A national tragedy had become a potential international crisis.
Most of the Italian press in Cannes started packing their bags as soon as they heard the news from home. Gino caught sight of them as they were checking out of the hotel. Convinced they were leaving early because they thought the Tour was lost, Gino jumped up from his chair, where he had been chatting with his teammate Corrieri, and charged over to confront them. They barely had time to tell him they were returning to Italy before Gino interrupted them defiantly:
“Go! Go home!” he shouted. “I know what you’re thinking: I’m old. You came here and tired yourselves out for nothing. There’s no point in following Bartali’s race, that poor old man, eh? But I’m warning you: a stopwatch won’t be big enough to record the amount of time by which I’ll beat the others. And don’t come back to interview me when I have the yellow jersey!”
The anger in Gino’s pale blue eyes quickly dissipated when the journalists explained that their departure had nothing to do with him. He thought immediately about his wife and sons in Florence. He tried calling them, but could not get through.
Details of the attack on Togliatti would trickle in as the day wore on. Yet already the parallels to a painful episode that had shaped Gino’s childhood were eerie. As an eleven-year-old, Gino had received his first lesson about the dangers of politics when he helped his father hide his Socialist pamphlets after his employer was murdered, just one of several high-profile leftist figures to be killed by the Fascists. For Italians, it had been a pivotal moment as the nation was kidnapped by a dictatorship, and later war and destruction. With Togliatti’s shooting, the country seemed to be retracing its recent history and falling back into another cycle of murder, chaos, and repression.
With little to do but wait, Gino stewed anxiously for the rest of the afternoon. One final problem remained: his coach, Alfredo Binda. Compared with all the troubles at home in Italy, it was a small issue. But it was a small issue that bothered Gino a lot. After the previous day’s disastrous race, Binda had opened up to the Tour’s organizing newspaper with several caustic comments about Gino’s prospects, saying, “Bartali is no longer young enough to endure the repetitive tests of a Tour de France. He races well and he conserves energy, but he no longer recovers quickly enough. Tomorrow he may accomplish a great feat … but he will suffer the effects the following day.”
Binda chalked up Gino’s lagging performance to his decision to race both the Giro and the Tour in the same year. Gino hadn’t performed well in the 1948 Giro, and Binda now thought he was too exhausted to succeed at the Tour. Such criticism wasn’t news to Gino, but that didn’t make it any less hurtful. Binda had betrayed the private relationship between cyclist and coach, and had done so for the transparent goal of improving his own reputation in the French press.
Gino tried to remain resolute. After a quiet meal with his teammates, he led them all out to the beach to play a few rounds of terziglio, an Italian card game. The ten men consumed a large cake decorated with an Italian tricolor ribbon, a bottle of vermouth, and a couple of packs of cigarettes. They were a little more lively for a time, but inevitably everyone fell back into their thoughts. Gino was no better, his mind turning to a strange new feeling that had started eating away at him a few days earlier. It was tough to put a finger on what exactly was agitating him. Perhaps it was the news from Italy. Or perhaps it was his disappointing results or the fact that the racers he was struggling to keep up with weren’t even teenagers when he last raced at the Tour. Or maybe it was the fact that his thirty-fourth birthday was only four days away. Whatever it was, he couldn’t help feeling that he was finally succumbing to the one doubt his critics kept raising.
He felt old.
As the afternoon wore on in Italy, the situation continued to deteriorate. Physical damages to private and public property around the nation kept mounting. Scores of people had been injured in riots and several had even been killed. A nationwide general strike was announced and set to begin at midnight. Industry-specific strikes were not a new phenomena in postwar Italy, but this strike would incorporate almost every industry, including the postal service and telegraphs and, for the first time in twenty-five years, the railways.
In private meetings, Communist leaders urged their members to keep calm, to ensure that any action the party took would be deliberate and considered, rather than a rushed reaction to provocation. Leading Communist deputies were dispatched around the country to pacify regional party members, union leaders, and their membership. The same men who had once preached fire and brimstone in the Chamber of Deputies now found themselves trying to douse the ravaging flames of discontent. No one envied them their task. The Communists had been such obvious and public victims of an unprovoked attack that it was really no surprise that some of their more radical members had been calling for retribution. Still, in private, more than a few of them must have seen the cruel paradox of the situation they found themselves in. The New York Times explained, “Indeed it is an ironic twist to the event that Togliatti was shot down while leading the Communists in a Parliamentary battle against the Government bill calling for the collection of unlicensed arms. This would disarm the Communist partisans, but it would also make assassinations more difficult.”
The Christian Democrats struggled with their own troubles as they tried to navigate the actual logistics of how to stabilize the country. For Prime Minister De Gasperi and his ministers, the day was filled with a chaotic flurry of meetings, updates, and impossible decisions. Italy was declared to be in a state of serious public danger, and all public gatherings were soon banned. A mandatory curfew was established, and 250,000 members of the army and police were alerted for possible deployment to secure the country.
At some point in this day of extraordinary measures, an unusual idea was hatched. Italy’s most powerful politicians realized there was someone outside of politics, and of Italy for that matter, who might help. According to France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, De Gasperi discussed the possibility of sending a telegram to this person with his foreign minister. In the end, the prime minister decided to make a phone call instead. No one could doubt that the situation warranted it, but many would be surprised when they found out whom he was calling. It wasn’t Harry Truman in Washington or Joseph Stalin in Moscow. It wasn’t even Pope Pius XII, across the river in the Vatican City.
It was Gino Bartali.
“Do you recognize me, Gino?” De Gasperi asked, reaching Gino in the early evening.
“Of course I recognize you, you’re Alcide. Please excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister … we used to be on familiar terms,” Gino responded.
“And we should continue to be,” De Gasperi said.
Gino listened, utterly perplexed. A minute earlier he had been sitting with his teammates on the beach, and now he was speaking with the leader of his homeland. The two were far from strangers, having known each other since well before the war, moving as they did in similar circles of Catholic activism in Italy. The two had also exchanged friendly telegrams earlier in the Tour. Still, none of that made this phone call any less surprising.
“Tell me, Gino, how are things going there?”
“Well, tomorrow we have the Alps …”
“Do you think you’ll win the Tour?”
“Well, there’s still a week to go. However, I’m ninety percent sure I’ll win tomorrow,” Gino responded, as he wondered what reason De Gasperi had, given all of the current problems at home, to be worried about him and a bicycle race.
“You’re right, Gino. It’s true that there’s a week to go. But try and make it happen. You know that it would be very important for all of us.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a lot of confusion here,” the prime minister responded.
“Don’t worry, Alcide. Tomorrow we’ll give it our all.” For all his knee-jerk confidence, it was a long shot and Gino knew it. With nothing else to say, the prime minister ended the call. Gino hung up the phone and
swallowed. De Gasperi was asking a lot, to be sure. But even more had been asked of Gino before, and he had delivered. Steeling himself for the challenge ahead, Gino returned to his teammates on the beach.
When he found them, Gino dropped to his knees and began silently drawing the following day’s racecourse in the sand. Conventional wisdom suggested that they should reserve their energy for the final climbs. Given the uncertainty about how the team would fare in the mountains, it seemed safest for the Italians to bide their time and see how their opponents attacked. In turn, Gino could then count on his teammates having enough energy to support him on the final mountain, which would help improve his overall chances. With several days of mountain stages awaiting him after the following day’s race, prudence demanded that an older racer conserve himself.
Prudence wasn’t an option Gino wanted to consider. With his finger tracing through the sand, he outlined a risky strategy of continuous attack. Instead of waiting until the decisive climbs later in the day, the Italians would strike right at the beginning. Rather than waiting to respond to their opponents’ first move, they would attack first. Instead of having his teammates to support him, Gino would charge up the mountains by himself.
Elsewhere in Cannes, the other Tour riders made their final arrangements. Bobet took his dinner in his room and was fast asleep by nine. Robic and four other teammates only finished eating dinner at ten, at which point they began a lengthy final inspection of their equipment, cutting into the precious hours of rest before they needed to wake, well before sunrise the following day. The Italian team took a short constitutional to walk off the cake and vermouth and then retired to their respective rooms. After changing into their matching striped pajamas, Gino and Corrieri prepared for bed. Flitting between nervousness and giddiness, Gino kept chattering away until the wee hours of the morning. Corrieri, however, did what he always did. He turned off the light, rolled over in bed, and fell asleep.
13
A Frozen Hell
(photo credit 13.1)
GINO AWOKE WELL BEFORE dawn. Giovanni Corrieri, his roommate, watched him. There was something strangely reassuring in what he saw. Gino was silent and lay calmly in bed, in striking contrast to his frenetic banter the previous evening. His bike rested nearby, propped against one of the hotel room’s walls. Like the cowboys in his favorite movies, Gino had insisted on spending the night beside his horse.
After a few minutes had passed, Corrieri climbed out of bed. He walked over to the window and opened it up. The shattering staccato of rainfall poured out on Cannes’s tawny beaches below as a short-lived storm pounded the surface of the Mediterranean into a choppy froth. The Alps stood prominent in the distance, looming behind Cannes’s clusters of whitewashed and pastel buildings. Their peaks jutted thousands of feet upward, a jagged gray barrier that prevented passage to the world beyond. Behind them lay Italy, fractured and heaving in violent national protests.
Gino would soon begin a ten-hour race through the Alps against the world’s best cyclists, wearing nothing more than a thin woolen jersey, a pair of shorts, and a cloth racing cap. If the rain continued in the Alps, the high altitude would turn it into snow and sleet. The crude dirt roads that had been hewn into the mountains would easily yield to this torrent of precipitation, leaving the cyclists to navigate the steep Alpine ascents and hairpin turns in a perilous river of mud.
There was little to say or do. Both men just watched the rain fall in silence. In time, Corrieri turned to his teammate, looking for a comment or at least a gesture acknowledging the situation. Gino caught his glance. Already picturing his opponents struggling hopelessly against the elements, he responded to Corrieri with a most unexpected reaction. He started laughing.
The loudspeakers crackled to life at four o’clock in the morning. As Tour officials made their final preparations before the day’s race began, a mass of colorful vehicles and figures assembled at the starting line on Cannes’s main thoroughfare. Each settled into its place like a veteran member of a cacophonous orchestra. In the front, drivers idled the motors of the forty-five trucks in the Tour’s commercial caravan of sponsors. They each had paid several thousand francs to promote their wares to the crowds expecting the riders behind them. After the publicity cavalcade and the riders came the press corps: 311 members of the media had gathered to follow the day’s race. Most had joined the expedition more than two weeks earlier when the Tour began in Paris. Print journalists rode in cars emblazoned with the names of Europe’s most famous newspapers. A few were chauffeured so that they could type as the race unfolded, punching out their articles on typewriters mounted onto the passenger-side dashboards. Others took notes by hand and relayed them at the end of the day to their editors by telephone. Still others saddled up on motorcycles, where, like the photographers, they could weave dangerously among the racers. The most daring of these rode back and forth through the whole procession like the radiomen who ferried updates to the broadcast stations.
A vast line of Tour support cars lined up behind the press corps. Each team had a small truck to shuttle replacement pieces and backup bicycles, along with a flashy Renault sedan for the coach and commissioner to ride along in. The Tour organizers carried their own supplies around in a massive eighteen-ton tractor-trailer nicknamed “the Dreadnought,” which was equipped with a pharmacy and an office complete with desks and filing cabinets that had been bolted to the walls to secure them. Two humbler vehicles rounded out the Tour caravan. One was an ambulance, whose three female nurses, the only officially sanctioned women in the convoy, were charged with tending to the needs of riders with lacerations, road rash, and broken limbs. The other vehicle, known as “the Broom Wagon,” swept up the broken spirits of the Tour—those riders, and there were always a couple during most stages, who decided they could race no farther and needed to be carried to the finish line.
One final vehicle, known universally as “Car Number 1,” would occupy the place of honor directly behind the racers. It was a convertible sedan and the personal car of the silver-haired Tour director, Jacques Goddet. He had his own driver so that he could take in the whole race standing, clad from head to toe in khaki. His dark eyes peered out from underneath a sturdy pith helmet, and he watched over the entire convoy with the solemn gaze of a British general launching an expeditionary force in Africa.
“Cannes has never awoken this early,” it was said, and for one dapperly dressed coterie, it had never gone to sleep at all. Long before the sun had even countenanced the idea of rising, a large crowd had stumbled out of Cannes’s finer establishments, her glittery nightclubs and casinos, and descended noisily upon one of the city’s main boulevards. Among them were the stars and crew of a French film about Buffalo Bill.
Few in this illustrious crowd seemed to be fazed about walking to the starting line of the day’s race as the brief rainstorm petered out; fewer still seemed perturbed about doing so in their evening finery, clutching bottles of champagne. If such behavior crossed the line into boorishness, no one seemed to mind. Perhaps it was the fact that many of them were from the ethereal world of the movies. Or perhaps it was just a question of geography. On the Riviera, the wealthy and besotted have never worried too much about the trivialities of propriety.
The rest of the spectators, the mere mortals, flowed in like the morning tide. They came alone and they came in crowds. Some came by foot, and a great number came by bicycle. Couples rode together wearing matching shirts, while other fans rolled in on two-, three-, and four-person bicycles. If previous stages were to be any indicator, there were likely even a few Franciscan monks riding about, though the familiar noise of their cassocks flapping against the wheels of their bikes would have been barely audible. It was drowned out by the happy chatter of young girls that bubbled out from under bright-colored umbrellas, carefully positioned to protect the bobbed coiffures that were in vogue.
They all mixed together in a loud and splashy display of humanity. On the sidewalks, small children chased each other
around while their parents chatted with other adults. Migrant Italian workers shuffled among the French citizens for whom they were building houses and roads. Some people milled about in the street, squinting to see through the forest of umbrellas whether the big-name racers had appeared yet. Others laughed at the hundreds of paper pamphlets that were being handed out by Tour officials, with their preposterously stern warnings against helping racers up the mountains. Some of these were straightforward: “Pushing: It’s cheating.” Others were more philosophical: “Those racers who struggle today in the hills ardently desired to race the Tour. They freely chose their lot.”
Many people struggled to secure a good spot from which to watch the action that would soon unfold. The early birds took up places on the curb. Everyone else improvised. They stood on benches, cars, crowded balconies, and rooftops. Young boys peered out from the tops of store awnings; a few even shinnied up lampposts.
To some, all this frantic activity seemed unnecessary. The day’s 167-mile racecourse would provide more than enough space for everyone to congregate. And congregate they did. From Cannes all the way to the finish line in the mountain village of Briançon, the sides of the road swarmed with clusters of people. The flatlands and mountain summits filled up quickly, and it wouldn’t be long before a few zealous supporters would dot the forsaken climbs through the Alps. Whole towns closed down as fans made a day of it, anticipating for hours on end that thrilling moment when the stars would appear and then speed off, visible for less than a minute. In the meantime, they waited. If the weather obliged, the bold could be counted on to write colorful messages to their favorite racers in chalk on the sections of the road that were paved, each encouraging word measuring several feet across. The Italian fans, whether working in France or just visiting for a few days from Milan or Turin, were never afraid to write large patriotic proclamations in Italian: Viva l’Italia! Viva Gino!—“Long Live Italy! Long Live Gino!” The rest of the spectators were happy just to pass around bottles of wine, cheering loudly, even boisterously, as they watched the antics of the local children, decked out in cycling uniforms and helmets, who were competing in short races for prizes donated by local storekeepers.
Road to Valour Page 22