The Story of the Giro d'Italia: A Year-by-Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume 2: 1971-2011

by McGann, Carol

  The Salvaranis replaced team boss Luciano Pezzi with recently retired Vittorio Adorni. Adorni announced that for the Giro, Salvarani would have co-captains—Gimondi and Motta. That rarely works.

  The Giro started off with a relay prologue at Lecce in Italy’s boot-heel which, although Salvarani won it by three seconds over Molteni, did not count towards the General Classification. The first stage, won in Bari by Molteni’s speedster Marino Basso, did count, making Basso the leader.

  The next stage went through the hills of Puglia and Basilicata and Gimondi didn’t enjoy it one bit. He was having a terrible day, trying to disguise his distress, riding in the middle of the peloton during what he hoped would be an easy, or piano, day.

  But who attacked? None other than his teammate Motta, in fantastic condition after the Tour of Romandie. Motta’s aggression got everybody’s juices flowing, turning the day’s racing red-hot. Gimondi, suffering his giornata no (a day when a rider has no strength), couldn’t stay with the leaders as they surged ahead. To make things worse, Motta had told Franco Bitossi, Enrico Paolini, Dancelli and Pettersson ahead of time about his planned attack as a way to make sure his off-form teammate was put out the back door. Losing almost nine minutes meant Gimondi’s Giro was over almost before it began. It turned out Salvarani’s Giro was over now as well.

  After coming in second to Paolini in that second stage, Motta was found to have an errant chemical in his system. The disfavor of the anti-doping control earned him a relegation to last place along with a ten-minute time penalty, enough damage to render him completely out of contention. Motta blamed the doping positive on a cup of herb tea. I would have paid good money to have been at the Salvarani team meeting that evening.

  Paolini now took the Pink Jersey, which he kept until the stage five hilltop finish at Gran Sasso.

  Vicente López-Carril, first to reach the top of the Gran Sasso, had suffered catastrophic time losses in the second stage, but sitting high in the standings was the day’s sixth place, Claudio Michelotto, and not far behind were Aldo Moser and Ugo Colombo. Several of the main contenders—Pettersson, Fuente, Gimondi, and Zilioli—finished the stage ten minutes or more behind Lopez-Carril.

  That made Colombo the maglia rosa: 1. Ugo Colombo

  2. Aldo Moser @ 15 seconds

  3. Claudio Michelotto @ 52 seconds

  4. Silvano Schiavon @ 1 minute 17 seconds

  5. Giancarlo Polidori @ 4 minutes 45 seconds

  This was the fruit basket upside-down Giro. Several riders came back from the dead when Gimondi led an elite break of nine riders into the Tuscan coastal town of San Vincenzo. Gaining back more than six minutes were Pettersson, van Springel, Moser and Michelotto. Moser was the new Pink Jersey, with Michelotto a half minute back. Pettersson and van Springel were in the top ten, but more than eight minutes behind Moser.

  Back into the Apennines. At the end of stage eight, where Moser had to give up the lead to Michelotto, the exhausted riders dribbled into Casciana Terme either alone or in small groups.

  Stage ten gave the riders three good climbs to chew on, the last being to the top of Sestola Pian del Falco, not far from Abetone. Fuente showed why KAS had hired him when he was first over the Passo Radici before finishing alone, though Lino Farisato was only 3 seconds back. La Gazzetta called the stage win a “revelation”, making it two Grand Tours where Fuente was revealed. I wonder if Merckx was paying attention.

  The first of two time trials was held at Lake Garda where Pettersson and van Springel turned in excellent rides. Davide Boifava won the 28-kilometer race but Pettersson was fourth at 63 seconds, while van Springel was 13 seconds slower. Michelotto was 25th at nearly three minutes.

  With the Alpine and Dolomite stages still to come, the General Classification was getting interesting. Riders who had suffered early race-killing time losses were coming back:

  1. Claudio Michelotto

  2. Aldo Moser @ 2 minutes 13 seconds

  3. Gösta Pettersson @ 4 minutes 37 seconds

  4. Ugo Colombo @ 5 minutes 36 seconds

  5. Giancarlo Paolini @ 6 minutes 27 seconds

  6. Herman van Springel @ 6 minutes 38 seconds

  The standings remained unchanged as the Giro traveled to what was then Yugoslavia before heading into the Austrian Alps for a trip to the Grossglockner. Fuente made another attempt for mountain glory and was first to the top of the second major ascent but it was 1968 Olympic road champion Franco Vianelli who carried the day, climbing alone to the top.

  Michelotto had been unable to stay with the main chase group containing Pettersson, van Springel, Gimondi and Colombo. He blew up at the Franz-Josefs Höhe where a friendly car door handle gave the leader an easy lift to within a minute and a half of the Pettersson group. The officials didn’t think that was the way the race should be ridden and penalized him a minute. This was far less than he gained by cheating, and allowed him to stay in pink with Pettersson third at two minutes and van Springel fifth, four minutes behind. Michelotto had expected no punishment for his cheating and expressed astonishment at the one-minute penalty.

  When Michelotto cracked on the Franz-Josefs, Pettersson and the other strongmen smelled blood. They weren’t happy with his nominal penalty, but the next two days in the Dolomites weren’t going to give the maglia rosa a moment’s rest. Stage eighteen took the riders from Linz in Austria over the Tre Croci, Falzarego, Pordoi and Valles passes. Given that sprinter Marino Basso was the first rider over the Pordoi, one can assume that the pace for the first three ascents wasn’t exactly white hot. But even that pace was too much for the Pink Jersey who must have been exhausted after riding well beyond himself defending the lead for more than a week. Indeed, Michelotto couldn’t stay with the leaders on the Pordoi’s ascent and while descending he flatted, rolled his tire and crashed.

  With the better riders together on the final climb, Alfredo Martini drove up next to Pettersson in the team car and was distressed to find that his team captain, who didn’t have a particularly aggressive personality, was content to sit in the pack. Martini knew Pettersson was riding into magnificent condition and also knew this was the time to make a move.

  “Don’t you know how strong you are?” he yelled, and screamed at the Swede to attack. The rest of the riders told Gösta to ignore Martini. At Martini’s furious insistence Pettersson took off with several good riders for company, the move turning into a four-man break of Pettersson, Gimondi, van Springel and Francisco Galdós. Gimondi led them into Falcade ten minutes ahead of Michelotto, who was sporting a bad head wound from his crash.

  Michelotto was out of the Pink Jersey and, following his team doctor’s advice, abandoned. Pettersson had quietly (if you ignore Martini’s yelling) moved to the front of the line:

  1. Gösta Pettersson

  2. Ugo Colombo @ 1 minute 34 seconds

  3. Herman van Springel @ 2 minutes 1 second

  4. Francisco Galdós @ 3 minutes 29 seconds

  5. Silvano Schiavon @ 5 minutes 19 seconds

  The next stage had three ascents including the Passo Tonale. It didn’t change things much, except that van Springel was able to sneak into Ponte di Legno 19 seconds ahead of Pettersson. With only the 20-kilometer final-stage time trial left to affect the standings, that could be a big deal. The gap between them was now only 102 seconds and both van Springel and Pettersson were good against the clock.

  But, there was no way van Springel, as competent as he was, could take the Giro away from Pettersson, one of the world’s best time-trialists. Ole Ritter won the stage while Pettersson was second at 39 seconds. Van Springel gave up 22 seconds to the Swede, but it was a good enough performance to move him past Colombo into second place.

  Pettersson’s director Alfredo Martini is given a lot of credit for Pettersson’s careful, economical and measured climb to the lead.
Pettersson didn’t waste a single watt, winning a difficult Giro à la Balmamion, without winning a single stage. Martini said that if Pettersson had been a more aggressive rider, his talent would have allowed him far more victories during his short professional career.

  Final 1971 Giro d’Italia General Classification: 1. Gösta Pettersson (Ferretti) 97 hours 24 minutes 3 seconds

  2. Herman van Springel (Molteni) @ 2 minutes 4 seconds

  3. Ugo Colombo (Filotex) @ 2 minutes 35 seconds

  4. Francisco Galdós (KAS) @ 4 minutes 27 seconds

  5. Franco Vianelli (Dreher) @ 6 minutes 41 seconds

  Climbers’ Competition: 1. José-Manuel Fuente (KAS): 360 points

  2. Franco Vianelli (Dreher): 270

  3. Franco Mori (SCIC): 190

  Points Competition: 1. Marino Basso (Molteni): 181 points

  2. Patrick Sercu (Dreher): 148

  3. Felice Gimondi (Salvarani): 139

  Photo of Gösta Pettersson

  Gimondi returned to good form in time for the World Championships where he and Merckx fought an epic duel. The two were alone together for the last twenty kilometers as the Italian withstood attack after attack from Merckx, with the Belgian prevailing in the final sprint. With each acceleration from Merckx, Gimondi would literally grit his teeth, so much so that during the intense final lap, Gimondi dislocated his jaw. Champions are different from the rest of us.

  For much of the twentieth century, Italian sport was cycling. The newspapers sold millions upon millions of copies to the sports-mad Italians who gobbled up the news of their heroes.

  But Italy had changed. Following the end of the Second World War, Italians desperate for work poured into the great manufacturing cities of the north, creating an enormous well of cheap labor that fueled Italy’s post-war economic miracle. But big cities are poor venues for road racing. As a result soccer, a stadium sport better suited to city living, grew in popularity. Adding to bicycle racing’s woes was television, which had gone from a rare luxury to an important part of western life. Televising the moving circus that is a road race is a complex, expensive and technologically demanding enterprise. In addition, no one really knows how long a bicycle race will take, making it a scheduling nightmare. Setting up television cameras in a soccer stadium, on the other hand, is a comparative piece of cake. By the 1970s, professional cycle racing was scrambling to find a way to remain important. To make things worse, over the following decades, the owners of the Giro regularly botched the sale of the Giro’s broadcasting rights, costing it vital spectators when it needed them most. Even the Tour de France had become tawdry with exhausting transfers designed to maximize the number of stage towns paying for the privilege of a Tour visit along with countless awards, each with a sponsor chipping in a few francs.

  1972. Eddy Merckx returned to contest the 1972 Giro. He was the reigning World Road Champion and the winner of the previous year’s Tour. Giro director Vincenzo Torriani designed a mountainous race hoping to keep the man nicknamed the “Cannibal” from eating the rest of the competition alive. The 100-man start list of riders would have to try to figure out some way to deal with the Merckx menace. This group included Gösta Pettersson, Italo Zilioli, Roger de Vlaeminck, Motta, Bitossi, Fuente and Gimondi. La Gazzetta thought de Vlaeminck, winner of that spring’s Paris–Roubaix as well as the week-long Tirreno–Adriatico stage race, might be able to give Merckx a real challenge. Merckx would find plenty of trouble in this Giro, but it would come from elsewhere.

  The man who holds the record for Giro participations (eighteen starts and sixteen finishes) almost didn’t start the 1972 Giro: super climber Wladimiro Panizza was without a team until Zonca signed him at the last minute.

  The Giro organizers had long wanted a Venice stage with the riders finishing in front of St. Mark’s Cathedral. The Venetians had continually rebuffed plans for the riders to cross the canals over a series of temporary wooden bridges. In 1972 the city relented and agreed to the proposal, but at the last minute Venice changed its mind and the prologue was cancelled. Several other cities offered to host the prologue, but Torriani wanted his Venetian start. He did the best he could with a bad situation and had the riders attend mass in Venice’s St. Mark’s. Since he was the 1971 winner, Gösta Pettersson was awarded the Pink Jersey to start the next day’s stage and the prize money that had been held for the prologue was distributed among the 100 riders.

  The first stage left from Mestre, the mainland city across the lagoon from Venice, and traveled to Ravenna, onetime capital of the Roman Empire. The Giro settled into its normal rhythm of a piano pace in the stage’s early kilometers. As the race got closer to the finish, the speed increased until the final 20 kilometers were nearly non-stop attacks. It came together for a bunch sprint with Marino Basso winning the stage and taking the lead. This year time bonuses weren’t in play so the field was credited with same time as Basso.

  The next day ended just inland from the Adriatic in Fermo, a hilltop city in Le Marche. The mild climb to the finish caused a selection that resulted in a sprint of champions. Gianni Motta won it from Bitossi, who was having gear troubles. Basso was third, followed by Merckx and de Vlaeminck. Basso kept his leadership in both points and the Overall.

  The hilly third stage, still taking the riders through Le Marche, sparkled with hard attacks. Fuente, probably testing Merckx’s legs, jumped away on a climb, only to have Merckx easily mark him and then counter-attack, forcing Fuente to dig deep. The finish showed why Franco Bitossi had the reputation of being one of cycling’s finest tacticians. After another series of blistering attacks, the peloton regrouped, a time when the pack can become lazy while the riders hope for a chance to recuperate. Bitossi sent his teammate Ugo Colombo on a flier. Colombo made it stick, beating the Merckx-led pack by 15 seconds and becoming the new maglia rosa.

  Now came the much anticipated stage four’s 48-kilometer morning half-stage with its hilltop finish at Block Haus. It was here in 1967 that Merckx had sent shock waves through the cycling world when he dropped Adorni, Zilioli, Anquetil and Gimondi in his first Giro.

  The climbing started just before the little town of Pretoro, the pack splitting almost immediately. Fuente’s KAS team began probing and sending men up the road. Merckx didn’t take the bait, knowing that it was Fuente he had to watch. With fifteen kilometers left, Fuente rolled the dice and off he went, leaving Merckx protected by only one teammate and surrounded by six good-climbing KAS riders.

  The day would not be a replay of stage three. Fuente flew to the top, not bothering to look back at the damage he had done. Merckx and Motta came in 2 minutes 36 seconds later, while Gimondi lost almost four minutes. Bitossi, who had won the climber’s crown three times (1964, ’65 and ’66) lost over seven minutes. Fuente had blitzed the mountain so fast that in those seventeen kilometers of climbing, twelve riders were eliminated because they had lost more than fifteen minutes, the time cutoff mandated by the rules. Because Basso, Patrick Sercu and Dino Zandegù were among the squalificati, the bunch sprints for the rest of the Giro would not be the same. Fuente was now the leader. Merckx said that Fuente was “virtually unbeatable on a short stage with a mountain finish.” He also warned, “The Giro isn’t over yet.”

  The Giro continued to head straight for the toe of the Italian boot as Fuente held his lead. The biggest animator of the next few stages was Bitossi, who kept trying to escape. He came close several times, but was always hunted down and caught.

  Stage seven went through the rugged Sila Mountains of Calabria. While Fuente and the KAS team spent the time before the stage’s start signing autographs, the Molteni squad did a hard warm-up. Merckx took off from the gun. Most of the peloton thought that with 151 difficult kilometers ahead, the Belgian was committing suicide. Fuente and his KAS teammate Santiago Lazcano were the only riders with Merckx after the first climb and they suffered horribly in the process. Over the top of Monte Scuro, Merckx descended like a fiend. The Sp
aniards, not having Merckx’s downhill skills, had to let him go. Pettersson, who had been staying reasonably close to the trio, took terrible chances and managed to close the gap to Merckx on the descent. Fuente tried to bridge up to Merckx and Pettersson but gave up and waited for the bunch. Merckx let Pettersson take the stage and the field came in 4 minutes 13 seconds later.

  The General Classification after stage seven: 1. Eddy Merckx

  2. Gösta Pettersson @ 10 seconds

  3. José-Manuel Fuente @ 1 minute 37 seconds

  4. Miguel María Lasa @ 3 minutes 12 seconds

  The Giro crossed the Strait of Messina for a Sicilian stage that made no change to the General Classification. The riders were given a rest day and transferred to Rome to head up the western side of the peninsula.

  It wasn’t unusual for the Spanish riders of the 1970s and ’80s to sit in the back of the field during the piano sections of the race, but it is a tactic fraught with danger, and regularly the Iberians were caught napping. It happened to them during stage ten, going from Rome to Monte Argentario/Porto San Stefano. There was an intermediate sprint mid-way through the stage that caused a split in the pack. The Spaniards were forced to chase the Merckx-led front group, making contact just in time for the beginning of the climb up Monte Argentario. Italo Zilioli got away near the top and held his slender 15-second lead into Porto San Stefano.

  Stage eleven, 242 kilometers up to Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, was a combative day with the Spaniards yet again playing catch-up. When Merckx saw Fuente wasn’t near the front, he launched an attack. Merckx always tried to keep speeds high on the flat and rolling stages, feeling this caused the smaller climbers—whom he believed had lesser energy reserves—to suffer and arrive at the mountains exhausted. Fuente was able to bridge, but during the closing kilometers he was hit with even more bad luck. His tire developed a slow leak as the speeds had been whipped up, forcing him to ride the last fifteen kilometers on a low tire. He didn’t dare stop to change his wheel and possibly never re-join the pack.