Authors: William Fotheringham
Coppi had learned to drive while in prison camp, and, like every other professional cyclist before and since, he was fear-some behind a steering wheel. Ubaldo Pugnaloni still gets the shivers thinking about the time they ran over a dog at 200kph on the way to a race. He once commented to Coppi that they were cutting it very fine as they passed other cars a hairs-breadth away; he just laughed. And, like so many professional cyclists, Coppi loved his cars, which were as much a tool of his trade as his bike; if Gino Bartali bought a new one he would go out and buy one bigger. He was particularly fond of his spacious, curvy Lancia Aurelia; having bought one in the Vatican because it was cheaper, he couldn’t work out how to turn the heating off so he drove it with the windows down.
Many books on Coppi fail to mention a tragedy involving the cyclist in early May 1947, when Coppi ran down a book-shop owner, Giuseppe Vallino, in the Genoa suburb of Sampierdarena, while returning from the Giro di Romagna. Vallino died in hospital from his injuries, unleashing a series of legal battles that ran on for nearly a year. Due to a lack of evidence, claims for damages from Vallino’s widow and his brother were thrown out, as was a requested six-month prison sentence for culpable homicide. Coppi eventually paid the widow 1.65 million lire in compensation. By Italian standards it was relatively uncontroversial, but it was a little foretaste of bigger, nastier legal wrangles to come.
* * *
Bruna recalled years later that her happiest memory of their marriage was when Fausto was packing his suitcase to travel to the Giro and little Marina hid in it. This is not a memory of time spent together, but of parting and separation. The marriage was eventually to crumble; Coppi’s suitcase, however, is still in existence. It’s one of the few relics that the Bianchi bike company has retained of the man who put its name on the map. The wooden sides are covered in canvas in the manufacturer’s eggshell blue, edged with leather; the corner plates and locks are in sturdy brass, the cyclist’s name on the luggage label.
The suitcase is an apt symbol of Coppi’s rapid rise to stardom. It was worked hard in those years immediately after the war. For a cyclist who could switch from road racing in summer to track racing in the winter, there was money to be made all over Europe at indoor venues such as Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver and Antwerp’s Sportpaleis. The velodromes are long gone now. The popularity of track racing as a mass spectator sport depended on the fact that without television fans across Europe seldom if ever saw their heroes in action.
Events such as Milan–San Remo and the Giro d’Italia had saturation coverage on the radio, in the sponsoring newspapers and photoreportage magazines, but prior to television the stars could only be glimpsed at the start or finish of major events, or as they sped past on the road.
On the other hand, at a track meeting at the Vigorelli – rebuilt at speed after being damaged in the war, and reopened on 26 May 1946 – or the Vél d’Hiv, the action was right there in front of the fans. The racing might be largely exhibition stuff, but it was spectacular and fast and, most importantly, the big names were on constant display. The roadmen were the crowd pullers, even though the track boasted showmen of its own: specialists such as the British sprint star Reg Harris and the Italian Antonio Maspes. The record attendance for a meeting with Coppi topping the bill was 20,000, in 1951, and he could earn up to 800,000 old French francs in appearance money.
To give some idea of the travel that was involved in this year-round racing schedule, we can study Coppi’s programme for the winter of 1947–8. His daughter was born on 1 November, and
La Gazzetta dello Sport
reports that he raced in Antwerp on 29 November, Brussels the next day, Paris a week later, Ghent the week after that, back to Paris for 19 December, Brussels two days later. After Christmas, it was Paris on 4 January, Ghent on 11 January, Brussels on the 17th, Nice on the 18th, Antwerp on the 24th, Ghent the next day, Brussels on 1 February, and finally Paris on 8 February. Travel in those days was by train, most often overnight.
The format of the race meetings varied. Sometimes there would be an omnium, in which a group of professionals would compete in several events – a points race, an elimination race, an event paced behind small motorbikes, perhaps – for a cumulative prize. The professionals would sometimes be divided into national ‘teams’, so that the evening’s show could be billed
as ‘Italy v France’ for example: anything to draw the crowds. All those meetings bar one included a pursuit match against either another major star of the road, such as the Belgian Rik Van Steenbergen, or a track specialist such as the Dutchman Gerrit Schulte. That winter Coppi rode twenty-one pursuits, and won them all.
The Italian writer Mario Fossati travelled alongside Coppi over one such winter and described how the
campionissimo
would get out of the express train in each day’s great city with his bike under his arm. At the station he would find the
soigneur
who had been appointed to look after him – a young man in a heavy overcoat in Zurich, a dry-faced senior citizen in a sailing top in Amsterdam, a guy with teeth like a horse in Antwerp, in Copenhagen a classy chap in a double-breasted coat who offered them pastis. There were taxi rides through the brightly lit city; the dramatic entrance onto the track among the screaming crowd; the night’s victims; the champagne, the flowers; oysters and steak tartare eaten in late-night restaurants after the evening’s work; the beautiful women lavishing attention on the star.
It was the antithesis of racing on the road with its mud, dust and potholes, the hours of training in all weathers. At the end of a road race the cyclist would sometimes be invisible apart from his eyes under a mask of muck, in a state of near collapse. Here, on the other hand, was access to good food, glamour, easy money, ready acclaim, popular success. The star, critically, had to play the part: hair had to be brilliantined, sunglasses worn to cover the bags under the eyes, elegant coats and suits donned for the dramatic entry into each night’s venue before he descended to change in the bowels of the stadium. It was a world of unimaginable glamour for the poverty-stricken post-war years, in the Europe of the Marshall Plan and food queues.
* * *
The huge crowds at the velodromes reflected the fact that cycling had rapidly returned to being an international sport in the years after peace was restored. Post-war, the French, Belgian and Italian papers who ran the major races – the Tour of Flanders, Paris–Roubaix, and so on – were quick to combine forces in organising the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo (named after the founders of the Giro and Tour). This new umbrella competition across the major events, national Tours and Classics, drew cyclists out of their national fiefdoms.
The Italians were happy to race abroad, once post-war restrictions were lifted. Coppi had made his first trip to France in mid-September 1946, winning the Grand Prix de la Trocadero, a circuit race held in central Paris, as a prelude to an outstanding victory in the Grand Prix des Nations, a massive 140-kilometre time trial. He was pushed hard early in the three and a half hour race by the Frenchman Emile Idée, but pulled away over the little hills in the Chevreuse Valley, south of Paris, in an effort that left him flat on his back in the centre of the Parc des Princes.
Coppi had picked up more than passable English in prison camp, and clearly had a flair for languages: he ended up fluent in French. He travelled more widely, and enjoyed greater international success, than any of Italy’s pre-war champions; he would be joined by Bartali and the country’s other post-war great, Fiorenzo Magni, who was the pioneer when it came to racing in Belgium. They were supported wherever they went by the massive diaspora of Italian migrant workers spread across Europe – many of them under a post-war scheme to provide much needed labour. Marina Coppi still has a heavy miner’s lantern given to her father by the Italian community in the Belgian mining area of Wallonia: ‘They told my father, “When you win, we win because we feel important again.” It’s a huge responsibility for a sportsman to bear.’
Cycle racing was about to experience its popular zenith.
Now the Tour is the one event in cycling that regularly draws truly huge crowds, but during the 1940s and 1950s vast throngs could be seen at races which now sit on the margins or have long disappeared: the Tour of the West and Bordeaux–Paris in France; the regional
giri
– Lazio, Veneto, Tuscany – in Italy. Thirty thousand might turn up to watch the finish of a Giro di Lombardia; pictures taken at the finish of any race or Tour stage of the time will show crowds twenty deep as far as the eye can see.
At a time of economic austerity, the spectacle of a major bike race could be taken in for free, and it offered a chance to recall the days of plenty. People across Europe needed diversion and they were limited in where they could travel before the car and motorbike became universal. Cycling went to those people. It was a sport in which they could take an active role: the riders liked to have bottles of water handed up, time gaps or the distance to the finish could be yelled out. The more concerned or less scrupulous could reach out a hand on a mountain and give a firm push to a backmarker or a leader as they dropped behind.
As Dino Buzzati wrote: ‘… there they were, the people of all Italy … massed along 4,000 kilometres and they weren’t what they were the day before. A powerful new feeling possessed them, they were yelling, laughing, the sorrows of life forgotten for a few instants, they were happy without a doubt.’ The bike was integral to their lives: they had fled invading armies with suitcases on their handlebars, they had ferried weapons and food to partisans and escaped prisoners; in Rome bike bombs had become a fearsome fact of life as partisans fought occupation. They rode bikes to work and play and they could dream of emulating the champions as they cycled to their factories and fields.
For a brief while, cycling surfed the wave of economic expansion that transformed Europe so rapidly after the war.
For a few years, before the advent of live television coverage, cycling retained the mystique of the heroic days when no one quite knew what had happened out on the road. That in turn freed up the journalists to unleash their imaginations. They hyped up the characters, their nicknames, their clashes of personality, real and imagined.
There was Aldo Ronconi, an Italian who was coached by his brother, a priest who would run after him at stage finishes with his cassock floating in the wind, and who would disguise himself so that he could get round the rule that family members were not allowed in the Tour caravan. There was Pierre Brambilla, who reputedly chopped his bike to pieces after finishing third in the 1947 Tour de France. The Swiss Hugo Koblet – the ‘
pédaleur de charme
’ – carried a comb and some eau de cologne so that he could smarten up before crossing the finish line in triumph. A rider such as Luigi Malabrocca became a celebrity merely for finishing last in the Giro; he would devise the most bizarre stratagems to lose time and ‘win’ his lowly place. The nicknames harked back to the language invented to describe the earliest Tours de France: the elf, the Breton gnome, the menhir, the little goat, glasshead, leather head, the emperor, the ironman, the lion of Flanders, the eagle of Toledo.
In this pan-European soap opera with its cast of larger than life actors, the rivalry between Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali was the principal subplot. It entailed a constant display of what the Italians term
polemica
, best described as a web of intrigue and dispute.
Polemica
drove and was driven by the sales of the newspapers that sponsored the races. Both men had to perform, on and off their bikes, to keep the headlines running, to keep the crowds interested. It was this rivalry that defined both of their careers.
‘I can’t do it alone. I need the help of a madman like you’ – Don Camillo to Peppone
When I first started attending bike races in Italy, in the early 1990s, Gino Bartali was as much a fixture at starts and finishes as the elderly Campagnolo service cars and the pink
Gazzetta dello Sport
posters. Bartali was then in his seventies, a gnome-like figure with deep lines etched into his chestnut-brown face with its towering broken nose and banana smile. He would be called onto the podium to mutter a few incomprehensible platitudes, but mainly seemed to be hanging around without a role, in a tacky-looking hat with a sponsor’s name on it. What I did not grasp at the time was that he
was
the role. His task was to be Gino Bartali, to provide a tangible connection with the glory days.
As much as anything he had achieved individually, the fans were celebrating his role in the partnership that defined a golden age when Italian cyclists seemed to win every major race. Bartali himself seemed to recognise this, commenting that he felt that the fans were there for Coppi as much as for him. It was a generous admission of the fact that for thirty years he had been fighting an unequal battle. Since Coppi’s death in 1960, fans and press had tended to project the romantic, mythical qualities of their rivalry onto the younger man rather than the living great. ‘Even the
Bartaliani
became
Coppiani
, partly through obligation, partly through conviction, partly through nostalgia,’ wrote Bartali’s biographer Gianni Brocchi.
Bartali was still dearly loved, if the constant queue of people shaking his hand and asking for his signature on anything that came to hand was any measure. There were estimates in the early 1990s that he was signing 5,000 autographs a day, but his popularity had its price. Bartali had also lost any mystique. He was half divinity, half caricature, like an Indian chief in a Barnum big top. There was something a little pathetic in the sight of him handing out publicity trinkets and posing with models in short skirts. It was hard to connect this doddery old man with the legend who had, it was always said, saved Italy from communist revolution by winning the 1948 Tour de France. All that remained of that Gino was the nose, as long and crooked as in his and Coppi’s golden days.