Authors: William Fotheringham
Bartali had opened the pre-Giro hostilities in 1947, declaring that Coppi would win ‘over my dead body’. There were murmurings from Coppi’s camp that the Giro route had been designed to favour his rival: why else was there no time trial stage? Early on, Coppi was shaken by the loss of his beloved Serse, who crashed out of the race, but he recovered to use his climbing skill to overwhelm the opposition in the Dolomites. The decisive day was from Pieve di Cadore to Trento over the climbs of the Falzarego and Pordoi. Bartali claimed later that he had trouble with his gears; he also crashed during an epic chase behind Coppi, who won the stage by four minutes and twenty-four seconds and kept the lead to Milan. Bartali did not accept defeat graciously, claiming that his rival had been able to ride in the slipstream of vehicles among the race convoy, and that he himself had been told to let Coppi win, because if Bianchi failed to take the Giro the team would disappear.
Coppi was dominant for the rest of 1947, taking the Italian national championship – decided in a series of one-day races – then adding the world pursuit title and finally the Giro di Lombardia, with Bartali more than five minutes behind. At the end of the season he was elected Italian sportsman of the year. In Milan–San Remo the following spring, Coppi’s winning margin was a colossal eleven minutes, but the following months saw
il pio
regain the ascendancy as Coppi’s star rapidly waned.
First came the Giro, where Coppi and his Bianchi team pulled out in protest when Fiorenzo Magni received a mere slap on the wrist after his supporters had pushed him up the toughest mountain passes. They had been brought in by the coachload and specially positioned for maximum effect. The Tour de France followed; in the Alps Bartali electrified Italy by
turning round a twenty-two-minute deficit to take his second victory in the event, at the age of thirty-three. It was one of the great Tour wins, and had a significance outside the sport, coming as it did the day after an assassination attempt on the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti. The Italian team leader was called that same day by his old acquaintance De Gasperi, who asked ‘more as a fan than a president’, as Bartali put it, whether he could win the race. While at home the communists set up roadblocks and called for a general strike, and weapons were brought out on to the streets, Bartali won the first Alpine stage and took the Tour. The tension subsided, and, strange as it may seem now, the victory was said to have ‘saved Italy.’
That is an exaggeration: while the gravity of the circumstances cannot be underestimated – the country was just three years out of the war, with plenty of former partisan weapons in circulation – historians feel that Italy would probably have stepped back from revolution even if Bartali had not performed. From Coppi’s point of view, it was disastrous: this was Italian sport’s first victory at international level, outside the country, since the football World Cup in 1938. It carried colossal prestige. Moreover, he had foolishly turned down the invitation to ride himself. And for Bianchi it was a catastrophe: Legnano enjoyed a massive increase in sales, up by about 40,000 bikes a month.
* * *
To make the relationship more complex, Coppi and Bartali were the children of different worlds. The age difference between them was a mere five years, but Bartali was rightly nicknamed
il vecchio
. Coppi dragged his sport into the modern world, while Bartali was a throwback to the pre-war years. The writer Curzio Malaparte made the link to the religious
faith of the ‘old man’: ‘Bartali belongs to those who believe in tradition, its immutability; to those who accept dogma. He is a metaphysical being protected by saints. Coppi has no one up there to look after him. He is alone on his bike. Bartali prays as he pedals; Coppi, a rational, sceptical being, full of doubts, only believes in the motor he has been given: his body.’ As Malaparte noted, Coppi was a sceptic, questioning every side of his profession in the search for perfection. Bartali’s approach, on the other hand, was that of a believer, no matter how outdated or wrongheaded he might be. Fiorenzo Magni told me: ‘Coppi was amazingly organised, which mattered a lot then, when you had to do so many things for yourself. Bartali was more of a fatalist, who assumed it would all turn out all right.’
Bartali relied on peasant remedies, some learned from his mother, but all harking back to the witchdoctor notions peddled by the
soigneurs
since cycling began: salt, olive oil and vinegar baths, hot compresses of vinegar and salt applied with a well-wrung cloth, local application of tobacco from cut-off cigarette butts, and rubs with grape juice because he had noticed that vineyard workers did this to relieve pain. He liked a glass of liqueur distilled by his father, and believed he had to protect himself from magnetic fields. To that end, he travelled with a compass so that he could align his bed north–south, and every night when he arrived in his hotel room he would shift the furniture accordingly.
Physically and mentally, Coppi was fragile while Bartali was hard as nails: ‘the man of iron’ in contrast with the rival whose brittle bones were compared to glass. Coppi could handle bad weather or bad luck, but only if he was on form and his mindset was perfect. He needed constant moral support from his team-mates, Cavanna, the management. Sandrino Carrea told me: ‘Coppi would get demoralised and say he had lost if some guy was two minutes ahead on the road, even if there
were still 100 kilometres to go. [In that situation] Bartali would say, “We can do it, we can do it”, even if there were only five kilometres to go. If Coppi had had the grit of Bartali or Magni, he would have won even more.’ Bartali, on the other hand, appeared impervious to heat and cold. ‘He was never tired, he never felt the weather,’ Fiorenzo Magni told me. He rarely wore a racing cape and, as Pugnaloni’s story shows, he could get by on a few hours’ sleep. Given the number of crashes and punctures Bartali suffered, disproportionate even for those times, it is just as well that bad luck did not undermine his self-belief.
Stomach troubles beset Coppi from time to time, but the digestive system of the ‘old man’ was a legend in itself. ‘He could have eaten stones if he wanted,’recalled his domestique Giovanni Corrieri. He reputedly drank up to twenty-eight
espressi
a day, which might explain why he never needed to try amphetamine. He swore he never doped, and as Coppi cynically remarked, ‘If Gino says it, it must be true.’ He would break eggs on his bars, letting the white fall to the ground and eating only the yolk. He would get through five or six in a stage. In his bottle would be watered down egg custard or sugar and water.
These were pre-war remedies, and Bartali never moved towards modern cycling as Coppi did. Nor did he have the same ascetic lifestyle. The story goes that once Coppi was dining at one of the finest restaurants in the Rome area. He got up and left early. ‘Don’t you like the food?’ asked the owner. ‘I like it too much,’ was the answer. Bartali saw things differently, as the night out before Milan–San Remo showed. Coppi would be in bed at 9.30, whereas in a twin hotel room Bartali might talk at his room-mate until 3 a.m., and the victim would plead with him to shut up or at least go somewhere else so that he could rest. Whereas Coppi was completely abstinent and while the
gregari
might enjoy a glass of wine at dinner,
Gino had a bottle. ‘If I had drunk just part of the wine Gino has, I’d be dead,’joked Coppi. And that was not all. ‘Gino smoked, and he smoked a lot, especially after the war when he was at his strongest,’ says Alfredo Martini, who was asked in the 1952 Tour to go and beg Gino’s favourite brand, Nazionale, off fans at l’Alpe d’Huez.
On their bikes, they relied on different attributes. As Ettore Milano told me: ‘Coppi had class, Gino had power.’ Alfredo Martini is a little more nuanced: Bartali had stamina but Coppi had speed. Bartali’s racing style was based on
grinta
, guts and strength. He used his stamina and sheer physical power, particularly in bad weather, to wear the opposition down with repeated attacks. Coppi, on the other hand, would wait until he could sense the right moment to make the single move that would get him clear of the pack. Once away, his ability to ride solo would ensure he could not be caught.
Tactically, Coppi was far more astute. He had to be, because Bartali was faster in a sprint finish. Coppi would watch and wait while
il pio
would waste energy with fruitless early moves in a race. Giovanni Corrieri was always frustrated with his old boss’s inability to learn from his mistakes or to act on the advice of his team-mates. ‘Perhaps Fausto would only jump once, but if you gave him two metres [lead] it was all over … I told Gino so many times: stop jumping, just watch Fausto’s wheel, because if he counter-attacks, you will never see him again. But the next day it would be business as usual. Fausto would just wait for the right moment for the fatal blow.’ In terms of strategy, the long-term planning of his racing, Coppi was better organised, and he wanted to hire the best men to help him. There are no figures such as Cavanna or the legendary mechanic Pinella di Grande linked with Bartali, who often had mechanical problems when he raced.
Sometimes the tactics adopted by the pair were more
sophisticated than trips to the cinema. Bartali noticed that a vein behind Coppi’s right knee would swell up when he was close to his physical limit. As early as the 1946 Giro he delegated one
gregario
specifically to sit behind his rival and watch for it, with orders to yell ‘the vein, the vein’ when the swelling appeared. It is said to have prompted the attack that won the older man the Giro della Rinascita. Coppi on the other hand, noticed that Bartali tended to cut the hairpin bends on a mountain climb if he wasn’t going well. To counter Bartali’s strength and repeated attacks, he also developed the classic tactic of riding steadily up the climbs, letting Bartali jump away time after time, reeling him in again and again with metronomic steadiness. It could happen up to ten times on a single mountain pass.
* * *
Opinions remain divided on just how close the pair
were. ‘I have eight or nine true friends and Fausto is the best,’ said Bartali, who also said they were ‘like brothers’. Coppi never described him in such terms – he was not that kind of man – but, tellingly, Bartali was the first person to whom he showed a photograph of his newly born son, Faustino. Martini repeats that they were friends off the bike, but not close friends because their characters were so different. As Rino Negri said: ‘Like all timid men, Coppi kept his opinions and convictions to himself. Gino, like all Tuscans, loved to talk like a river in flood.’ For example, at the dinner table, there was not a lot of banter between them. Giovanni Corrieri saw it like this: ‘They were rivals but didn’t really hate each other. They feared each other athletically but had mutual respect.’
The relationship was clearly a knowing one, with its own conventions, such as refusing to refer publicly to each other by name, using instead epithets such as ‘that one
there, the other’. They took pleasure, most of the time, in annoying each other as a matter of form. Bartali, Coppi commented, would often laugh at him to annoy him; Coppi clearly loved to play Bartali at his own game, spying and disinformation. He told Rino Negri: ‘I knew what he was up to when he sent people to me to assess my state of mind. I split up his informants into two categories; when I wanted him to find something out quickly I sent [one], when I wanted him to feel something was suspicious I sent [the other].’ The objective was to gain the psychological whiphand: on one occasion, while climbing the Pordoi Pass, one of the Giro’s toughest mountains, Coppi said ‘
ciao
’ to his rival as he left him behind, making sure that Bartali could hear. ‘I don’t believe he ever swore, but that time I wondered …’ It is the kind of gamesmanship that comes naturally to sportsmen with lively minds, the cycling equivalent of sledging in cricket, or the things muttered between rugby’s front rows as they pack down in a scrum.
There are those, however, who testify that the rivalry was ‘absolute, tremendous’. Ubaldo Pugnaloni told me that Bianchi’s domestiques would always be terrified if a race went down a particularly bad stretch of road. Their concern was that Coppi might puncture, in which event ‘all hell would break loose’ as Bartali’s Legnano tried to take advantage. They would then have to try to help Coppi regain the speeding pack.
Even so, there was considerable complicity between the pair and their teams. Coppi and Corrieri had a particularly close friendship. Both Bartali and Coppi clearly understood the financial value of the rivalry. They must have been aware that headlines would come from every word they said to the press, every action in a race that was witnessed by the journalists. Sometimes the complicity went beyond mere theatre. The duo had a secret pact in the 1946 Giro to combine forces
in the Dolomites against their younger rival, Ortelli. Coppi would have preferred not to lose to Bartali, but if he were to do so, it was better for his image, and his financial interests, if he were to finish second to his great rival than to come fifth to an unknown. If Ortelli emerged as a rival, that would threaten both of them. The thinking seems convoluted, yet it has its own logic.
Sometimes, the lengths they went to seem puerile. In one Giro d’Italia Coppi became tired of hearing the fans chanting ‘GI-NO’, ‘GI-NO’ at Bartali. The crowds could easily spot his rival, as he was wearing the red, green and white Italian national champion’s jersey, so Coppi ordered a team-mate, Donato Piazza, to put on the jersey he had earned for becoming Italian track champion and ride at the front of the bunch. The upshot was that Piazza took the applause, not Bartali. The downside was that Piazza was only permitted to wear the jersey in track events, not road races such as the Giro, and he was breaking the rules. But Coppi was happy to pay the fines.
The relationship reached its nadir at the 1948 world championships in Valkenburg, Holland, held a month after Bartali looked to have gained the advantage over the younger man with his Tour de France win. It was now late August, and Coppi had won nothing major since March. Victory for Bartali in Holland would mean the ascendancy of
il vecchio
was absolute; additionally, as ever, there were rumours that Bianchi were losing patience with their leader. But in Holland the rivalry had a new twist: the world championships were contested by national teams. That meant the pair were joint leaders of the Italian squad, and expected to combine forces to represent their country. Instead, they watched each other, neither willing to put in an effort that might have given the other an advantage. They simply let the race go away from them, amid a cacophony of whistling from the Italian fans
who had made the journey north to see one of their heroes take the gold medal. ‘Wherever you go I’ll go,’ said Coppi, and he was as good as his word, even following Bartali into the changing rooms.