Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  The controlling force behind all of this was an extensive propaganda apparatus that was more than happy to gloss over the truth or ignore it altogether. Few Italians at the time would have known, for instance, that Mussolini, like Hitler and Franco, had not been particularly interested in sports in his early life. Nor was it widely understood that photographers and newsreel cameramen consistently shot him from a low angle to lengthen his short, stocky body and draw some attention away from what one Italian historian described as his “big bald head, a pockmarked face and a prominent jaw.” Instead, Italians were encouraged to obey their government and place full faith in their leader, “Italy’s Number One Sportsman.”

  As the Italian sports craze continued to ramp up, it couldn’t have been a better time for Gino to discover cycling and launch his career. Many of the customers who came into the bike shop where Gino worked as a boy competed in amateur athletic clubs and professional teams that the government endorsed and financially supported. When Gino began competing himself, his first income—the prizes from various amateur and later professional races—often came from government coffers. Once he started winning regularly, the perks only improved. Gino, although nominally conscripted into the military in 1935 alongside the rest of the men in the country, was able to avoid many of his obligations until the onset of World War II.

  On a broader level, the national focus on sports brought greater sports coverage in newspapers, even as higher-profile general interest stories about natural disasters or major accidents were being downplayed or silenced altogether by the regime. Increased coverage ensured that the names of budding stars like Gino shone that much more brightly in the public consciousness. Although such fame was satisfying in its own right for Gino, it carried a far more definitive value. In an era before international corporate endorsement deals, most of the earnings athletes like Gino could hope to generate came from appearance fees paid by organizers of smaller races throughout Europe. Those fees were determined by how often a racer won, and how big a crowd he could draw. Gino’s prominence in the press therefore had a direct impact on his ability to support himself and his family.

  Yet behind this national fixation lurked a political minefield. Absent a war, sport was one of the most convincing ways that the Fascists could promote their ideology outside of Italy. It was a “calling card for the nation abroad,” as one historian described it. And so, in the physical culture of Fascism, athletes could no longer be just athletes—they were “blue ambassadors,” charged with displaying “glorious actions in sports struggles against the strongest representatives of other races in the world.” Their training methods were transformed from ordinary preparation into a de facto showcase of all the advances of Fascist theory and planning; their triumphs abroad were treated as propaganda victories of the highest order. In this political climate, as one Italian historian explained, “a gold medal in any discipline at the Olympic Games, or in the Tour de France, was more important than a thousand diplomatic acts, in as much as to celebrate victory meant to celebrate Italy and Fascism.”

  Living in this world of Fascist sport, Gino began to find that the decision makers who surrounded him were increasingly driven by political motives. Athletic governing bodies, like the Italian Cycling Federation, which helped assemble national teams and set schedules, were often staffed by high-ranking Fascist party members; the members of the press covering a sport answered to the regime, not to the readers or racers. A star athlete like Gino who didn’t share all of the regime’s ideological positions thus found himself in an unenviable position. On top of all the normal pressures of high-level athletic training, he was forced to endure the shifting political tides with few steadfast allies.

  With his first Giro d’Italia under his belt, Gino was Italy’s most promising cyclist heading into the 1937 season. But in March, Gino’s year almost ended before it had even started. During a training ride from Milan to Florence, he was caught off guard by a snowstorm. Exhausted by the ride and overwhelmed by the cold, wet weather, he arrived back in Florence with a terrible fever and a phlegmatic cough. Watching his burning temperature rise, his family grew worried. A doctor was called, and his examination yielded a frightening diagnosis of bronchial pneumonia. Little is known about the medical specifics of Gino’s case, but pneumonia was still a serious threat to one’s life in 1937. “You can imagine [my mother] Giulia’s state,” Gino said. Given that, the sequence of events that followed could hardly have been more surprising. Not only was Gino deemed healthy enough to race the Giro d’Italia six weeks later, in May, but he was strong enough to win the race.

  His victory sent the Fascist press into a tizzy. Gino had not only validated all the hopes they had placed in him, but he had also given credence to the idea that he could bring even greater honor to Italy by becoming the first cyclist to win the Giro and the Tour in the same year. Immediately the Tour de France became the discussion topic of the moment. One Fascist magazine summed up everything the race represented to Fascist Italy: “There is no point hiding it: the Tour de France, because of the enormous interest it arouses in all the athletic nations of the continent, is an event of exceptional significance. Winning it would be a clamorous affirmation of great international resonance.”

  Gino resisted all this chatter and spoke openly about not racing at the Tour. The dream of winning both the Tour and Giro in the same year certainly still burned brightly for him, but his doctor’s warnings about his health made him feel that he should put off his plans for another year. Winning the Giro after a bout of pneumonia was incredible enough; trying to win both the Tour and the Giro was asking for trouble.

  Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper founded by Mussolini that was the official press organ of the regime, pushed back hard. As an opening gambit, its lead cycling journalist gave Gino some benefit of the doubt regarding his pneumonia. He then assured readers that Gino had “to understand that at the Tour de France the national honor of our cycling is at stake,” which overruled any of Gino’s personal concerns about his health.

  Gino still resisted, and speculation continued to swirl that he would decline participating in the Tour.

  Il Popolo d’Italia struck back even more forcefully. In a telling display of the unchecked power of the Fascist press, they invented a story that Gino was holding out for a 200,000-lire payoff from the regime to attend the Tour. They mocked his faith and then used the cold language of war to accuse him of not being patriotic:

  A soldier who defends his flag leaves the trenches, risking his life without thinking of his bank account. He thinks of his Homeland and of his mother and goes. In the land of France, it is a matter of going to defend our flag.… Bartali is called to represent our sport, our youth, our strength, and all our eyes are on him, many of them rather ill-disposed.

  The article ended in a menacing tone, noting that the head of the Italian Cycling Federation, who was also a military general, would visit Gino and ensure his participation in the 1937 Tour.

  As Gino waited for this ominous meeting, he could survey the challenging European sports landscape. Two sportsmen of a similar caliber offered models of how he might navigate a relationship with a dictatorial regime that he was unwilling to endorse openly. The first was Max Schmeling, a heavyweight boxer who was riding a tidal wave of support in his native Germany after having defeated the American boxer Joe Louis in a widely followed match in New York in June 1936. Dark-haired and brawnier than Atlas, Schmeling had glided smoothly through the tumult that was German politics after World War I. In the 1920s he had befriended leading figures of the left, like the author Heinrich Mann. As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, however, he quickly changed tack and cultivated friends on the right.

  Schmeling’s shift raised few eyebrows; his saving grace was an enterprising sense of discretion. Where other athletes might have attempted to curry political favor by loudly supporting Nazi policy, Schmeling was tight-lipped. He avoided making any public comments, either positive or negative, about Naz
i politics that might upset his professional prospects abroad, likely aware that much of his earning potential rested in his ability to compete in lucrative prizefights in the United States. In his actions and in his private life, however, Schmeling was able to maneuver more freely. To his credit, he chose to shelter two Jewish boys during Kristallnacht, the violent attack carried out on Jews in Germany and Austria in November 1938. Yet he also chose to meet privately with Hitler, a devoted fan, and developed a close friendship with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda.

  On the other side of the spectrum stood Ottavio Bottecchia, the first Italian ever to win the Tour de France with back-to-back victories in 1924 and 1925. A former lumberjack with Socialist leanings, he had little sympathy for Mussolini or the Fascist regime. Talking with one of France’s leading investigative journalists, Bottecchia had spoken freely about his political views and his interest in acting on them in some capacity. Any political work he might have been doing or planning was cut short, however, in June 1927 when he died unexpectedly while on a training ride in northeastern Italy.

  The details that emerged about his death were highly suspicious. His cranium had been smashed and several other bones were broken, but his bike was found unscratched some distance away from where he lay. Similarly, the stretch of road where he was found had only the slightest slope, and there were no skid marks or other evidence that a car had caused his death. Despite all this, there was little in the way of an investigation, and the cause of death was hastily attributed to a fainting spell. Such an assessment seemed highly dubious for an elite endurance athlete who had shown no signs of illness during Tours raced under far more arduous conditions.

  Rumors spread like wildfire in the absence of any credible explanations. One of the most plausible held that Bottecchia had been killed by the Fascists—if not by members of the Fascist party itself, then perhaps by affiliated individuals looking to bootlick certain officials. This was the theory held by the French investigative journalist who had spoken with Bottecchia, and years later it would receive a certain degree of affirmation. One of the last people to see Bottecchia alive—the parish priest who administered his last rites—told an Italian writer he believed the theory that Fascists were culpable; an Italian émigré in New York would later confess to the murder on his own deathbed. Neither story is wholly conclusive, and so Bottecchia’s death remains a mystery to this day.

  In the 1930s, however, the shadow cast by Bottecchia’s death was more ominous. The circle of competitive cyclists in Italy was close-knit, and word of his untimely death would have traveled quickly. Coming after the high-profile murder of the leftist politician Matteotti, it was no wonder that many sportsmen would draw the same conclusion. In Mussolini’s Italy, no man, not even a famous athlete, was ever fully beyond the regime’s reach.

  When it came to his own political choices, Gino chose to align himself with the Catholic Church, which was perhaps the most powerful constituency in Italy apart from the Fascist party. It wasn’t an entirely surprising choice. He had long been a committed churchgoer, and with the death of his brother, Giulio, he had further devoted himself to the activities of Catholic Action. A number of his closest friends were Church leaders, such as the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa. Above all, Gino’s faith had become integral to his everyday life, and it was the root of his determination on the bike, or, as he put it, “It gave me the push to try again.”

  What was surprising was how zealously and publicly the Church embraced Gino. In the course of just two years, leading Catholic figures elevated him to the highest stature. Journalists of the Catholic press praised him as a “magnificent Christian athlete” and reported his races in the language of biblical ecstasy. Catholic poets wrote long sonnets about him, comparing him to a three-engined aircraft as he rode on his bike. There was even a play written about him titled Arriva Bartali (Bartali Is Coming), which was performed in small theaters and churches around the country.

  If the unifying theme behind much of the coverage of Gino was his faith, the motive for highlighting this piety was rooted more in politics—and the lingering tensions between the Church and the Fascist regime. Rather than openly criticizing a regime that endorsed a culture of violence and machismo, personified by bloody boxing matches and a winking approval of mistresses, Catholic writers and artists tried instead to promote Gino as an alternative icon for Italian youth. Gino, as a pious member of Catholic Action who attended mass weekly and prayed daily, was obviously cut from a very different cloth than the average Fascist athlete. These facts could be easily highlighted, and readers could be trusted to draw the correct inferences about the Church’s attitude regarding the Fascist vision of sport.

  In large part, this positioning worked. It won Gino, and the Church leaders behind him, the support of the sports press. When, for example, a few Fascist newspapers began to mock all the fawning coverage of Gino’s religious devotion by referring to him as Il Fraticello or “the Little Monk,” it was an otherwise areligious sports newspaper that published a rigorous defense of Gino and his right to active membership in the Church. Some in the hard-line Fascist press might have been tempted to push back, or drop their coverage of the star altogether, but the hard truth of the matter was that Gino had one thing going for him that even the most grudging anti-Catholic critic had to accept: he won races.

  In the first half of the 1930s, Italy had no shortage of successful athletes. Primo Carnera became the first Italian ever to win the heavyweight boxing championship, and then declared that his victory was “for Italy and for Il Duce.” At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932, audiences watched as the Italian team, nicknamed “Mussolini’s boys,” marched in Fascist formation at the opening ceremonies and then went on to win twelve gold medals and placed second only to the United States in the overall rankings. Mussolini addressed the athletes soon afterward: “Four years lie before you. Use the time to prepare well. In Los Angeles, you were second. In Berlin, it’s necessary to be first.”

  The dream of lasting sports dominance never materialized. Carnera lost the heavyweight title, and was soon faring so poorly in international fights that his passport was revoked to stop him from embarrassing the country abroad. The Italian Olympic athletes did no better. When the Olympic Games came to Berlin in 1936, the Italian regime watched as German athletes won more than four times as many medals as their Italian counterparts. This must have been hard for Mussolini to stomach. In three years of power, Hitler had crafted the formidable showcase of athletic prowess that Mussolini had not been able to build in fourteen.

  The Italian Cycling Federation officials making plans for the 1937 Tour de France must have viewed all of this with excitement and perhaps even trepidation. At a moment when their sports-obsessed regime was starved for champions, they had Gino, a racer who was blazing a meteoric path to the top of his sport. No single race had ever been so important.

  Desperate but stubborn and still recovering from his brush with pneumonia, Gino may have thought about standing his ground and not going to France for the 1937 Tour. But doing so would have amounted to committing professional suicide, if not worse, just as he was within striking distance of his sport’s most prestigious title. If he defied the Fascists, they could stop him from competing, thus dethroning him from his vaulted position among the fans. A lesser form of retaliation might have been to reach out to someone in the press to stop the character assassination. Such a request, however, most likely would have been ignored. At a moment when the regime was censoring not just the content of articles but even the smallest details of how the stories were laid out in the newspaper, few journalists would have had the courage to make a fuss over an athlete claiming libel.

  If Gino didn’t know all of this already, he found out quickly. True to Il Popolo’s prediction, he buckled after the visit from the head of the Italian Cycling Federation. Just twelve days before the Tour was to begin, he made a short statement declaring his intention to compete. With that, h
e packed his bags and got ready for France.

  The Tour of 1937 began with more exciting unknowns than most other years in the Tour’s history. There was a significant new rule change—described by one modern cycling historian as the Tour’s only “truly radical change” in over a century of existence—that permitted the derailleur, or gear-shifter, to be used on all Tour bikes. Riders who had once been forced to dismount and flip their rear wheel to change gears could now change gears on the roll, though they would still need to pedal backward, lean down, and move the chain with their hand or a small lever, depending on their bike’s design. Predictably, however, the press spilled more ink on the sensational development of Gino’s arrival. Although it was his debut attempt at the race, many reporters in Italy and abroad had already pegged him as a favorite to win.

  Even the most exuberant, however, recognized that there were many reasons to be cautious. First, there was a question of competitive endurance. With thirty-one stages fit into just twenty-six days, Gino would face a punishing schedule of races. Second, there were the mountains. For the first time in his career, Gino would face both the Alps and the Pyrenees in the same race. Finally, there was the unavoidable issue of distance. At more than 2,740 miles, the Tour was by far the longest race in which Gino had ever competed—and this distance would come just one month after he had raced some 2,300 miles around Italy.

  For all the concerns that some held, Gino performed well in the first portion of the Tour. In the early stages he cycled cautiously, assessed his competitors, and kept the top racers within his line of sight. By the Alps, the first range of mountains to be crossed, he became more aggressive. On the stage from Aix-les-Bains to Grenoble, he summited the imposing Col du Galibier—the Galibier mountain pass—first. Riding confidently, he crossed the finish line with enough of a lead to secure the yellow jersey awarded to the overall leader.