Things Rich Simpson Actually Did

[TdG]

There is an addendum to this anecdote. One of the other claims this chap made to burnish his hard-man reputation was that he was a drug dealer and could get us various substances. We could all see this for the bluster it was of course. Until, that is, the police turned up, broke into his locker and recovered various substances. At which point he was expelled. So maybe it was all true?

 

[Will Hunt]

I don’t have anything to add regarding RS, but it reminds me one episode in my formative years.


I started climbing at school, we had one of those DR walls: rocks cemented into blocks in the wall and a pocketed concrete overhang. There was also the Nottingham wall, which was a more modern affair. After a couple of years I was getting reasonably proficient at this climbing thing. A new guy joined the school in my year, a strong climber apparently. He’d sometimes come and hang out at the DR wall and shoot the breeze on climbing – or rather, regale us with big talk about the things he’d done down at the Nottingham wall. He was getting a bit of a reputation for tall tales in other areas of school life, but I didn’t have any reason to disbelieve his climbing claims, after all he’d never actually pulled on to demonstrate his abilities to us. Tired from one of his cellar sessions at the wall, I suppose.


Yes, the cellar in the Nottingham wall was where the real connoisseurs dwelled. A basic steep board down in the dark, dusty bowels of the building. The kind of board with holds fashioned from bits of old chair leg, all varnished, pulley-busting globules. Climbing to the top of the thing by any means was desperate. Amongst the problems recorded in the cellar’s crinkly notepad, one stood out that was given the barely imaginable grade of English 7a. The physics of it looked impossible. But our new school colleague had repeated it – amazing! In fact, he bragged, it had only had two ascents: one by him and one by his mate – I shit you not – Si O’Connor.

I'm tearing up. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

 

[webbo]

Going back to the off thread bit. Armstrong was using PED’s before he got cancer. He first admitted using to one of the doctors treating him. There is also an incident pre cancer where he buys off a European rider in order to win a three race series with I think a million dollar prize fund.
Pre cancer he was a good one day rider but not very good at stage racing even with drugs. Post cancer he stepped up the drug programme to something even the Russians would have been envious of.

 

[lagerstarfish]

There is an addendum to this anecdote. One of the other claims this chap made to burnish his hard-man reputation was that he was a drug dealer and could get us various substances. We could all see this for the bluster it was of course. Until, that is, the police turned up, broke into his locker and recovered various substances. At which point he was expelled. So maybe it was all true?

finding that they were all performance enhancing drugs would complete this nicely

 

[Rocksteady]

Going back to the off thread bit. Armstrong was using PED’s before he got cancer. He first admitted using to one of the doctors treating him. There is also an incident pre cancer where he buys off a European rider in order to win a three race series with I think a million dollar prize fund.
Pre cancer he was a good one day rider but not very good at stage racing even with drugs. Post cancer he stepped up the drug programme to something even the Russians would have been envious of.

From one of the documentaries on him I gained the impression that a common side-effect of one of the PEDs he was taking was testicular cancer.

 

[mrjonathanr]

Anyone who is laissez-faire about performance enhancing drugs should watch Secrets of the Dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR9CUGBVH-Q

Seeing the harm caused to the athletes by drugs is upsetting viewing, frankly. Like you say, anyone who is blasé about the impact drug use has should rethink. It’s horrible.

 

[ArtistFormerlyKnwnAsDoylo]

I don’t remember much about it all now (prob due to a bang on the head in Ogwen a few years ago) but on the subject of bikes I remember Simmo launching one at Dense in the school. Don’t think it was Lance’s though.

 

[finbarrr]

even though i'd rather be reading about what RS or other shady climbers did or did not climb, i just have to comment on the lance armstrong bashing.
he was the best at cycling in the tour the france and doping in that era, and it is hard to disconnect the two.
if anyone was cheering for any elite/top 10 cyclist back then, you were probably cheering for a doper.
in some of the tours he won you have to go back to number 15 or something like that to find the first person who has not been caught/implicated.

http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2014/12/31/cycling-in-the-epo-era-65-per-cent-dirty-and-probably-more-311201/

 

[ali k]

Reading this again I wonder what Ben Heason did to upset, offend or wound him.

I’m dredging the memory bank a bit here so could be wrong on some details but IIRC Ben was on the Frankenjura trip and called bullshit on his Action Directe ‘ascent’ so it was a case of attack is the best form of defence.

Back on topic it turns out my memory bank is as faulty as I thought, and half of this recollection is wrong. BH and RS were in Frank at the same time but Ben never confronted him or accused RS of bullshitting. Simpson just went rogue by the sound of it - most likely to deflect from the doubts that were swirling around him.

 

[webbo]

Whether Lance was the best is impossible to prove. However what he was the best at was cheating which I guess makes the connection with Richie Simpson but whether RS was a good a cheat is debatable. Given Lance made millions out his lies.

 

[Moo]

Why are we still on talking about lance Armstrong on a thread titled "Things Rich Simpson Actually Did" ?

I'll mirror kingys comments about being disappointed with the whole affair really. I think when I was younger and watched the likes of the real thing and then Simpsons stuff, I just thought I'd climb on a board and get well good. I climbed on a board a lot, but rather than well good I ended up thoroughly broken.

I would still like to know if he actually did anything he'd claimed however. I recall him writing about a hard first ascent in spain where he only did it because some local wizard shouted beta up to him from the ground, does that ring any bells?

 

[Simon Lee]

That might have been Keith Sharples who spotted him from
the ground doing something obviously whack when he was dogging A Muerte.

 

[Yossarian]

I love this story - if climbing was more like cycling or football then there'd be a Hollywood film about RS, starring Barry Keoghan as RS and Cillian Murphy as Doylo.

Re cycling - there was an amateur RS in California: https://cyclingtips.com/2016/03/who-is-thorfinn-sassquatch-the-mysterious-case-of-a-los-angeles-strava-legend/

 

[Falling Down]

What happened to the guy in the article Yoss?

One of my mates was going out with Emma O’Reilly (the whistleblower) for a couple of years recently. It was interesting talking to her about Lance and the years she spent working with him.

 

[Yossarian]

He runs a very high-end made to measure cycling clothing company in LA - https://brandt-sorenson.com/pages/about-us

I'm not sure what happened re the potential sentence / fine / jail, etc.

I'd be interested to hear about any decent pop psychology books about bullshit artists. I've known a number of varying degrees of ability and ambition. In the words of Janey Katz vs Alan Partridge, RS is clinically fascinating. It's the assuredness and the sense of entitlement. As someone said further back in the thread, doing a load of one armers is the climbing equivalent of Anna Sorokin's Hermes Birkin which convinced everyone that she was actually worth $60million and in the process of opening a private art museum, as opposed to being a grubby con artist.

 

[jwi]

I'll mirror kingys comments about being disappointed with the whole affair really. I think when I was younger and watched the likes of the real thing and then Simpsons stuff, I just thought I'd climb on a board and get well good. I climbed on a board a lot, but rather than well good I ended up thoroughly broken.

Where I lived before there was a complete mythomaniac climbing. He managed to convince some beginners that he was the man, a lot better than anyone else in the area, and that they should train with him using his frankly insane training methods. A lot of wasted time and effort for anyone involved. I tried to intervene one time when they did something that was unusually risky, because I was young and did not know better.

He also sold a 55 m rope to his girlfriend (!) claiming it was 60 m. She got stranded on a rappel when she did not reach down to the next belay station.


There are still some active climbers who are widely believed to be making up ascents. Among them an 8c+ climber with delusions of having done multiple 9bs. (A good sanity check is if the ascent was mentioned in Grimper Magazine or not... If there is an international level ascent mentioned elsewhere but not mentioned in Grimper it is usually because there are rumours swirling around)

 

[abarro81]

Is that a reference to the younger Zehani (sp?)

 

[Falling Down]

Thanks Yoss.

Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder. I’m not a big fan of DSM diagnosis but this type of behaviour falls in and around Narcissism.

 

[shurt]

Anyone who is laissez-faire about performance enhancing drugs should watch Secrets of the Dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR9CUGBVH-Q

Seeing the harm caused to the athletes by drugs is upsetting viewing, frankly. Like you say, anyone who is blasé about the impact drug use has should rethink. It’s horrible.

Some of the anecdotes from the EPO heyday are bananas. There were some in the (amazing) Marco Pantani film where riders would set alarms for the middle of the night and wake up to cycle on a turbo trainer to stop themselves having a heart attack. What a life...

Tom de Gay thank you for the Notts Wall hilarious anecdote. I loved that wall when I was growing up and the cellar there was something I never ventured down to. Someone told me a guy lived down there for a week eating nothing but Power Bars. Looking back it could well have been Si O'Connor!!!

 

[cowboyhat]

IIRc the trigger for rich simpsons beef with ben h was about some wild country sponsorship; RS discovered that ben was on a better deal than RS and then up and coming james Pearson.

RS was outraged because he thought nothing Ben had done was hard, then he discovered the faint whiff of doubt about a couple of Bens ascents, (TBH I don't think there was doubt it was more that there were no witnesses), then Rich went for it in the whataboutery style. He obviously didn't understand any of the soft skills involved in representing a brand.

I've always been intrigued by the Simpson story, I guess in the same way I don't understand most human phenomenon. To just lie to people, and for what.

And also because no stranger to the alter of power Keith told me, years later, something along the lines of paraphrasing

Ive climbed and trained with Tyler and Mickey, I've seen euro wads and etc; no one is as strong as Rich on a board.

So why did he lie? I ask

Keith shrugs. I don't know.

This is the strangest part for me, was he impatient? What? Bonjoy has said the most illuminating things here, obviously RS was a troubled chap, searching for something through which climbing was a conduit. And where is he now, a lot older. Perhaps he's had therapy and improved as a human.