Fallen Angel (15 page)

The disgust of the entire country was shared by the Italian cycling federation, which banned both men for two months for what was euphemistically called ‘a lack of willingness to compete’. The ban was quickly rescinded: Coppi won the Giro d’Emilia and Giro di Lombardia, both in typical lone escapes, on 10 and 24 October respectively, to take some consolation from a year that had gone Bartali’s way. (It had also seen him lose his world pursuit title to the Dutchman Gerrit Schulte.) The Lombardy win was typically dominant; he escaped well before the climb to the Madonna del Ghisallo, broke his own record time for the ascent, and stayed out in front for over eighty kilometres to win by almost five minutes, his third consecutive win in the Classic. The conditions were atrocious: he finished covered in mud and was immediately wrapped up in a leather overcoat.

The Valkenburg debacle had far-reaching effects. Bartali would never be world champion. He and his great rival would never truly trust each other. In all its pettiness and negativity, the episode would come to define the dark side of their rivalry. Most importantly, however, Valkenburg haunted the Italian cycling authorities and the national team manager, Alfredo Binda. They would be a laughing stock if this were allowed to happen again. Putting ‘two cockerels in the same hencoop’, as the Italian saying has it, was not to be undertaken lightly but, as Coppi prepared to ride his first Tour de France, also contested by national teams, it had to be done.

Among the millions of fans obsessed with Fausto Coppi by the summer of 1948 was a provincial doctor in a small town north-east of Milan. Doctor Enrico Locatelli and his young wife Giulia were known locally as ‘the ideal couple’ or ‘the inseparables’. They never quarrelled. They would spend evenings together in their sitting room, where she would crochet while he read
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, searching the pink paper for any article that mentioned his idol, whose photograph could be seen all round the house. If the paper did not have a piece on Coppi, he would throw it down and go to bed. As for Giulia, she had no idea why anyone should be so interested in any sport of any kind. Cycling held no attraction for her, just yet.

Almost every region of Italy had its own Giro – a one-day event that was organised by the local paper and which would usually draw the greats of the day. Such local classics have since declined in importance, virtually to the point of anonymity. Nowadays the Tre Valli Varesine, the Three Valleys of Varese, just north of Milan, would barely get a few paragraphs in
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, but in the late 1940s it was another key episode in the Bartali–Coppi soap opera. The race itself, held on 8 August 1948, resulted in the usual
polemica
between Bartali and Coppi. Victory went to the latter, with ‘the other one’ claiming he had ridden dishonestly. It was an important step in the escalation of mutual distrust between the two men during the build-up to the world championships. It was, however, far less significant than one apparently minor event on the periphery of the race.

As far as Dr Locatelli was concerned, what mattered was that the race was held not far away from the village of Varano Borghi, where he had set up his practice when he and Giulia moved north in late 1945, not long after their wedding. Locatelli’s wife had no particular desire to accompany her husband when he told her they were to go and obtain Coppi’s autograph at the Tre Valli Varesine. Giulia went along, but with a different thought in her mind: here was a way of escaping the small village where they lived, for an afternoon at least. Just as Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary found that life with her doctor husband in the French provinces was slow, so Giulia was chafing at the bit. Doctor Locatelli was a busy man, devoted to his work. Even though Milan was just an hour away, Varano Borghi felt cut off from the mainstream, and she spent many hours with her two-year-old daughter Loretta, whose name was always shortened to Lolli.

Giulia subsequently produced two subtly different versions of how she and Coppi met. According to one account, she and her husband went to approach Coppi at the
punzonatura
, the ritual of the evening before the race when the
campioni
would register and have their bikes checked. The Locatellis arrived late in Varese, as did Coppi. In the traffic jam approaching the race’s headquarters, the doctor and his wife were stuck in a line of traffic behind a large grey Lancia Aprilia bearing an Alessandria registration plate. It was the doctor who recognised Coppi in the car; the couple followed it through a yelling throng of fans, some grabbing the car, some climbing on to it. At the
punzonatura
, the police made a vain attempt to force the crowd back from the car so that the doors could be opened. And when they did open she saw him get out: a tall, slender, reserved man, aloof and somehow detached amidst the chaos, dressed in a dark-brown suit with a blue tie.

In a second version, produced thirty years later, she was
more downbeat about her first impression: ‘To tell the truth, he made no impression on me as a man. I thought he was ugly, with that enormous chest and his long pointed nose.’ Both accounts tally in one way: she met Coppi at his hotel and asked for an autograph, although one version has this happening the evening before the race, the other the evening after the finish. At his hotel, Giulia caught him as he went up the stairs. He did not even bother to look at her; give a piece of paper to the porter, he said, and I will sign it. ‘You are being unkind,’ she replied; she would have an autographed photograph or nothing. ‘This time he looked at me and went red in the face with embarrassment. He murmured shyly, “Yes, yes, of course.”’

Coppi turned, and called to his brother Serse to get the bag of photos from the car. To whom should he dedicate the picture: ‘
Signorina
…’
Signora
, she corrected him. When visited by the journalist Jean-Paul Ollivier in the 1980s, Giulia Locatelli still had a postcard of a young Coppi in the Italian national champion’s green, red and white jersey. It was a symbol of the way she had dragged Coppi from indifference to acquiescence, a foretaste of the power she would eventually exert over him. She may have sensed an opportunity when this celebrity, the idol of the baying crowd, had been bent to her will in that single encounter on the stairs. She would return again and again to see him race. ‘I became obsessed with Coppi,’ she confessed.

As well as the veneer of celebrity, the smart suit and the big car and the hordes of fans, what was there about Coppi himself that might attract a woman? The most telling comment I could elicit came from the wife of one of his team-mates: ‘
Era squisito
’, he was refined. What did she mean by that? ‘Delicate in his manners, courteous in the way he spoke, almost feminine.’Another woman mentioned that he had long, delicate hands. It is hard to get further from the old cliché
of the cycling champion as an uneducated peasant or manual worker.

Coppi’s son Faustino recalls Giulia’s view of her lover: ‘She would say “He was a gentleman” even though he came from a peasant family. He had a certain courtesy, a way of behaving. They lived together for several years and there wasn’t once when he didn’t get up when she arrived at the dinner table.’ After their affair went public, Giulia explained the attraction like this: ‘Coppi is not a common man, and in a certain sense he is very unlike people who earn a living from sport. He has the style of an artist, you could say a musician, he moves delicately, dresses with taste. He is at home in any company.’

Coppi was a man in search of certainty: that was reflected in the people who influenced him, powerful minds such as Cavanna, his brother Serse, Bartali. In that context, it was understandable that he might eventually succumb to a strong-minded woman. Giulia’s initial interest in Coppi went hand in hand with that of her husband, and together the couple visited more and more bike races, always seeking out the champion. For the moment, Giulia Locatelli looked like any other impassioned autograph hunter.

* * *

Coppi had plenty to distract him in the next few months besides his one-year-old daughter Marina. He was more restrained in his track racing, and that restful winter ushered in the best spell of his career. The big issue derived from the Valkenburg debacle, however. In a few months, Italy would have to choose the national team for the Tour de France, which was contested by squads from each country rather than the sponsored outfits that rode the rest of the season’s races. Alfredo Binda and the heads of Italian cycling had to decide which of the two stars should lead the national team. Should
they go for the defending champion, Bartali, or his bitter rival? Could they leave either one out without drawing virulent protests from the fans and media? If they put both men in the team, how could they work together?

The two men had at least restored amicable relations when Coppi visited Bartali in Tuscany at Christmas 1948, but it fell to Binda to get them to the start of the Tour in the same team. The Italian manager was a man of stature: as the
campionissimo
of the 1920s, he had at one time been so dominant in the Giro that the organisers paid him to keep away. He had also won the first world professional road race championship in 1926. Here was no lightweight, but a man who could talk to Coppi and Bartali on equal terms. A summit meeting was called in early March 1949 at the town of Chiavari, east of Genoa on the Mediterranean coast, with all the senior figures in Italian cycling present, and a written agreement under which the pair agreed to cooperate was drawn up under Binda’s guidance on 14 March.

Bartali said publicly that he would work with his rival, but Coppi showed astonishing form as the 1949 season progressed. Just five days after the agreement was signed the younger man opened a four-minute gap in thirty kilometres to win Milan–San Remo. Three weeks later he scored a narrow win in the ‘best of three’ pursuit decider against Schulte in front of a 20,000 crowd at the Vigorelli. He then headed to Belgium and northern France, coming close to victory in the Flèche Wallonne Classic and engineering a victory for his brother Serse in Paris–Roubaix, which, he said, gave him more joy than if he had won himself. Back in Italy, as the Giro neared, he won the Giro di Romagna, with Bartali ten minutes behind.

That year’s Giro took place amid massive public interest. The ‘third man’ of Italian cycling, Fiorenzo Magni, had won the 1948 race, while Bartali had taken the Tour de France
and ‘saved the republic’. So Coppi needed to re-assert himself in his home Tour. The hype was immense, but only Coppi lived up to it, with two deadly blows on two great mountain stages. For the rest of the three weeks he and Bartali observed each other closely, amid rumours that Bartali might have been poisoned by a malevolent Sicilian. The race was remarkable for one other thing: the despatches of the writer and poet Dino Buzzati in
Corriere della Sera
, some of the most lyrical reports cycling has ever prompted.

The emotion was not generated only by the racing: 4 May had seen the Superga air crash, in which the entire squad of the dominant Turin football team,
il Grande Torino
, had been wiped out. Coppi and Bartali had been friends of the players, with whom they had turned out in benefit matches, and Coppi began the Giro with an FC Turin badge on his Bianchi jersey. The memory of the war was also still close: the race returned to Trieste, now part of Italy, to scenes of rejoicing, tears and seas of Italian flags, and it travelled past the flattened town of Cassino, where, wrote Buzzati, ‘there were no lovely girls at the windows – the windows were missing. Even the walls were missing.’

Coppi swooped on the main stage in the Dolomites, riding away from Bartali when the ‘iron man’ punctured on the Pordoi Pass and opening a gap of seven minutes by the finish in Bolzano. That prompted Buzzati to write the following, about the
campionissimo
in flight: ‘Look at Coppi, is he climbing? No. He is just forging onwards as if the road were as flat as a pool table. From a distance, you might say he is out for a blissful stroll. Close-to, you can see his face becoming more and more lined, his upper lip contracting like a rat caught in a trap … [he is] hermetically sealed in his own suffering.’

As the crow flies, just sixty kilometres separates the towns of Cuneo and Pinerolo in Italy’s western Alps. But for 10 June 1949, the new Giro organiser, Vincenzo Torriani – whose name
would be inseparable from the event until the 1990s – had devised a massive loop of 254 kilometres into France and back for the race’s eighteenth stage. It took in five climbs: the Maddalena – known to the French as the Col de Varche – the French passes of the Vars and the Izoard, with its scree-slopes and Death Valley-style rock pillars, the ascent to the Franco-Italian border at Montgenevre and the long drag past the ski resort of Sestriere before the descent to Pinerolo. With 4,200 metres of climbing in total over the five passes, it was one of the toughest courses for any mountain stage in any Giro.

At the stage start, Coppi was a few seconds behind the race’s overall leader, Adolfo Leoni, the sprinter who had been the mover behind the rebirth of cycling in post-war Italy. The stage had been preceded by the predictable verbal exchanges with Bartali: ‘Tell that one I’ll drop him.’ ‘Tell the other one he won’t see my back wheel for long.’ Bartali said Coppi would attack on the first three cols, ‘I’ll catch him on the fourth and drop him on the fifth’; Coppi riposted that Bartali ‘will have to have a good look at my back wheel at the start because that’s the only time he’ll see it’.

It was good knockabout stuff, but it was irrelevant once the stage had started. Coppi went clear on the Varche, amid late spring snow in the high meadows, in pursuit of another Italian, Primo Volpi. There was a massive 192 kilometres to go, but he simply rode further and further ahead, dodging around massive potholes in the tarmac, until, at the finish, he was indisputably the Giro winner, with Bartali floundering in his wake, twelve minutes behind. To escape so far from the end of the stage, with some five hours’ riding through the mountains ahead, in the day’s rain and cold, was a massive gamble, a colossal statement of confidence in his own ability. Those present recall that he was almost angry afterwards. ‘That loony Volpi made me completely kill myself,’ he said to Mario Ricci.