As far as Dr Locatelli was concerned, what mattered was that the race was held not far away from the village of Varano Borghi, where he had set up his practice when he and Giulia moved north in late 1945, not long after their wedding. Locatelli’s wife had no particular desire to accompany her husband when he told her they were to go and obtain Coppi’s autograph at the Tre Valli Varesine. Giulia went along, but with a different thought in her mind: here was a way of escaping the small village where they lived, for an afternoon at least. Just as Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary found that life with her doctor husband in the French provinces was slow, so Giulia was chafing at the bit. Doctor Locatelli was a busy man, devoted to his work. Even though Milan was just an hour away, Varano Borghi felt cut off from the mainstream, and she spent many hours with her two-year-old daughter Loretta, whose name was always shortened to Lolli.
Giulia subsequently produced two subtly different versions of how she and Coppi met. According to one account, she and her husband went to approach Coppi at the punzonatura, the ritual of the evening before the race when the campioni would register and have their bikes checked. The Locatellis arrived late in Varese, as did Coppi. In the traffic jam approaching the race’s headquarters, the doctor and his wife were stuck in a line of traffic behind a large grey Lancia Aprilia bearing an Alessandria registration plate. It was the doctor who recognised Coppi in the car; the couple followed it through a yelling throng of fans, some grabbing the car, some climbing on to it. At the punzonatura, the police made a vain attempt to force the crowd back from the car so that the doors could be opened. And when they did open she saw him get out: a tall, slender, reserved man, aloof and somehow detached amidst the chaos, dressed in a dark-brown suit with a blue tie.
In a second version, produced thirty years later, she was more downbeat about her first impression: ‘To tell the truth, he made no impression on me as a man. I thought he was ugly, with that enormous chest and his long pointed nose.’ Both accounts tally in one way: she met Coppi at his hotel and asked for an autograph, although one version has this happening the evening before the race, the other the evening after the finish. At his hotel, Giulia caught him as he went up the stairs. He did not even bother to look at her; give a piece of paper to the porter, he said, and I will sign it. ‘You are being unkind,’ she replied; she would have an autographed photograph or nothing. ‘This time he looked at me and went red in the face with embarrassment. He murmured shyly, “Yes, yes, of course.”’
Coppi turned, and called to his brother Serse to get the bag of photos from the car. To whom should he dedicate the picture: ‘Signorina …’ Signora, she corrected him. When visited by the journalist Jean-Paul Ollivier in the 1980s, Giulia Locatelli still had a postcard of a young Coppi in the Italian national champion’s green, red and white jersey. It was a symbol of the way she had dragged Coppi from indifference to acquiescence, a foretaste of the power she would eventually exert over him. She may have sensed an opportunity when this celebrity, the idol of the baying crowd, had been bent to her will in that single encounter on the stairs. She would return again and again to see him race. ‘I became obsessed with Coppi,’ she confessed.
As well as the veneer of celebrity, the smart suit and the big car and the hordes of fans, what was there about Coppi himself that might attract a woman? The most telling comment I could elicit came from the wife of one of his team-mates: ‘Era squisito’, he was refined. What did she mean by that? ‘Delicate in his manners, courteous in the way he spoke, almost feminine.’Another woman mentioned that he had long, delicate hands. It is hard to get further from the old cliché of the cycling champion as an uneducated peasant or manual worker.
Coppi’s son Faustino recalls Giulia’s view of her lover: ‘She would say “He was a gentleman” even though he came from a peasant family. He had a certain courtesy, a way of behaving. They lived together for several years and there wasn’t once when he didn’t get up when she arrived at the dinner table.’ After their affair went public, Giulia explained the attraction like this: ‘Coppi is not a common man, and in a certain sense he is very unlike people who earn a living from sport. He has the style of an artist, you could say a musician, he moves delicately, dresses with taste. He is at home in any company.’
Coppi was a man in search of certainty: that was reflected in the people who influenced him, powerful minds such as Cavanna, his brother Serse, Bartali. In that context, it was understandable that he might eventually succumb to a strong-minded woman. Giulia’s initial interest in Coppi went hand in hand with that of her husband, and together the couple visited more and more bike races, always seeking out the champion. For the moment, Giulia Locatelli looked like any other impassioned autograph hunter.
* * *
Coppi had plenty to distract him in the next few months besides his one-year-old daughter Marina. He was more restrained in his track racing, and that restful winter ushered in the best spell of his career. The big issue derived from the Valkenburg debacle, however. In a few months, Italy would have to choose the national team for the Tour de France, which was contested by squads from each country rather than the sponsored outfits that rode the rest of the season’s races. Alfredo Binda and the heads of Italian cycling had to decide which of the two stars should lead the national team. Should they go for the defending champion, Bartali, or his bitter rival? Could they leave either one out without drawing virulent protests from the fans and media? If they put both men in the team, how could they work together?
The two men had at least restored amicable relations when Coppi visited Bartali in Tuscany at Christmas 1948, but it fell to Binda to get them to the start of the Tour in the same team. The Italian manager was a man of stature: as the campionissimo of the 1920s, he had at one time been so dominant in the Giro that the organisers paid him to keep away. He had also won the first world professional road race championship in 1926. Here was no lightweight, but a man who could talk to Coppi and Bartali on equal terms. A summit meeting was called in early March 1949 at the town of Chiavari, east of Genoa on the Mediterranean coast, with all the senior figures in Italian cycling present, and a written agreement under which the pair agreed to cooperate was drawn up under Binda’s guidance on 14 March.
Bartali said publicly that he would work with his rival, but Coppi showed astonishing form as the 1949 season progressed. Just five days after the agreement was signed the younger man opened a four-minute gap in thirty kilometres to win Milan–San Remo. Three weeks later he scored a narrow win in the ‘best of three’ pursuit decider against Schulte in front of a 20,000 crowd at the Vigorelli. He then headed to Belgium and northern France, coming close to victory in the Flèche Wallonne Classic and engineering a victory for his brother Serse in Paris–Roubaix, which, he said, gave him more joy than if he had won himself. Back in Italy, as the Giro neared, he won the Giro di Romagna, with Bartali ten minutes behind.
That year’s Giro took place amid massive public interest. The ‘third man’ of Italian cycling, Fiorenzo Magni, had won the 1948 race, while Bartali had taken the Tour de France and ‘saved the republic’. So Coppi needed to re-assert himself in his home Tour. The hype was immense, but only Coppi lived up to it, with two deadly blows on two great mountain stages. For the rest of the three weeks he and Bartali observed each other closely, amid rumours that Bartali might have been poisoned by a malevolent Sicilian. The race was remarkable for one other thing: the despatches of the writer and poet Dino Buzzati in Corriere della Sera, some of the most lyrical reports cycling has ever prompted.
The emotion was not generated only by the racing: 4 May had seen the Superga air crash, in which the entire squad of the dominant Turin football team, il Grande Torino, had been wiped out. Coppi and Bartali had been friends of the players, with whom they had turned out in benefit matches, and Coppi began the Giro with an FC Turin badge on his Bianchi jersey. The memory of the war was also still close: the race returned to Trieste, now part of Italy, to scenes of rejoicing, tears and seas of Italian flag
s, and it travelled past the flattened town of Cassino, where, wrote Buzzati, ‘there were no lovely girls at the windows – the windows were missing. Even the walls were missing.’
Coppi swooped on the main stage in the Dolomites, riding away from Bartali when the ‘iron man’ punctured on the Pordoi Pass and opening a gap of seven minutes by the finish in Bolzano. That prompted Buzzati to write the following, about the campionissimo in flight: ‘Look at Coppi, is he climbing? No. He is just forging onwards as if the road were as flat as a pool table. From a distance, you might say he is out for a blissful stroll. Close-to, you can see his face becoming more and more lined, his upper lip contracting like a rat caught in a trap … [he is] hermetically sealed in his own suffering.’
As the crow flies, just sixty kilometres separates the towns of Cuneo and Pinerolo in Italy’s western Alps. But for 10 June 1949, the new Giro organiser, Vincenzo Torriani – whose name would be inseparable from the event until the 1990s – had devised a massive loop of 254 kilometres into France and back for the race’s eighteenth stage. It took in five climbs: the Maddalena – known to the French as the Col de Varche – the French passes of the Vars and the Izoard, with its scree-slopes and Death Valley-style rock pillars, the ascent to the Franco-Italian border at Montgenevre and the long drag past the ski resort of Sestriere before the descent to Pinerolo. With 4,200 metres of climbing in total over the five passes, it was one of the toughest courses for any mountain stage in any Giro.
At the stage start, Coppi was a few seconds behind the race’s overall leader, Adolfo Leoni, the sprinter who had been the mover behind the rebirth of cycling in post-war Italy. The stage had been preceded by the predictable verbal exchanges with Bartali: ‘Tell that one I’ll drop him.’ ‘Tell the other one he won’t see my back wheel for long.’ Bartali said Coppi would attack on the first three cols, ‘I’ll catch him on the fourth and drop him on the fifth’; Coppi riposted that Bartali ‘will have to have a good look at my back wheel at the start because that’s the only time he’ll see it’.
It was good knockabout stuff, but it was irrelevant once the stage had started. Coppi went clear on the Varche, amid late spring snow in the high meadows, in pursuit of another Italian, Primo Volpi. There was a massive 192 kilometres to go, but he simply rode further and further ahead, dodging around massive potholes in the tarmac, until, at the finish, he was indisputably the Giro winner, with Bartali floundering in his wake, twelve minutes behind. To escape so far from the end of the stage, with some five hours’ riding through the mountains ahead, in the day’s rain and cold, was a massive gamble, a colossal statement of confidence in his own ability. Those present recall that he was almost angry afterwards. ‘That loony Volpi made me completely kill myself,’ he said to Mario Ricci.
Buzzati produced his most effusive piece yet, reflecting that here, surely, the older champion, Bartali – twelve minutes behind and almost twenty-four minutes back in the overall standings – had been killed off by his younger rival. Buzzati observed the muddied face of the ‘iron man’, his open lips, his expression of suffering and wrote: ‘Thirty years ago I learned [at school] that Achilles killed Hector. Is this too glorious, too solemn a comparison? No. What would be the point in calling these “classical studies” if the fragments that remain in our minds were not an integral part of our lives? Fausto Coppi does not have Achilles’ glacial cruelty … but Bartali is living through the same drama as Hector: the tragedy of a man vanquished by the Gods. Bartali has fought a superhuman power and he could only lose: his opponent is the malevolent power of old age.’
Less elaborate, but a better illustration of the massive time gaps Coppi opened up on that stage, was a tale told by the French journalist Pierre Chany. He described following Coppi before deciding to stop for lunch. As Coppi disappeared up the road, he and his colleagues had a starter, a main course and coffee. Bartali came past as they left the restaurant. It seems unlikely, unless the waiter was extraordinarily quick on his feet, but it makes the point.
* * *
Coppi’s dominance in the Giro left the Italian national cycling federation and the trainer of the national team, Alfredo Binda, with a nasty conundrum. The consensus reached at Chiavari broke down after Coppi’s victory in the Giro. Coppi’s backers, underpinned by the financial muscle of Bianchi, demanded that Bartali remain at home. Speaking to La Gazzetta dello Sport, Coppi made his case: he had always felt his rival was not a team man, that he did not play by the rules, and that they should not race together. The prospect of Bartali leading another team in the Tour, the mix and match ‘international’ squad, was raised, but quickly dropped. The national standing of the pair was such that the Italian president Alcide De Gasperi was moved to declare publicly that they had to unite on behalf of Italy. This was hardly surprising given his friendship with Bartali; more remarkably, the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti said publicly that he agreed with De Gasperi.
Binda, Coppi and Bartali met again in the central Italian town of Osimo that June, and Binda laid down the law. If the pair left the room without coming to an agreement, he told them, Italy would never forgive them and their images would be mud. He proposed the following deal: they would each take their own gregari with them and would agree to help each other until the Tour reached the mountains, at which point they could ride their own races and it would become clear which was the stronger.
The Italian team manager had a gut feeling that neither man wanted a repeat of the Valkenburg farce, because they feared what it would do to their reputations. However, he made sure that he retained control of the team. He would have the power he needed to restrain either man if he started to put self-interest above the common weal. He had the ultimate right to select the team, while allowing Bartali and Coppi to bring some of their own team-mates. He kept the power to throw anyone off the race if they disobeyed his orders, and he established that he would be the one who told the gregari what to do. The written agreement was finally signed at the Hotel Andreola in Milan, just two weeks before the Tour started on 30 June in Paris.
* * *
After Bartali had won the 1948 Tour, taking seven stage wins along the way, Coppi had told his gregario Ettore Milano that if he didn’t win the 1949 Tour he would give up – he was sick, he said, of hearing people talking about Bartali’s win on the radio. In the event, he came within an ace of ignominious failure. Just five days after the race began, he was standing by a roadside in the depths of Normandy, holding a broken bike and asking plaintively if he could go home. It was the greatest crisis of his career, with his vulnerable side brutally exposed.
Coppi had begun his Tour with a tour of his own, a trip around the sights of Paris on his bike. By stage five, which ran over 293 kilometres from Rouen to St Malo in blazing heat, the Italians were not showing well; both Coppi and Bartali were eighteen minutes behind the race leader, the Frenchman Jacques Marinelli. But on that day, Binda ordered his Italians to go on the attack, and Coppi worked his way into what looked like the stage-winning escape. Best of all, he left Bartali well behind him, in a tactical fix: the older man could not set up a chase, because he could not ride against his own team-mate.
As the race passed through the village of Mouen, with 160 kilometres remaining to the finish and the lead over the peloton already ten minutes, disaster struck. Marinelli reached for a bottle that was being held out to him by a spectator, wobbled and fell, taking Coppi with him and entangling their bikes. The Italian’s machine was a broken wreck: forks twisted, tyre forced off the back wheel, front wheel broken, the chain in the spokes. That should have mattered little: showing considerable foresight, Binda had asked the Tour organisers to allow him a second team car to provide service in the event of his riders having mechanical problems, on the grounds that he had two leaders, who might be in different places on the road.
So there was a car behind Coppi, and in it was his Bianchi directeur sportif, Tragella, who was on the Tour as Binda’s assistant. But Binda’s foresight counted for nothing: the on
ly spare bike Tragella had was too small. Coppi’s spare was with Binda, who had stopped at the feeding zone in order to ensure Bartali got his lunch. No less than seven minutes had passed by the time Binda caught up, to find Coppi and Tragella standing by the roadside, looking, as he put it, ‘like two dogs that have been beaten with sticks’. Coppi was certain that his race was over.
It was down to Binda and the other Italians to keep Coppi going. But merely getting him started again required Binda to use all his persuasive powers. Initially he tried compulsion, warning Coppi that if he stopped without permission, he would be fined. That failed and the manager resorted to white lies, telling Coppi that he himself had retired from races in this kind of situation, and had always regretted it. This was fantasy, but the situation was desperate: Coppi would not respond. Eventually, like a parent negotiating with a toddler, Binda told him that if he rode as far as the finish, he could go home the following morning, if he still wanted to.
Binda’s next step was to make Bartali wait; he knew that Coppi would be stimulated by the idea that Bartali might win if he went home. Initially Bartali pedalled alongside, ‘alternating persuasion and insults’, he recalled. ‘It was like talking to a wall. Then I got angry. “I’m going home”, Fausto said. And I replied, “My fine boy, how are you going to look to your fans? You’re giving up. Goodbye glory, goodbye cash, no one will take you seriously any more. You wanted me to stay at home for this Tour and what do you do, you give up on the fifth stage?"’
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