Fallen Angel

by William Fotheringham

  Such rationalisations would have meant little to Bruna, a woman who never had a particular taste for the limelight and found Coppi’s celebrity hard to cope with. Was there a subtext when Coppi – or rather his ghostwriter – wrote in his 1950 autobiography Le Drame de Ma Vie that ‘the important thing is to find a wife who understands the life a cyclist is forced to live’? His was, unfortunately, not a life that was easy to empathise with; being a professional cyclist’s wife has never been straight-forward. To this day, cyclists’ marriages seem to break down at an alarming rate, but maintaining a marriage must have been particularly hard half a century and more ago. Marina recalls that she and Bruna experienced Coppi’s victories, defeats and crashes only through the radio, in the same way as the rest of the Italian population. There were occasional phone calls as well, such as the one during the 1949 Tour de France when she told her father, ‘Keep the pink jersey, Daddy’. ‘She hasn’t quite got the hang of her colours yet,’ smiled her father as he told the tale.

  The long trips to get to races meant, for example, that a four-week Tour could turn into a six-week trip, at a time when communications were rudimentary. Adriana Bartali remembers going to the cinema to see how her husband was getting on in his races, working out his health by looking at his picture in the newspapers, and having to book telephone calls for eight o’clock. Coppi rarely spared himself: in the winter of 1949, for example, he undertook a marathon trip together with Serse, racing in Tunisia, then driving across North Africa to race in Casablanca, Tangiers and Algeciras before crossing back to Spain and driving most of the way to Paris. It was hardly necessary, but the money was there to be earned.

  Moreover, Coppi’s life bore no relation to that of a shop-keeper’s daughter in provincial Italy. The transition from poverty-stricken prisoner of war to cycling star had happened virtually overnight. How on earth could Bruna have understood all that her husband was experiencing, and how could she have imagined the addictive qualities of the glamour, the adrenaline and the acclaim? She was not a woman who enjoyed the public gaze.

  However, the notion that Bruna did not attend bike races is a myth: one of the most touching images of her and her husband is from the 1946 Giro d’Italia, where they are looking into one another’s eyes, behind a bike. There is another picture of her kissing Fausto after the 1946 Giro di Lombardia. The affection looks deep and mutual. Exceptionally, Bruna was permitted to visit the Tour de France in both 1949 and 1951 – in the latter year on compassionate grounds. She was also at the 1952 Giro and Tour. When she did attend races, however, she made a point of remaining in the background. She would not sit among the guests of honour. Instead, she sat on the steps, to remain unseen. ‘There were places but I never took them. I stayed on the steps so that any expressions I had of worry in a crash or joy in a victory could not be noticed.’

  She travelled to criteriums and track races with Coppi, Fiorenzo Magni and his wife, and Magni recalls one revealing episode in Paris. ‘The wives went shopping. Bruna kept saying, “How beautiful this blouse is, how lovely this cardigan is” and my wife said, “Why don’t you buy them?” Bruna said, “No, think how much work it took to pay for them. I mustn’t spend the money.”’ She was, says Magni, ‘too Genovese’ – in Italy the Genovese are thought unwilling to spend money – ‘but it was not tightfistedness, rather a modest mindset. That’s the heart of the problem. Bruna stayed the same, and he changed. He learned about the world, he travelled, she wanted to remain a housewife, go to the hairdresser’s once a fortnight not once a week, have one set of best clothes not two. That [mindset] is not something you change, that’s for life.’

  As Italy’s biggest sports star, her husband was no longer only hers. No matter how much affection he bore her, or how much he loved little Marina, his life was dictated by other things. Biagio Cavanna had a simple take on the marriage: Fausto was Bruna’s husband when he was at home, but belonged to the people of Italy, to his sponsor, to his team-mates when he was away. Cavanna’s son-in-law, Ettore Milano, felt the same way: ‘Bruna didn’t understand like the wives of Gino [Bartali] and [Fiorenzo] Magni understood,’ he told me. ‘When they were at home each was a husband, when they were away, no. Due to her ignorance of cycling, Bruna didn’t figure that out, and that was her fault. You can’t clip a man’s wings.’ Nino Defilippis, who came to know the couple as their marriage crumbled, has a more subtle view: Bruna married a man who turned into someone else: ‘Bruna was a country miss,’ he told me. ‘When Coppi married her he wasn’t the Coppi that he eventually became. His wife married Coppi the ordinary man not Coppi the campione. Coppi became Coppi, she remained the same and couldn’t adapt.’

  The marriage of a reticent, frequently absent husband and a shy woman made for a mutual lack of communication. The story is told of Coppi’s visit to England in the early 1950s, when a microphone was thrust under his nose at a function and he was asked a question in English. He answered, in perfect English; he had learned the language in the prisoner-of-war camp. Bruna was incredulous, a little angry: her husband had never told her.

  Moreover, Bruna did not get on with the strongest character involved with Coppi, Biagio Cavanna. The masseur felt she interfered too much in her husband’s business. After Coppi’s death, he recalled: ‘You would hear her saying all the time, “Don’t go here, don’t do this, do that, I don’t want this, this won’t do.” Coppi would listen, because that was his character, then he would do what he wanted.’ According to Cavanna, the continual disagreements got to Coppi, particularly the public ones. ‘I followed the evolution of Coppi’s feelings for his wife day by day,’ recalled Cavanna, ‘and in the long term the character of the woman wore him out.’ Ettore Milano concurs: ‘Neither [Bruna nor Giulia] managed to fundamentally understand and respect Coppi as a man.’

  As is customary in cycling, Coppi would reveal his thoughts to the masseur while he was having his legs done. Cavanna would then relay his sentiments to Bruna – no doubt merely increasing her stress and annoyance. ‘I told her fifty times that she was wearing him out and she would lose him. It got to a point where he was keeping his family merely because they were there. When Giulia Occhini arrived on the horizon, Fausto Coppi’s love for his wife was over. Coppi was neither awkward nor timid with women; they simply weren’t a problem for him. He was a sentimental man who merely wanted to feel satisfied sentimentally. One woman was enough for him.’

  It is unclear how Coppi’s relationship with Giulia Locatelli developed in 1951 and 1952, but at some point she took the step of inviting him to the home she and her husband shared; he came several times, she recalled, because he had a relation doing military service at a nearby aerodrome and so had a ready excuse. Conveniently, he had now moved northwards over the Apennines from Sestri to the large, opulent villa in Novi Ligure which is now Marina’s home. It was probably an hour closer to where Giulia lived, but that was coincidence. It was just down the hill from Castellania, Biagio Cavanna was on hand, and so too was Coppi’s newly acquired hunting ground, an estate to the east of Novi, towards Asti, at the town of Incisa Scappaccino.

  Once or twice, team-mates came with him to see Giulia. ‘We became friends. Friends. I never thought I would fall in love with him. I am the child of a broken marriage and I wanted my children to grow up in an affectionate environment.’ But Bruna never accompanied Coppi on these visits. It is unclear why Coppi let the friendship develop, but he was not a man to confront issues that involved offending those close to him, with whom he had emotional ties. Nino Defilippis says he was ‘scared of making mistakes, di fare brutta figura, a countryman’s character’. He was also a man with innate respect for women. He always addressed his mother in formal language, and Giulia Locatelli was struck by his good manners. Perhaps he simply floated along, vaguely attracted to one woman, profoundly attached to the other, because resolving the situation would have involved embarrassment.

  There is a consensus among those who were close to Coppi that his relationship with Giulia Locatelli
would not have happened if his brother had not died. Ettore Milano is explicit: ‘Serse was more subtle, more awake, better at reading people, less worried about offending anyone – he would have advised Coppi. He would have told her where to go. But Fausto didn’t have the strength of character, didn’t have the authority. He wasn’t capable of it.’ This may be wishful thinking, linking the death of one much-loved brother with the catastrophic private life of the other, but it has the ring of truth about it: in the absence of his father, Coppi was dependent on Serse for honest advice. The more worldly younger brother might well have encouraged him to keep the affair secret to keep his family together, might have felt that Giulia Locatelli was a dangerous influence from the start. Knowing Serse, he would probably have slept with her while his elder brother was still plucking up the courage to say buon giorno.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  A MAN ALONE

  ‘He is alone, alone on his bike. He is a man’ – Curzio Malaparte, Coppi e Bartali

  For most Italians of a certain age, it takes only three words to evoke Coppi’s image and achievements. Un uomo solo. A man alone. The phrase was coined in 1949 by the radio journalist Mario Ferretti when Coppi staged his longest solo escape to crush the Giro d’Italia field on the Cuneo to Pinerolo leg. ‘Un uomo solo è al comando, la sua maglia è biancoceleste, il suo nome è Fausto Coppi.’ One man alone is in the lead, his jersey is white and light blue, his name is Fausto Coppi. He remains the greatest of cycling’s escape artists. Rino Negri estimates that he raced 3,000 kilometres alone, to win only fifty-eight races. His philosophy was simple: ‘Either I don’t escape, or if I do, it is when I cannot be caught.’ In a pamphlet comparing Italy’s two great cycling champions, the writer Curzio Malaparte felt that Coppi’s habit of winning on his own reflected the cyclist’s belief in his own strength rather than in any divine power. ‘He has no one in heaven to protect him. He only believes in the motor that has been given to him, his body.’

  Coppi was often asked what was the ‘ecstatic moment’ in a race. He would always answer ‘when you cross the line first’. Then he would reconsider; it was when he had weeded out all but the very strongest cyclists in the field, and realised that even these riders were weakening as he rode. In other words, the moment when his physical superiority became obvious and he could be certain that victory would not escape him.

  Fiorenzo Magni believes Coppi’s racing style was in part due to his turbulent marriage. He asked Coppi why he would escape so far from the finish, when he could achieve the same result by waiting until the last hill. ‘"I like riding alone”, he told me. It was a taste, a matter of satisfaction.’ Magni says: ‘Coppi’s massive efforts in a race were an indirect way of taking revenge. He was never happy at home and when he broke away he was throwing out the dynamite he had inside.’ Coppi was certainly a man in search of solitude: he once told the Giro organiser Vincenzo Torriani that his dream was to buy a home in the highest block of flats in Milan and live by himself.

  That reflects the popular notion of Coppi as a man alone in his racing and alone in his personal life after the death of Serse: increasingly estranged from his wife, unable to find complete happiness with his mistress and eventually betrayed – as he saw it – by a society that had bestowed on him the status of a national icon. It all fits the idea of this particular cyclist as a tragic hero, but the reality is more complex and uncertain.

  * * *

  For Coppi, 1951 was a poor year: for the first time since the war, he ended a season without a truly important victory in a one-day Classic or a major stage race. He was now thirty-two, and while his old rival Bartali was still racing, a new young generation of cyclists had emerged, led by the Swiss Hugo Koblet, the ‘pédaleur de charme’ who had so dominated the 1951 Tour, and the Frenchman Louison Bobet. The murmurs that perhaps the campionissimo’s time was past were inevitable. The initial post-war euphoria had dissipated and there were other things on people’s minds: the Cold War was beginning, the Soviets and Americans were experimenting with ever more powerful nuclear weapons, the McCarthy witch-hunts were underway, the first steps were being taken towards the creation of the European Union.

  By the time the 1952 Giro d’Italia came around, it was more than two years since Coppi had won anything significant. The start of the season had been promising but no more than that. His young Bianchi team-mate Loretto Petrucci had won Milan–San Remo. In Paris–Roubaix he had clearly been the strongest rider in the field even though he had been beaten by Rik Van Steenbergen, a superior sprinter who knew that all he had to do was hang on until the finish. But Coppi had said the previous autumn that he had a plan: he would ‘not put his neck out’ between March and May, to save his strength for the double: Giro and Tour.

  The campionissimo’s decision was vindicated on the fifth day of the Giro when he won the mountain time trial stage near Rome. With a field that could hardly have been stronger, including Koblet, the 1950 Tour winner Ferdi Kübler and the double Giro winner Fiorenzo Magni, not to mention Bartali, an early win was critical for his confidence. Better still, by the time the race entered the Dolomites he was in the pink jersey, thanks to a crash which had delayed the leader, Giancarlo Astrua. Best of all, he had a strong rider alongside him at Bianchi to share the pressure and worry the opposition. Coppi’s team had hired the young Frenchman Raphael Geminiani, who was given an open brief: he was to attack on every climb, so that Coppi’s rivals would waste their energy chasing him down.

  The value of having Geminiani in the team became clear on the stage from Venice to Bolzano, over three major mountain passes. In a display of classic team tactics, the Frenchman was sent ahead of the field early on and his captain caught him up later in the stage, once he had got rid of the peloton. That meant Coppi had Geminiani’s support until he felt he needed to deliver the coup de grâce. On the final climb, the dirt-tracked Pordoi Pass, the Frenchman rode his heart out for the first five kilometres; once he had cracked, Coppi took off for the stage win, which gained him five minutes and won him the Giro. On the final massive mountain stage at the Swiss end of the Dolomites, over the Saint Bernard and Simplon passes, there remained only the relatively minor matter of ensuring that his young team-mate led over the climbs, so that he could be paid for his earlier efforts with victory in the King of the Mountains trophy. For Coppi, it was not merely a matter of rewarding Geminiani, however: it was a chance to deprive Bartali of a prize which might distract attention from his own overall win.

  The 1952 Tour was preceded by the same polemica and diplomatic wrangling as the 1949 race. Coppi initially insisted that Bartali should not ride – he said he would go on holiday by the sea if Bartali were selected – even though il vecchio had come fifth in the Giro. Forgetting their double act in the Alps during his Tour win, Coppi complained that Bartali had ridden a negative race in 1949 and 1951, waiting for him to falter. What Coppi did not say, but probably thought, was that Bartali had finished in eighth place in the 1951 Tour to Coppi’s tenth and might thus have the right to say he should be leader.

  The Italian cycling federation president, Adriano Rodoni, responded to the impasse by refusing to send an Italian team to the Tour. It was a bluff, of course, calculated to make Bartali and Coppi see sense. La Gazzetta dello Sport, no doubt aware of the importance for its circulation of Coppi’s presence in the Tour, organised a summit meeting at Recanati with Coppi, Bartali, Magni, Binda and Rodoni. There Binda forged an agreement to form what was one of the strongest ever Italian teams in the Tour, led jointly by Coppi, Bartali and Magni, with the pick of their domestiques. According to Rino Negri, the paper itself paid the riders to race the Tour that year. It was money well spent: when Coppi and Bartali were performing, circulation rose to between 700,000 and 800,000 copies.

  The old rivalry with Bartali dominated the early part of the Tour, which started in Brittany and circumnavigated the country clockwise. Four days in, after the stage across northern France to Roubaix, Coppi was sitting at the dinn
er table when he said to Binda: ‘When will he stop spying on me? When will I stop feeling his eyes stabbing me in the back?’ He threw his fork into his plate of rice and stalked off. The rumour swiftly ran round the town that he had gone home – this was, after all, the time when the entire Tour caravan would fit in a single town. Nearby, a little group of journalists were having dinner; Coppi came into their restaurant, sat down and, over a large beer, explained his reasons for walking out: ‘You know, when I feel Bartali in the bunch, looking at me, waiting for me to show a sign of weakness, it’s true, I want to throw everything over and go back to my little house in Sestri. I’ve just had a bellyful of it.’

  He did not go home, but it was an inauspicious start to one of the most dominant Tour wins in the race’s 105-year history, one of those rare occasions when a great champion is in perfect form and potential key opponents – in this case Kübler, Koblet and Bobet – are missing. The day after his fit of temper, which happened to be the anniversary of Serse’s death, Coppi made his first statement, attacking alone on the climb to the finish in the Belgian town of Namur. He finished second on the stage behind a rider who had escaped earlier on, but, most critically, was two minutes ahead of Bartali. ‘That’s good, there will be no controversy. Il Fiorentino [the Florentine] will have to help you now,’ said Cavanna as he massaged him that evening. ‘I don’t want his help,’ grumbled the campionissimo. ‘Play the game,’ advised Cavanna. ‘If he helps you without thinking twice – and indeed especially if he does think twice – accept his help. Then he’ll know you aren’t worried, and that’s all that matters.’