In France, the morning of the fourteenth was unfolding in a happier manner. The nation was celebrating Bastille Day, France’s Independence Day. In Paris on this day everyone was a boulevardier, eagerly strolling the city’s vast avenues in search of amusement. In the morning they could enjoy the grand military parade in the Champs-Élysées, where the president of the Republic was set to appear as the guest of honor. In the afternoon, the city’s various national theaters offered free matinees for all the Frenchmen luxuriating in their day off work. By evening, Paris would be set ablaze as fireworks were launched from various locations. When their embers dissipated into the darkness of the sky, the city below them would keep glowing, as all her finest monuments, bejeweled with thousands of tiny lights, illuminated the night skyline.
On the French Riviera, Cannes also buzzed with holiday fervor. In the turquoise waters of the Côte d’Azur, snow-white and cream-colored yachts idled lazily in the sun. On the beaches, children built empires of sand, and more than a few women, the pretty young things that are never in short supply in Cannes, could be seen modeling France’s shocking new tribute to bathing-suit minimalism—le bikini. Nearby, young couples strolled under the date-palm trees that bordered La Croisette, the city’s most famous boulevard. This long green chain of droopy palm leaves was complemented by the occasional mimosa tree whose petite yellow flowers released a light, fruity scent with a hint of mango, which local parfumeurs bottled and sold so that visitors could savor the Riviera long after their holiday was over.
Bastille Day was a day for wine and happy picnics, and in Cannes these simple pleasures took on a charming elegance of their own. Picnic baskets brimmed with Provence’s most succulent treasures—the myriad types of olives and tapenades that are specialties of the area, and various fruit confits and calissons, delectable local confections made of almonds, melon, and sugar. The wine lover was certain to relish his own delights. Provence is famous for her rosés, but on a national holiday champagne was de rigueur for any red-blooded Frenchman with the means to purchase it.
Of course, anyone who cared to look closely in 1948 would have noticed some shortages. Many store shelves were still empty, and like everywhere else in France, in Cannes many food staples remained under tight rationing. The city itself also seemed a little worse for wear. The war had turned the stream of tourists seeking sunshine into a dribble, and Cannes was short of money.
But when the Tour rolled into town, Cannes spared no expense. Whole parts of the city had been cordoned off to prepare for its arrival; a prominent tribune stand was built at the finish line so that the area’s top politicians could see the race’s finale. The cyclists, used to simpler lodgings elsewhere in France, were put up in the most opulent hotels. These weren’t just luxury hotels, they were some of Europe’s best—the type of establishments typically reserved for the world’s wealthiest, “the Maharajahs and the blondes” as one journalist termed them. In an inspired act of beneficence, the city and Tour organizers had reserved rooms in one particular hotel, arguably the finest of them all, for the Italian team. It was the Carlton, whose two prominent cupolas were said to be designed to resemble the breasts of the city’s most famous courtesan.
Rest days like this one offered an extended opportunity for celebration, although they were officially intended by Tour organizers as a day of quiet recuperation before and after a tough mountain stage. Various catered receptions would be organized, and fashionable clubs would invite cyclists to be guests of honor at their parties. Bands at nightclubs would play to all the visitors who had followed the Tour into the city. There was no doubt that the more earnest cyclists would spurn all such engagements. But it would hardly be surprising to find at least a few of them enjoying the festivities. After 1,700 miles in the saddle, no one could begrudge a man a canapé and a couple of cocktails.
In Room 112 at the Carlton, the day was shaping up to be a quiet one. While Gino had gone sightseeing with his teammate Giovanni Corrieri during an earlier rest day, he planned for a more tranquil day in Cannes. The morning had started well enough. Gino had enjoyed a sleep-in and a late breakfast, the twin delights of Tour cyclists on rest days. The daily mail pile had yielded its own pleasures in the form of a pair of notable telegrams from Rome. One came from Monsignor Montini, passing on blessings from the Pope in the Vatican. (Montini himself would later become a pope.) The other was from Italy’s prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi, thanking Gino for a short greeting that he had sent and wishing him luck for the following day’s race.
When the members of the press began to gather in his room for their daily debrief, Gino’s expression quickly soured.
“Always the same questions!” he barked angrily at the twenty or so reporters who surrounded the bed where he rested. The Italians and other riders frequently gave interviews from bed because when they weren’t racing, they wanted to do everything they could to let their legs recover. Corrieri, who was lying in bed just inches away, was silent as Gino mocked the journalists’ questions.
“So, Gino, will you win the Tour? Your setback in the general classification doesn’t frighten you? What are you planning to do?” Gino asked sarcastically.
Gino was in one of his moods, which was no news to anyone, least of all the journalists who had been following his every movement for the last couple of weeks. But their questions did seem redundant, if not impertinent, given how many had already written him off in their respective publications.
The Italian writers, both those in Cannes and those following the Tour via telephone updates and radio broadcasts, were particularly vocal in their criticism. As could be predicted, most attributed Gino’s poor performance to his age. As an older racer, Il Vecchio lacked the endurance needed to keep pace with younger cyclists over three weeks of competition. “While I felt really good, everyone was going around saying that I was a finished man: an old man who still knew how to defend himself but that it took more than that to win the Tour,” Gino later recalled.
Other Italian journalists were more pointed. One of them blamed Gino’s poor performance on his cherished status with the bartaliani, his fans. “Bartali is embraced by too many people. Too much love always leads to sin.” Others faulted Gino for inviting Adriana to spend the night with him two days earlier when the Tour stopped over in San Remo, Italy. For Gino, it had been a rare occasion to see his wife during a two-month absence from home, and he insisted angrily to the press that the couple had slept in a bed together with their son lying between them. For hardened wheelmen, however, the presence of women and the possibility of intimate relations, no matter how absurdly remote, could spell nothing but trouble for a racer.
The lead journalist on the cycling beat of Italy’s most prominent sports journal Gazzetta dello Sport was the most memorable critic as he pronounced, “Bartali, the old king of the mountains, is no longer the king today.” He put Gino’s shortcomings in the context of Italy’s recent history: “These are bad times for monarchies, and kings also pass away in the world of sports. It is wars that knock the world over, and athletically, it’s the great racing battles that replace the important champions of the past.”
The French press was surprisingly more sympathetic. Gino repaid them in kind when he offered one journalist an exclusive interview in which he outlined three major reasons for his poor performance in the Tour. First, he complained that he was competing not just against one French team, but many. He was right. There were several French regional teams in the 1948 Tour in addition to the French national team. Second, Gino claimed that he felt “alone” because his teammates weren’t strong enough racers to support him when he needed it.
Both excuses might have been technically accurate, but neither held much water. The Tour had for many years featured multiple French teams. In fact, during his victorious 1938 Tour, Gino had raced against three French teams without any incidents of unfair collusion between them. And if Gino felt that his teammates were weak competitors, he had no one to blame but himself—after all, he ha
d helped select them.
Gino’s most important complaint was that the national cycling federations that governed the sport in each country should force their best racers to compete in the Tour. In Gino’s words as reported in the French sports newspaper L’Équipe, such a mandate was necessary because the Tour was a “race with international impact where the honor of each country is in play.” The question wasn’t which Italian rider Gino would have wanted the Italian Cycling Federation to oblige to ride in the Tour and help him. That was obvious: Fausto Coppi. The real question was how a man who had been so emotionally scarred by the Fascist government’s interference in his own fledgling career could now demand that the current government interfere in another man’s career. As he wrestled with the prospect of losing the Tour and fading into irrelevance, Gino was openly considering abandoning one of his most cherished personal convictions. As Coppi’s long shadow cast its pall over him in Cannes, Gino hit a new low.
Just a short walk away, at the Hotel Victoria, the French team was spending the rest day in much better spirits. Jean Robic, the ruling showman of the team, was particularly boisterous—and for good reason. He was a day away from one of his favorite stages, the race from Cannes to Briançon, and his performance thus far in the Tour had been excellent. In the first round of climbing in the Pyrenees, Robic had succeeded in challenging Gino on the Italian’s favorite mountainous battleground. The press had taken notice. In Robic, one reporter proclaimed, “Bartali has found his master.” To be sure, Robic had his own concerns. There was still a sizable gap between him and the Tour leader, his teammate Louis Bobet. Yet it was nothing that couldn’t be made up in a stage or two. In the previous year, Robic had come back from a similarly large setback and won.
Robic was ready to celebrate, and his plans reflected that. Like a young starlet at a photo shoot, Robic would spend much of the day posing for the cameras of the national media. He hammed it up for photographers while milking a goat at a nearby farm. He also rode a donkey on the beach and then made a trip to a local hospital to speak with several sick children about the Tour. Other racers and onlookers might have thought that Robic was overexerting himself the day before the most grueling stage in the Tour. But for Robic, these activities were rather tame as far as his rest days were concerned. During an earlier rest day in Biarritz, he had borrowed a motorcycle from someone in the Tour caravan and gone for a joyride with friends. He was later spotted in a local casino. A few days after that, when the Tour stopped for a rest day in Toulouse, Robic was delighted as fans mobbed and cheered him in his hotel. When he slipped out the back door of the hotel to explore the city’s market, he was spotted again, this time by a group of stocky female fishmongers. They seized him and hoisted him up to their shoulders, parading him around the cheering crowd for the better part of an hour. The revelry continued at Toulouse’s city hall, where Robic and several other riders were praised again at a public reception. Though it wasn’t yet noon, several bottles of champagne were opened.
Aldo Ronconi, the captain of the Italian “B” team, likely spent much of the rest day as he had spent his other rest days, writing postcards to his friends, family, and fans. After years toiling in both Gino’s and Coppi’s shadows, it was a delightful novelty to be writing to his own fans. It didn’t hurt, either, that there was a lot of good news to report to them. Ronconi had enjoyed some flashes of brilliance in the flats and was holding his own in the mountains. Like Gino, Ronconi had struggled during the last stage. Still, as he sat in his hotel room in Cannes, he could take pride in the fact that he was the top Italian racer in the general classification. The rider who had come to France to show his countrymen that he was Gino’s equal was now on track to defeat him.
Other riders spent the day on more routine tasks. One French rider planned to get acupuncture to help a sore knee. Two other French racers helped a third with his personal grooming and shaved him as he lay in bed. One Belgian racer was known to spend a few hours of his rest days in a bathtub filled with vinegar because he thought it would help his muscles limber up. Another Belgian racer would spend part of the day cleaning his clothes, a ritual he performed every day. His roommate, however, was less fussy and was happy just to turn some of his dirty clothing inside out and get another wear with less effort.
The most talked-about rider, Louis Bobet, the Tour leader, all but disappeared. Unlike other rest days, such as the one where he ended up at a cocktail party hosted by a ravishing actress, Bobet had decided to spend the whole day in his hotel room. Tempting as some of the day’s festivities might have sounded, there was just too much to lose by tiring himself out. Still, Bobet appeared to be in undeniably good spirits. He had won the previous day’s stage and kept the yellow jersey that he had worn for eight of the past twelve that had been raced. He was returning to full health as an injection of penicillin seemed to have cleared up the few painful boils that had appeared on his legs—boils that the press had matter-of-factly attributed to “overtiring, too much eating, and perhaps abuse of performance-enhancing substances.”
After a good night of rest, he could spend this morning quietly thinking about how far he had come. In some two and a half weeks, a baker’s son from Brittany had become a household name in France. His wife had become a fixture of the press. Police protected him at the finish lines from adoring fans; loyal admirers showered him with gifts, like the pound of unsalted butter he would receive that day from his hometown. Articles from different corners of Europe anointed him France’s newest crown prince of cycling. No matter where he looked, Bobet could not escape one fact: his life had changed irrevocably. After years of training and sacrifice, Bobet finally grasped the imminence of his victory in Paris.
And then he got very, very nervous.
In Italy, the situation turned from bad to bleak. Togliatti was rushed to the operating room for emergency surgery, led by one of the nation’s leading surgeons. Christian Democrats, Communists, and journalists congregated in the waiting area. “This is the worst possible thing that could have happened,” said Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, as he raced to join them at the hospital. Though likely in extreme shock and delirious with pain, Togliatti was still conscious. But he was losing blood rapidly, hemorrhaging internally, and had already needed several blood transfusions. At a quarter after one, he was anesthetized and surgeons began the arduous work of trying to remove the bullets from his body.
Outside the hospital, the news of Togliatti’s attack swept across the country as radio stations posted radio bulletins and newspapers printed special editions. This information sent the country into chaos. Work in factories and many offices stopped almost immediately. Protesters gathered in the streets, ripped up pavement, and crafted barricades to stop police. “A wind of panic” menaced the country, wrote one journalist. In Rome, “the city wore the livid mask of fear,” reported another. In Milan, factory workers took over their workplaces by force. Other workers did the same in Turin, and even held hostage some thirty managers, including the managing director of the Fiat car factory.
The shooting of Togliatti brought all the dissatisfactions, frustrations, and divisions in postwar Italy to the fore with chaotic results. If Togliatti died, everyone feared what would befall Italy. As his condition remained uncertain, the country teetered closer to the brink of revolution or civil war. Public protest meetings that were held in most of Italy’s major cities quickly turned into riots. In Venice, a group of radical Communists seized a radio broadcast station and attacked an oil storage center. In Pisa, a pistol-toting Fascist hijacked a horse and carriage and opened fire on a crowd of workers, until he was dragged down and beaten to death by the crowd. In Taranto, protesters hurled rocks and bottles of gasoline at police. In Rome, demonstrators gathered in the large piazza in front of the office of the Foreign Ministry. Rioters made several attempts to break into the building, and the police fired shots into the air to scare them off. In Genoa, a group of radicals seized full control of the city government.
In Gi
no’s hometown of Ponte a Ema, there were loud demonstrations in the streets. Many people in the crowds were crying, according to one pair of longtime residents, the Grifonis, who witnessed the events. “We were out of our heads,” recalled Tullia Grifoni. “This news really upset us.” Across the Arno River in Florence, angry protestors stormed the offices of the Christian Democrats and plundered them. Another political party that sympathized with elements of the Fascist platform fared even worse. Protesters forced their way into its offices, burned files, and then threw the office furniture out on the street. In a more remote and hilly part of Tuscany where Gino liked to train, a group of armed partisans took to the mountains and began a bloody battle against the army and the police.
In the USSR, radio stations in Moscow announced that Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party were “outraged” by the attack on Togliatti. Across the Atlantic, the CIA and the State Department would have found out about the shooting in the early morning. For officials who believed that Italy’s choices would affect the fate of Western Europe, it must have been a terrifying moment as they followed developments from afar. At 8:55 a.m., the terror came much closer to home when an anonymous caller, who police believed was motivated by Togliatti’s shooting, phoned the switchboard of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and said, “I am a Communist. The cathedral will be blown up at a quarter to twelve.”
Road to Valour Page 21