Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  Everywhere, they waited.

  At the Carlton hotel in Cannes, each member of the Italian team made his final preparations. Aluminum water bottles were filled and placed in their holders, seat heights measured to an eighth of an inch for the umpteenth time. Bike frames were checked and rechecked. Anyone who cared to look would have noted that Gino had opted for slightly thicker tires. They were undoubtedly heavier than his regular tires, but Gino hoped that they would compensate for their weight by giving him some added traction in the mountains.

  When everyone was satisfied with the state of their equipment, they sat down together for a team breakfast. Gino devoured an imposing pile of eggs, meat, and bread with marmalade, and washed it all down with several cups of coffee. Discussions around the table were few and far between. It was as if the boisterous mixture of laughter, gossip, and bravado that usually accompanied the Italian team had been swept away with the rain. To be fair, the conditions hardly seemed conducive to even the most superficial of conversations. At five in the morning before a long day of climbing, few subjects seemed worth wasting the energy needed to speak about them. Most members of the team, including their captain, were lost in reflection about the events taking place in Italy.

  “How is Togliatti?” Gino asked a journalist.

  “He’s been operated on. I heard on the radio he’s still alive,” he responded. Gino was somewhat calmed, but this update did little to relieve the other Italian riders.

  A few silently contemplated the uncomfortable question posed by the Tour director in a column that he wrote for one of France’s most popular newspapers. “Bartali fights the final battle of his career. After a defeat in the Tour, what’s left for this champion, overtaken by Coppi?” Others mulled over their own diminishing future prospects. The 1948 Tour winner would take home 600,000 francs, and even more from appearance fees in races afterward. Nearly all the other racers would return home with nothing to show for their efforts but their disappointment. Gino understood this. Finishing his meal off before starting on one of the American cigarettes that he reserved for moments of importance, he broke the uneasy silence that hung in the room.

  “Let’s think about the race, guys, it could be the last.” It was no rousing call to arms, just a simple statement of the facts.

  No one responded.

  At the Hotel Victoria, Bobet did his own final inspections. Like Gino and many of the other racers, he had adapted his bicycle for the day’s stage, opting to exchange a heavy pedal axle for a hollow one, which would allow him to ride more quickly because it was lighter. To most onlookers, it seemed an unusual decision because a hollow axle was decidedly less robust. With a large lead over both Robic and Gino, Bobet had no need to race so aggressively. In fact, he could afford to lose the stage and even a few minutes of time—as long as he avoided any major disasters that might prevent him from shining in the flats that would follow the Alps. But Bobet wasn’t in the mood for conservative racing. Perhaps it was anxiety—there are few shoulders on which the yellow jersey rests easily. Or perhaps it was vanity—winning in the Alps would have exorcised those remaining demons in the press who still doubted him. Whatever it was, Bobet planned to race for victory alone.

  Robic must have smiled when he checked over his own equipment. For once, his leather helmet would be an object of envy in the peloton. This signature accessory had made him the butt of countless jokes because few others regularly wore anything beyond a cloth cap. Cycling was always a dangerous sport, but in the mountains, where the roads were often little more than gravel and mud, it could be deadly. Just weeks before the Tour, a Belgian racer had died during a descent in the Tour of Switzerland, in which Robic had competed. Later, in the Pyrenees stages of the Tour itself, one of Gino’s teammates was struck by a swerving car, and another car, a press vehicle, slid off the road into a ravine, killing one passenger and seriously injuring the other.

  At least one team of racers followed Robic’s example and insisted on wearing helmets for this and every other mountain stage. Other riders adopted equally unorthodox measures to protect themselves throughout the Tour. One French rider, an outspoken Communist, had been spotted secretly dipping a medallion of the Madonna into holy water for good luck on the climbs, moments after making a big show of turning his back to a bishop during a mass for the racers.

  With all their final preparations completed, the French team headed for the starting line in the center of Cannes. The Hotel Victoria faded quickly from sight and with it the inscription that their coach had left in its guest book: “With the hope that the hours spent here will allow us to keep the yellow jersey until Paris.”

  “The weather is unstable. Storms and lightning are moving through the Alps and Pyrenees. Temperatures are unseasonably low.” The news from the national weather report was unsettling, but no one at the sign-in area at the Café des Allées seemed to pay it much attention. Forecasting the weather has always been challenging, and the summer of 1948 seemed a particularly difficult subject for divination. Reports in Paris spoke about freak summer weather patterns that brought snowfall to the Black Forest, but in Cannes nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Summers in the Riviera tend to vary only between hot and blistering, and the last two days had been no different. On July 13, they had suffered through temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, though the sea had become turbulent by the evening, with “menacing waves and white foam like fangs that wanted to bite.” The rest day on July 14 had brought relief from the sun with some light cloud cover. Given all of this, it was no surprise that anybody who did pay attention to the weather reports might have greeted them with skepticism. Sympathetic souls might have chalked up this seeming mistake to the difficulty of interpreting regional weather patterns; more cynical hearts saw just another instance of the big-city bluster that has won Paris the eternal enmity of the provinces.

  In any event, the press was much too distracted by a new arrival in their midst to bother about the weather. Maurice Chevalier, a famous vaudeville singer and an Academy Award–nominated actor, had been coaxed from his villa in nearby Bocca to serve as a guest columnist for two days. He had worked for Hollywood heavyweights like MGM and Paramount, but had no experience as a sports journalist, and it was unclear whether he had ever even seen a cycling race before. Yet he would receive 100,000 francs for his labors—the same amount that in Paris awaited the winner of the Tour’s King of the Mountains contest.

  There was little to indicate that the racers begrudged Chevalier all the attention or money that he was receiving. Most were too busy with more important things, such as filling the pockets of their jerseys with food to eat while they raced. Few, if any, noticed that Gino had arrived at the starting line with “smiling eyes” as one journalist put it, even if he was accompanied by a paltry honor guard of only four fans. Gino was just happy to be racing one of his favorite stages. As he had told a journalist a few days earlier, he wouldn’t find it so hard to lose the Tour if he could just hear it announced that he was the first over the Izoard mountain pass one last time.

  No doubt thinking about his own prospects, Ronconi was seen smiling widely at the starting line. Bobet looked visibly uneasy, like a star Thoroughbred that gets restless waiting in the gate. Robic, however, gleamed with happiness and confidence. “The three cols today are my lucky ones,” he said. “I cannot lose.”

  At ten after six, a pistol was fired and the race began. Gino pressed forward and his wheels began to glide easily over the road beneath them. Fans cheered and the whole Tour cavalcade rolled forward. Fueled by an inordinate quantity of diesel, the publicity caravan sped ahead and left a sizable cloud of exhaust fumes. The riders, many wearing bandages after falls in earlier stages, rode after them with the grim determination of injured cavalrymen riding into battle. Over the next several hours they would traverse a gradual ascent, a gentle valley descent, and then a climb up and down three mountain passes. A ride up one of them alone was a formidable journey. The smallest rose some 6,900 feet, which
was even more impressive and unusual since the racers would start at close to sea level that day.

  They had barely crossed through the city’s gates when the Italians began their attack. One of Gino’s teammates sprinted forward. In a telltale sign of nerves, Bobet parried, even though he should have had a whole team to rely on for support. Several other riders chased after him. Gino stayed back, with Robic watching his every move from just a few inches away. Within a few minutes, Bobet and the front group had caught the breakaway rider. The first attack had ended. The sky clouded over as the peloton regrouped beneath it.

  There was an eerie lull as the cyclists made a slow climb out of the Riviera. After riding past endless rows of olive groves and fields of grapevines, they began a descent through a valley into a small village. The riders slowed down shortly before eleven as race officials handed over the first of two yellow food bags they would get to fuel them for the next eighty miles of hard climbing: some cold chicken, a chocolate bar, five cubes of sugar, and a few bananas. They transferred these meager rations to the pockets of their jerseys and flung the bags to the side of the road. Ahead stood the first mountain pass, the Col d’Allos, its top half invisible under the heavy fog that had begun to cover the valley in cold rain. The mood of the riders and the caravan changed as quickly as the weather. “Gone were the gay crowds, the villages, the flags. The little group of men in their gaily colored sweaters seemed forlorn in the vastness of this magnificent landscape,” wrote one American journalist.

  Remembering his surroundings from the last time he had raced there in 1938, Gino felt his heart squeeze as he was overwhelmed by emotion. “I could hear the shouts of the Italians who ten years earlier had deafened me on those same ascents,” he said. But there wasn’t much time for nostalgia. While changing his gear for the mountains, which required him to pedal backward and then lean over and pull a lever, he left himself vulnerable, if only for a brief moment.

  Robic saw his moment and attacked. He broke away from the pack and rushed up the mountainside, where some lavender and a few small fir trees broke through the unending wall of gray. Gino, who was trying to conserve energy by drafting in the wind stream behind a teammate, weighed his next move. Robic kept sprinting, and soon took the lead. Within minutes he passed the red flag marking the final kilometer of the climb, and just as quickly he rolled over the top. Gino was already a minute behind, and the distance was growing.

  Though he was steering through little more than mud and gravel, Robic sprinted skillfully through the descent. French journalists who had arrived earlier abandoned any pretense at objectivity as they stood on their cars and cheered him on. One newspaper car that was following him through the mud lost control and slid into a ravine. The driver was thrown from the car, but escaped any major injury. A passenger fractured his clavicle. Miraculously, no one died.

  The temperature kept dropping, so much so that the cold rain turned into a wet snow. Yet the idea of snow in the middle of July seemed so otherworldly that journalists reached for literary allusions to describe it. One saw something of a biblical apocalypse, another Dante’s vision of hell. Listeners across France heard all of this as they were tuning in to the noontime radio updates. Even if the change in weather seemed rather worrisome to some, everyone could sit down to lunch with the comfort of the facts. Robic was in the lead, and the yellow jersey remained safely in French hands.

  Lazarus awoke on the Vars mountain pass. Gino charged up this second and penultimate climb, his gaze blank and emotionless. His jersey and shorts were now completely stiffened by freezing mud, but underneath them his body moved fluidly from side to side. An icy wind blew as he pedaled, forcing the stunted firs that had taken root among the mountain’s rocks to bend as though in deference to him. Seeing Robic in front of him on the road, Gino contemplated his final attack. The only thing left to do was to pick the right moment.

  Ahead, crowds wrapped in drenched blankets and improvised jackets watched as the road leading up to the Vars summit capitulated to the onslaught of snow and freezing rain. The buses that had carried them there rested among the rocks, metallic behemoths in a lunar landscape. Robic still held the lead, but he periodically looked back and tried to gauge the strength of the familiar green figure behind him.

  What he saw could not have been comforting. Pumping relentlessly on his pedals, Gino was gaining on him. On the roadside beside them, the French fans watched nervously as the Italian shortened the Frenchman’s lead to a few hundred yards. Some, still furious that Italy had allied with Germany against France during the war, jeered him and later his teammates as Fascists. But these were just angry aberrations. The rest of the crowd was more passive, transfixed by the morbid suspense of watching a lion stalk his prey. “My heart was going boom-boom in my chest,” said one middle-aged French journalist. “I wouldn’t have traded my seat for the hair I had in my twenties.”

  Robic held out until the top of the Vars. Gino, however, had now whittled his lead down to thirty seconds. Panicked, Robic leaned sharply into the descent down the mountain. Gino followed after him, pedaling as aggressively in the descent as he had during his climb. Farther behind him, Louis Bobet was faltering. His vision had started to cloud, one of the first signs of bonking—the condition when a rider’s body shuts down because he has consumed all the energy stores in his muscles. Bobet would soon suffer a further setback when his hollow pedal axle cracked in the mud. Even farther back, the rest of the peloton struggled. Between the roads and the elements, they were going to have a hard time finishing one climb, let alone three.

  Robic raced madly through abrupt turns. The cold wind battered his tired body and made him ever more liable to take a nasty fall. During a fast glide, he yelled something incomprehensible to a passenger in a nearby official’s car. Someone passed him a newspaper. He shoved it under his sweater, a haphazard shield against the cold, and he tried to stay ahead of Gino, who was slowly gaining ground in his wake.

  As they came down the Vars, Gino caught him. Speeding over a road that had been ravaged by flooding, he rolled past Robic, who was now so forlorn that he couldn’t even muster a rebuttal. Instead he looked up slowly at Gino, with the sadness of a man who knows his fate is sealed. Physical exhaustion, food deprivation, and the elements had taken their toll. Like Bobet behind him, Robic’s body had crashed and other racers soon would overtake him. Many wondered whether he would even make it to the finish line.

  Just minutes afterward, Gino realized that he was about to hit the same wall. He had missed the food satchel earlier in the race, and his body was threatening to shut down. “Heavens! What coldness! What absolute hunger!” he exclaimed later. “I was so hungry, I felt I would die of hunger.” There was no doubt that he was starting to regret having refused the sausage and bread someone in a press car had offered him earlier, even if it was heavy fare to consume before a hard climb. Famished, Gino looked around to see if any spectator had something to eat. When nothing immediately materialized, he began to wonder whether he would have to walk his bike up the last mountain pass, the Col d’Izoard.

  It was no small stroke of luck when someone reached out and handed him three bananas. To this day, the identity of this generous stranger remains unknown. It’s possible that it was some anonymous Tour official with food to offer from an extra satchel. One of Gino’s teammates believes it was a priest. Whoever it was, their gift could not have come at a more propitious moment. Gino made quick work of all three bananas. His body responded almost immediately.

  At the foot of the Izoard, facing a twenty-mile climb steep enough to stall all but the most rugged cars, Gino felt his legs surge beneath him. “The cold blocked the fire of the muscles, but a numb and soaked Gino gunned his engine,” observed the Tour director. The old wheelmen would chalk it up to the power of good fortune. It stood to reason that the man who won the 1938 Tour wearing the number thirteen jersey would rise again ten years later in the thirteenth stage. The bartaliani, the true believers, however, dismissed such musin
gs as mere superstition. To them, this was nothing short of divine intervention. “The good Lord took a pair of wings from one of his angels to put them on the back of Bartali,” wrote one.

  Gino reveled in the clarity of one thought: I feel like a giant. Looking neither left nor right, he powered right past the crowds of stupefied onlookers. Covered in mud and remnants of grease applied earlier to ward off the cold, he was nearly unidentifiable. Man and bike had become one, a pulsing mass of muscle and chrome that shimmered in the light rain. Moving rhythmically from pedal to pedal, Gino was completely at ease as he worked his way up the slope. With a six-minute lead over the next racer, he rode to the top alone. At the summit, Maurice Chevalier yelled out to him from a French press car, “Bartali! You’re immortal!” And for one fleeting moment when Gino crossed the finish line, he was right.

  The news traveled back over the Alps into Italy as fast as the radio signals could carry it. Italian radio had started broadcasting again at 1:00 p.m., and a good number of Italians, particularly in the north, were able to pick up the French channels, too. In Rome, a young representative ran into the Chamber of Deputies and made a loud announcement to the gathered officials:

  “Attenzione! Great news. Bartali has won the stage and maybe the yellow jersey. Long live Italy.”

  The clapping that started on all sides of the room built into a loud and thunderous applause.