Fallen Angel

by William Fotheringham

  All these factors combined to produce a crisis of identity for a country which was still under Allied occupation and did not have its own currency, instead still using the AMlire issued by the occupation government. Many of the answers came in 1946, starting in June with the referendum for a new constitution, in which women had the right to vote for the first time. The Paris peace conference in July saw Italy take its place among the democracies, with the agreement of war reparations. And the economic leap forward came in October, when the new head of government, Bartali’s friend Alcide De Gasperi, launched la ricostruzione. This was a massive programme of public borrowing, totalling 231 billion lire, to finance public works and give work to the unemployed. The term would also come to stand for the cultural, moral and social rebuilding of the nation after fascism and civil war.

  Amid the rubble and the rebuilding, cycle racing in Italy became both a hint of better times ahead and a symbol of the work that needed to be done. It was also a reminder of the disastrous state of the nation’s infrastructure. A picture of Milan–Turin, run on 29 July 1945, speaks volumes: a dirt road, clouds of dust, battered support cars, Coppi and his fellow cyclists using every variant of kit, riding bikes that do not fit. At other times, the cyclists would be in mud that came over their tyres. Such roads were called strada bianca, and they played a disproportionate role in every race. Racing on the roads was barely possible. ‘Many of the surfaces had no asphalt and had been ripped out of the earth, they were like rivers, with rocks and huge holes,’ says one writer of the time. ‘It was a massive effort to ride on them.’ Well-tarmacked portions were mentioned in race reports in the same tones that today we reserve for stretches of cobbles; clearly they were a rarity.

  With Italy’s infrastructure in such a state, deciding to restart the Giro d’Italia was a colossal gamble. But in January 1946, La Gazzetta dello Sport announced that the Giro would go ahead early that summer. In February Italian cycling was re-admitted, ‘provisionally’, to the international fold; the other defeated nations such as Germany and Japan had to wait longer. The prospect of the national Giro and international recognition rapidly revitalised Italian professional cycling: there were nine squads with some 110 riders between them and another 115 unattached riders, and 24 races including the Giro for professionals alone.

  Since its foundation in 1909, the Giro had always been more than a bike race. That was inevitable for the national Tour of a country that had been unified for less than half a century. The race had embodied one message after another: the unification of the country on its fiftieth anniversary in 1911; inspiration for the impoverished south to follow the example of the richer north; patriotic rebirth after the First World War, when the route included the battlefields. So the 1946 race was bound to be more than a mere diversion from grim reality. It was hardly surprising that La Gazzetta dello Sport baptised the event Il Giro della Rinascita, the Giro of Rebirth.

  The race coincided with a turning point in Italian history: the national referendum over a new system of government, the first national election for twenty years, took place on 2 June, with massive popular support. On 13 June Italy became a republic. Two days later, the Giro started, ‘serving a purpose that is greater than the race itself,’ said La Gazzetta’s editorial. ‘Neapolitans, Torinesi, Lombards and Laziali, Venetians and Emilians, all Italians, all regions with a single society and a single heart, all await the Giro as a mirror in which they can recognise each other and smile.’

  ‘We are bursting with faith,’ wrote Bruno Roghi in La Gazzetta. ‘We have had faith in so many arduous, tremendous things. We believed in the fall of the Gothic Line. We believed in the unification of Italian sport. We believed in the constant improvement of roads and infrastructure. We believed in the work and cooperation of industry. We believed in Italy … [we had] faith in the rebirth of Italy, faith that has been transformed into the caravan of seventy [cyclists] as beautiful as a rainbow of hope.’ The Giro, he added, would enable the Italian people to ‘rediscover themselves thanks to their irrepressible optimism’.

  Cultural and sporting landmarks acquired more significance in post-war Italy than ever before. The army was disgraced, politics suspended, the King gone. Sport and culture offered stability, hinted at normality. So La Gazzetta’s writers compared the start of their race to Toscanini’s first baton stroke at the reopening of Milan’s La Scala a month before. The sense of rebirth was not limited to the writers on the recently relaunced Gazzetta. The Church – the only national institution that had survived the war – was keen to be involved. Pope Pius XII wrote to the organisers saying that he saw the Giro as an act of ‘supreme faith in our country’s rebirth, in the spirit of fraternity that unites our people’. He blessed the peloton before the start of the stage from Rome to Perugia. Alcide De Gasperi, newly elected as head of government, watched the race between Bassano del Grappa and Trento on 5 July. The stage was deliberately chosen: Trento was part of the Alto Adige, the German-speaking region in the northern Alps that had reverted to Italy as part of the post-war settlement. The head of state’s presence here, watching the event that united the disparate areas of Italy, was a symbolic statement: you are part of our country now.

  The riders, too, felt they were involved in something bigger than themselves. ‘There was a huge feeling for the Giro della Rinascita,’ Alfredo Martini told me nearly fifty years later. ‘Racing it was a positive, emblematic thing. People understood that Italy had to start from nothing, roll up its sleeves and also think of things that would provide enthusiasm, reignite passion. The Giro offered hope for the future.’

  A key part of that future was mobility. The destruction of roads and railways had made it a nightmare merely to travel or carry goods from A to B: getting the cyclists from Milan to Naples and back was an assertion of ‘a rapid return to daily normality, or at least the desperate desire to believe that that return had been made,’ wrote the historian Daniele Marchesini. ‘If the caravan was able to move from north to south it symbolized the fact that the public powers had managed to recreate, in the shortest of time spans, the minimum conditions needed to ensure that the nation could live together in one whole.’ In contrast, the first post-war football championship – starting in autumn 1945 – had been divided into north and south divisions because communications were so bad.

  The Giro organisers’ inspection noted that almost all the bridges on the route were temporary, often shared with railways. In places the riders would have to get off and walk up steps. In Milan, the race had to start several miles from the city’s outskirts, due to the abysmal state of the roads. The food available to the riders was a monotonous diet of minestrone and chicken, and that not always good. Prizes offered by local sports clubs along the route included demijohns of wine, furniture, sacks of potatoes, home-made cheeses, tubular tyres, fishing rods, ‘sometimes cash’ – a reflection of an economy which had been reduced to barter. Pigs and chickens would be awarded as prizes at the stage finishes, then sold immediately by the riders.

  The newspapers saw the Giro as offering a first chance to go out and report on the state of the nation, so they sent their best writers, men such Orio Vergani of Corriere della Sera, who described the event as ‘a sort of unreal joust in the rubble’. Vergani described a race of jarring contrasts: the happiness of the event against the grimmest of backdrops, with constant reminders of conflict and death. He observed that in Ancona, where the Giro started, running water had yet to be restored, and he made a point of visiting the vast swathe of flattened buildings. There was the dust, clouds of it blowing from ruined towns and villages, and ‘thousands upon thousands of houses reduced to nothing, good only for bats’. The roads were lined with war cemeteries, each with its sign: English, French, Indian. Ninety-five per cent of the people on the roadsides seemed to be wearing dirty khaki, abandoned military uniforms. Many were bare chested, because shirts were in short supply.

  Controversially, the race visited the city of Trieste, claimed by both Italy and Yugoslav
ia amid bitter post-war reprisals and massacres, and at the time under United Nations control. The secret services were against the stage finish, fearing a violent reaction from the Yugoslav population, who would feel the city’s inclusion in Italy’s national Tour was an unwelcome statement of Trieste’s Italian identity. But they also feared an Italian backlash if the stage were cancelled, and let the organisers go ahead.

  Their fears were realised when demonstrators stopped the race at the demarcation line with roadblocks of barbed wire and barrels of tar. Stones were thrown; the security forces accompanying the race responded with rifle shots. The field dived for cover; they recognised the sound. Bartali hid behind a car; Coppi took shelter behind a barrel, and together they led the calls for the stage to be abandoned.

  Most of the riders felt it was not worth risking their lives and made for their hotels, but seventeen of the field, mainly from the local Willier-Triestina team, were smuggled through the demonstrators in American military lorries bristling with rifles. They were released eight miles from the finish and raced into the city to a rapturous welcome. The final sprint was rigged, to ensure a victory by the Triestina leader Giordano Cottur. The stage was followed by two days of rioting, fomented by Italian nationalists brandishing a bloodied jersey which had been worn by a rider who had been hit by a stone. Bombs were thrown at the police, buildings connected with Yugoslavia were burnt. The riots left two dead and more than thirty wounded.

  As far as the actual racing went, Bartali obtained his revenge on Coppi for his defeat in Milan–San Remo that March. Coppi crashed on stage five to Bologna and broke a rib, but he effectively lost the race on the stage to Naples, nine days in, when he had to stop to adjust a defective brake. Bartali took the opportunity to attack. He was four minutes ahead at the summit of the stage’s main climb, the Colle di Macerone, and gained another two minutes on a desperately chasing Coppi over the final 100 kilometres.

  The minutes lost in the south proved decisive as the race returned northwards. Although he had been advised by the race doctor to retire, Coppi found his legs in the Dolomites, winning three stages but never gaining enough time to take the race lead. The key battle was on the stage to Bassano del Grappa, the decisive point the Falzarego Pass, high above the ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo; here Coppi rammed home the fact that he was the best climber in the race by dislodging Bartali, but the Tuscan saved his lead with the help of another rider from his area, Aldo Bini. Coppi won the next day’s stage to Trento, with Bartali two minutes behind, but it was not enough to regain all the time he had lost in the south. In Milan, Bartali won by a mere forty-seven seconds; Coppi’s frustrations were summed up when he won the final stage in the Arena, only to be disqualified following confusion over whether he had sprinted on the correct lap: he went for the finish immediately after entering the track, only to find that the rest of the field sprinted a lap later.

  There were 30,000 in the Arena, a reflection of the massive crowds that turned out for the entire Giro. The focus for this wave of public support was not hard to find: the rivalry between il vecchio, the ‘old man’, Gino Bartali, and the newcomer, Coppi, who had put himself in the spotlight so spectacularly when racing resumed among the rubble. It was at this race that the rivalry moved to centre stage, where it stayed for eight years, until Bartali quit and Coppi lost his powers. The pair performed in a climate of mutual suspicion and surreptitious alliances which could assume ridiculous proportions. During a stage in Tuscany, the older man spotted Coppi dropping a bottle containing a strange green liquid. At the finish he didn’t even wait to get a shower: ‘I took the car and retraced my steps. I needed that bottle.’ The next day, with the help of a chambermaid – they were staying in his native region, after all – he raided Coppi’s room and inspected everything: ‘medicine bottles, scent bottles, flasks, test-tubes, even suppositories’. There was nothing suspicious, however, apart from Bartali himself. He got the green liquid from the original bottle analysed, and found it contained a ‘common pick-me-up, made in France’. To make sure he wasn’t missing out on anything, he ordered a case.

  On the critical stage to Bassano del Grappa, Bartali’s alliance with his fellow Tuscan Aldo Bini helped him chase down Coppi just at the point when the young upstart was threatening his race lead. Coppi complained publicly, but the day before he had reached an agreement with Bartali to combine forces against the up-and-coming Vito Ortelli. On another Dolomite stage, when Bartali was sick, it was Coppi who got off his bike, poured water over him to clean him up, and offered him encouragement. It was pure theatre, and it was just the beginning. By the end of the 1940s an entire generation of European sports fans would find it impossible to mention one without the other.

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  THE IMPOSTER

  The most eloquent link to Coppi’s new life in this new Italy is to be found in the town of Novi Ligure, in a large, elegant house set off a wide avenue of shady trees. Marina Bellocchi née Coppi, born in November 1947, is the image of her father: she has inherited the high forehead, the sweeping hair, the elegant nose and the half-smile in which the upper lip barely moves. But whereas Coppi always appears languid and self-effacing in film footage and television clips, his daughter is lively, laughing, expressive, her appearance belying her sixty years.

  Fausto and Bruna moved from Castellania over the Apennines to a flat in the town of Sestri Ponente on the Ligurian coast near Genoa after their marriage at the end of 1945. It was easier to get food near the big city in those times of shortages, and the Mediterranean climate was milder for training than the chillier, foggier winters of Piedmont. A fourth-floor flat in an apartment block with no lift was probably not the first choice for a cycling champion, however. His Bianchi bike (possibly his most valuable possession) was kept in the flat, and when Coppi went out training the tifosi would wait outside the building to compete for the honour of carrying his bike up the stairs when he returned, so that his legs would be less tired.

  In the mornings before Fausto left to go training, he would have breakfast with his daughter as she prepared to go to infant school. She would have zuppa al latte, hot, sugary bread and milk, and Fausto would pretend to steal his daughter’s food, much to her consternation. When he laughed, it came out like that of a small boy: eheheheh. On winter mornings, he would stuff a thick layer of newspapers under his woollen jersey to absorb the sweat and keep the wind off his chest: as she was eating he would methodically rip out a triangular space at the top of each sheet to allow him to open the zip at the collar of his jersey.

  Marina attended a nursery school between the sea and the Via Aurelia, the coast road where Fausto trained most days; as he passed, he would stop at the huge iron gate and call her over just to say hello. Sometimes, as he went training in the morning, he would carry his daughter to school on the crossbar of his bike, a precarious ride she did not entirely enjoy, although she did not tell him so.

  Squashed in the pockets of Marina’s heavy coat would be a few of Coppi’s favourite cakes, little baskets of flaky pastry called gubeletti, made specially for the cyclist by a local baker’s called Sidea. Usually they were filled with jam, but the baker’s boys took the trouble to fill Coppi’s with orange marmalade so that they wouldn’t be too sweet for him. His other passion was for small pastry fingers known as bacicci, little kisses.

  Coppi would ride up to 160 kilometres each day, come home, eat a light lunch, and lie down to rest on the sofa with Marina in his arms. Cavanna would be driven the forty-five miles over from Novi Ligure to give him a massage, and he would go to bed at 9.30 p.m. Already, the Coppis were making plans for the future. He wanted to open a bar or a restaurant after he retired, he said while being interviewed by the journalist Gianni Roghi. Bruna overheard, and said the idea would not suit her; the demands on their time would be too great. ‘OK,’ said her husband. ‘We’ll get someone to run the bar and we’ll just take Marina out walking around the town.’

  * * *

  Outs
ide his family, to most of those who met him, Coppi appeared distant, ill-at-ease. One former team-mate, Michele Gismondi, told me: ‘He always seemed to be fond of us, deep down inside, even if sometimes his mind seemed elsewhere, as if he were thinking of something else.’ Jean Bobet concurred: ‘Out of his racing kit he looked fine, but the suit never seemed quite to fit him. I had the impression he was not at ease. He was always polite but seemed to be watching everyone else, and looked as if he was watching everyone else watching him.’

  Coppi was impossible to pin down. Team-mates and friends find it hard to remember specifically what it was that made his character special. He is not, it should be pointed out, the only cyclist of this kind. Orio Vergani of Corriere della Sera, for one, believed that most of the cycling champions of that era were reticent men, never letting too much out in public about the efforts they made, the drugs they took, their child-hood, their dreams. They were peasant boys with the peasant’s instinct for caution, thrown into a bizarre, dog-eat-dog world where they gambled every day – on their own strength, on the trajectory of a bend, on the line to take in a sprint – and where they were surrounded with people whose aim was to deceive them.