As Dino Buzzati wrote: ‘… there they were, the people of all Italy … massed along 4,000 kilometres and they weren’t what they were the day before. A powerful new feeling possessed them, they were yelling, laughing, the sorrows of life forgotten for a few instants, they were happy without a doubt.’ The bike was integral to their lives: they had fled invading armies with suitcases on their handlebars, they had ferried weapons and food to partisans and escaped prisoners; in Rome bike bombs had become a fearsome fact of life as partisans fought occupation. They rode bikes to work and play and they could dream of emulating the champions as they cycled to their factories and fields.
For a brief while, cycling surfed the wave of economic expansion that transformed Europe so rapidly after the war. For a few years, before the advent of live television coverage, cycling retained the mystique of the heroic days when no one quite knew what had happened out on the road. That in turn freed up the journalists to unleash their imaginations. They hyped up the characters, their nicknames, their clashes of personality, real and imagined.
There was Aldo Ronconi, an Italian who was coached by his brother, a priest who would run after him at stage finishes with his cassock floating in the wind, and who would disguise himself so that he could get round the rule that family members were not allowed in the Tour caravan. There was Pierre Brambilla, who reputedly chopped his bike to pieces after finishing third in the 1947 Tour de France. The Swiss Hugo Koblet – the ‘pédaleur de charme’ – carried a comb and some eau de cologne so that he could smarten up before crossing the finish line in triumph. A rider such as Luigi Malabrocca became a celebrity merely for finishing last in the Giro; he would devise the most bizarre stratagems to lose time and ‘win’ his lowly place. The nicknames harked back to the language invented to describe the earliest Tours de France: the elf, the Breton gnome, the menhir, the little goat, glasshead, leather head, the emperor, the ironman, the lion of Flanders, the eagle of Toledo.
In this pan-European soap opera with its cast of larger than life actors, the rivalry between Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali was the principal subplot. It entailed a constant display of what the Italians term polemica, best described as a web of intrigue and dispute. Polemica drove and was driven by the sales of the newspapers that sponsored the races. Both men had to perform, on and off their bikes, to keep the headlines running, to keep the crowds interested. It was this rivalry that defined both of their careers.
CHAPTER 7
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THE MYSTIC AND THEMECHANIC
‘I can’t do it alone. I need the help of a madman like you’ – Don Camillo to Peppone
When I first started attending bike races in Italy, in the early 1990s, Gino Bartali was as much a fixture at starts and finishes as the elderly Campagnolo service cars and the pink Gazzetta dello Sport posters. Bartali was then in his seventies, a gnome-like figure with deep lines etched into his chestnut-brown face with its towering broken nose and banana smile. He would be called onto the podium to mutter a few incomprehensible platitudes, but mainly seemed to be hanging around without a role, in a tacky-looking hat with a sponsor’s name on it. What I did not grasp at the time was that he was the role. His task was to be Gino Bartali, to provide a tangible connection with the glory days.
As much as anything he had achieved individually, the fans were celebrating his role in the partnership that defined a golden age when Italian cyclists seemed to win every major race. Bartali himself seemed to recognise this, commenting that he felt that the fans were there for Coppi as much as for him. It was a generous admission of the fact that for thirty years he had been fighting an unequal battle. Since Coppi’s death in 1960, fans and press had tended to project the romantic, mythical qualities of their rivalry onto the younger man rather than the living great. ‘Even the Bartaliani became Coppiani, partly through obligation, partly through conviction, partly through nostalgia,’ wrote Bartali’s biographer Gianni Brocchi.
Bartali was still dearly loved, if the constant queue of people shaking his hand and asking for his signature on anything that came to hand was any measure. There were estimates in the early 1990s that he was signing 5,000 autographs a day, but his popularity had its price. Bartali had also lost any mystique. He was half divinity, half caricature, like an Indian chief in a Barnum big top. There was something a little pathetic in the sight of him handing out publicity trinkets and posing with models in short skirts. It was hard to connect this doddery old man with the legend who had, it was always said, saved Italy from communist revolution by winning the 1948 Tour de France. All that remained of that Gino was the nose, as long and crooked as in his and Coppi’s golden days.
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As the focus for an entire generation of sports fans, the Coppi–Bartali rivalry is in the same league as those of their fellow cyclists Anquetil and Poulidor in the 1960s, of Ali and Foreman in the 1970s, Senna and Prost in the 1980s. There were classic elements in the plot: the young upstart Coppi against Bartali, the old champion; Coppi the team worker who rises to take on his own team leader, Bartali. All sports feed off such soap operas, but where cycling is unique is that the great, lasting events in road cycling were founded specifically to provide copy for newspapers, by breeding this kind of intrigue.
The rivalry was, said Orio Vergani, ‘a great machine of financial interests’. Both men needed the money the rivalry could bring them – no race was worth organising if they did not participate, so they were paid to start, be it an exhibition event or a regional classic. La Gazzetta dello Sport needed the pair to boost its circulation, as did the regional papers that ran their own races. Bianchi and Legnano needed the duo in order to sell bikes. Team-mates of the champions earned far more racing for Coppi or Bartali than they could racing for themselves, even if their devotion meant that they never won a single event.
Coppi and Bartali were friends of a kind, who would work together when they had to – but the pyramid of interests ensured that the rivalry took on a life of its own and created its own momentum, to the extent that the actual sports events themselves could become lost among the miasma of words churned out by the newspapers. Behind the polemica – the ‘disputes’ whipped up by La Gazzetta dello Sport et al. – there was real competition, in immense volume. The number of events Coppi and Bartali rode, not to mention the fact that a single race, the Tour or Giro, lasts for over three weeks, meant that the frequency with which they went head to head is astonishing compared to, say, the number of meetings between Foreman and Ali. The rivalry lasted for almost fifteen years, from 1940, when Coppi outshone his team leader at the Giro, until Bartali’s retirement at the end of 1954. Even though 1943, 1944 and 1945 were lost to the war, that is still an eternity in sporting terms. Begin with the number of events they rode, add in the pre-race hype, the post-race analysis and the between-race gossip and you can understand the massive, lasting impact on Italian consciousness.
Since Coppi and Bartali, Italian cycling has tended to see itself in terms of such opposing pairs. Most important, and deepest, was the rivalry in the late 1970s and early 1980s between Francesco Moser and Giuseppe Saronni (when I visited Moser seven years after his retirement he was still putting down Saronni), but there were others: Marco Pantani and Claudio Chiappucci, the Irishman Stephen Roche and Roberto Visentini, Gilberto Simoni and Damiano Cunego.
Italy seems made for such rivalries. Argument is a national pastime in a nation whose inhabitants do not understand the notion of sitting on the fence. One of the cornerstones of Italian identity is a phenomenon called divismo – opposition between concepts, people, places, sports teams and their stars. You are for one or the other, rarely neutral yet, paradoxically, the urge to argue forms a bond. The most basic oppositions in Italy are between the prosperous north and relatively impoverished south, between neighbouring cities and provinces, and between Milan, the industrial capital, and Rome, the political capital.
There was a proliferation of opposing pairs in the post-war years: in politics the right-wing
Christian Democrats and left-wing Socialists; in sport, Juventus and Inter, Varzi and Nuvolari, Maserati and Ferrari; on screen, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida; on stage, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi; on the written page, Giovanni Guareschi’s conservative priest Don Camillo and the radical communist mayor Peppone. There was another side to divismo in the post-conflict years. Fascism had imposed conformity that went beyond the political, while during the civil war loyalties had been a question of life and death. Arguing the virtues of Lollobrigida over Loren, or Bartali over Coppi, was a harmless outlet for emotion and could be celebrated as part of Italy’s return to normality.
After Bartali’s win in the 1947 Milan–San Remo, the pair whipped Italy’s cycling fans into a state of delirium. As Dino Buzzati wrote: ‘The [tifosi] have forgotten everything: who they are, the work waiting for them, the illnesses, luxuries, unpaid bills, headaches, love, everything except the fact that Coppi is in the lead and Bartali continues to lose ground.’ At that year’s Giro two separate police detachments had to be provided, one for Coppi’s supporters, one for Bartali’s. They were not there to prevent fights, but to stop the two stars being over-whelmed by their respective tifosi at the finish. The fans would remain outside the two riders’ hotels singing and shouting until the small hours; Pierre Chany writes of being awoken one morning at three o’clock by a scream in the street. Outside the hotel, a tifoso was lying unconscious on the pavement, blood streaming from his head. He had climbed up the outside of the building and fallen from the second floor; ‘Poverino,’ said his sobbing girlfriend, ‘he so wanted to see Fausto as he slept.’
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Of the two, it is Coppi who has inspired the artists and writers, who has acquired the lasting legacy, but in the flesh it was Bartali who was the bigger personality, who made the clearest impression on the minds of his contemporaries. To start with, there was one thing everyone knew about him, that truly set him apart: his overt religious belief. Coppi remains diffuse, hard to define: Bartali was and is il pio Gino. The most famous image of the man shows him praying at Lourdes during the rest day in a Tour de France, with Fiorenzo Magni alongside him. His eyes are closed in devotion, his arms shine with the cyclist’s tan.
When away from home and unable to pray in the private chapel of his house in Ponte a Ema, near Florence, Bartali would often take his squad to Mass before race starts. He dedicated his wins to Ste Thérèse of Lisieux and had her image cut into his handlebars (this was subverted forty years on when the sprinter Mario Cipollini rode with Pamela Anderson’s picture on his bike). He raced with half a dozen medallions of Ste Thérèse and the Virgin Mary hanging from his neck and his handlebars. There was a rumour that a little girl in the Tuscan countryside had seen Bartali climbing a mountain with an angel pushing him. On a more earthly note, his closest personal gregario, Giovanni Corrieri, said his pious master never swore once in seven years and would get annoyed with riders who relieved themselves during a race on the grounds that it did not look good in front of the public. If this were true, it would make Bartali truly unique among cyclists, who view watering the verges where they race as their God-given right.
For the Catholic Church, Bartali was a gift, with the ‘deep and ingenuous faith of a Spanish toreador. He kneels and prays before measuring himself against his bull and kneels and thanks God after getting through the day.’ His chastity, self-denial and prayer meant he could be depicted as the perfect Christian athlete. He could produce pithy phrases to link his faith and his sport, worthy of fridge magnets or car stickers today: ‘Faith enables me to stand the pain’, ‘My jersey was often dirty, but my thoughts remained pure’. When he founded his bike company, it was no coincidence that the machines were made by a manufacturer called Santamaria. The bikes, ironically, were of poor quality.
Bartali’s sporting longevity, over a career that lasted the best part of twenty years, could be held to represent ‘eternal Christian youth’, the notion that chastity and piety would lead to eternal life while bringing earthly success. Not surprisingly, given the aura that was created around him, he was treated like an earthly saint: the tifosi would strew rose petals in his path and kiss the tarmac where his tyres had been. His stage win at Lourdes in the 1948 Tour was, inevitably, seen as divinely inspired.
Coppi was depicted as an atheist, to his utter disgust: he met Pius XII on at least two occasions, in 1947 and 1949. The first visit was at the instigation of Bartali, and the rumour went that he had not gone willingly. His account of the visit is expansive enough to suggest he was not indifferent: the redvelveted page; the silence of the Vatican’s corridors; Pius XII’s simple room, full of books and decorated with a large silver cross; the papal blessing traced in front of them with his ‘delicate, transparent hands’. Coppi actually had the classic peasant Catholic faith he was brought up with, but, unlike Bartali, he had the countryman’s unwillingness to bare his soul. He would mutter dark things about other people who made much of their beliefs in public, referring clearly to Bartali, and add that he was equally devout. It was Coppi who presented all his gregari and the team manager, Alfredo Binda, with gold medals depicting the Madonna del Ghisallo – patron saint of cyclists – after his 1949 Tour de France win.
There were, in any case, nuances to Bartali’s Catholicism. His faith was overt, but his behaviour was more muscular than Christian once he was on his bike and the competitive instinct took over. His thoughts might have been clean, but he sold many of his races as an amateur. In the Giro in 1947, when a rider called him a ‘lying priest’, he did not turn the other cheek but delivered a straight left that floored the blasphemer. Several of his contemporaries describe him as tight-fisted, a rider who offered money for assistance in races but never paid or came up with less than he promised. ‘Gino never kept the promises he made to his rivals in a race. In certain situations he would ask you for help in return for a favour or something else which never came. Fausto on the other hand didn’t say very much but kept his word.’ In terms of lifestyle, it was Coppi who lived like a monk, while Bartali smoked and drank with Rabelaisian gusto.
Politically, as well, Bartali’s beliefs were much easier to identify than Coppi’s, and they sprang from his religion. Bartali’s father had been an active socialist – he had asked young Gino to hide his party card when the fascists began rounding up the leftwingers – but Pio Gino was a close friend of the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi, whom he had met in the Vatican during the war. Inevitably, he was adopted by the Christian Democrats. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that Coppi was approached by the left to endorse Palmiro Togliatti’s communists during the 1948 election campaign. Wisely, however, and typically, he turned them down. It was widely held by those close to him that he voted Christian Democrat, but that did not stop the political labels: Bartali was ‘De Gasperi in bicicletta’, Coppi ‘the Togliatti of the road’. There were posters, too: ‘Up with Coppi the communist, down with Bartali the Christian Democrat’. As with the pair’s religious beliefs, the labels were simplistic.
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For Coppi at least, Bartali was the person who mattered in every race. He was fixated with the man. One writer recalled sitting in the Bianchi team car behind the pair as they ascended a mountain pass in the Giro, where Coppi was clearly the stronger from the way he was riding. The Bianchi boss Aldo Zambrini was shaking his head: his rider could win, but he didn’t dare attack. Then Bartali’s chain came off. ‘It was only a few seconds, but it was enough. As if liberated from a nightmare that froze his muscles and paralysed his willpower, Fausto did not merely accelerate, he took flight. It was like a bird beating its wings.’ Coppi was so mentally fragile that he would complain that Bartali was watching him and only him; the notion would make him want to quit.
Sometimes, the rivalry prompted sheer farce, as in the events of the evening before Milan–San Remo in March 1947. That night, Bianchi were in their usual hotel in the centre of the city, the plushly furnished, marble-embellished Andreola, near the vast Central
station. With them were Bartali’s Legnano. Coppi was worried about his form, so he instructed his domestiques to nobble his rival. This was not a matter of spiking Bartali’s food or letting his tyres down. Instead, Coppi based his plan on the psychology of the individual. It was well known that Bartali liked to stay up late smoking and yarning: Serse Coppi was instructed to get Bartali out on the town and keep him up late. The trek to San Remo would begin early in the morning, and a sleepless night could wreck Bartali’s chances. With him Serse took his friend Luigi Casola and Ubaldo Pugnaloni, the uncrowned Italian champion of 1943.
‘If Bartali were in this room now, we’d be here [talking] until midnight,’ Pugnaloni tells me. ‘Coppi had gone to bed early as usual. Serse, Casola and I took Bartali to the cinema, to see Gilda with Glenn Ford, we began smoking cigarettes, got back in the middle of the night. Fausto had a good grumble at Serse because they were sharing a room and he didn’t come in quietly.’ After the film they went to eat, strolled round the station, and ‘spun the evening out’. At the back of their minds was one thought: ‘losing sleep would cut Bartali off at the knees’.
The plan failed. Coppi’s conjunctivitis got the better of him and he abandoned. Pugnaloni had insomnia after smoking too many cigarettes and quit; Casola and Serse Coppi also abandoned. As Pugnaloni told me, ‘Bartali put out half the team in an evening, because he was used to staying up late and we weren’t.’ The winner, inevitably, was the ‘old man’, amid rumours that Bianchi were getting fed up with paying Coppi his huge salary.
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