to Wales to work at a factory in Powys that made a Barry Hoban-branded bike and lived in a remote house high above a valley.
Hoban married Simpson’s widow, Helen (née Sherburn), in 1969. She survives him along with their daughter, Daniella, and two stepdaughters, Jane and Joanne. A mechanic told Fotheringham that on the night of the tragedy, Hoban asked that Simpson’s saddle — made from one of his wife’s handbags —be transferred to his own bike. Hoban also began using Simpson’s tyres. In his wallet he kept an old photograph of the pair racing against each other, sprinting to the finish.
Barry Hoban, cyclist, was born on February 5, 1940. He died on April 19, 2025, aged 85