Authors: William Fotheringham
While they might not always have agreed over diet, Cavanna and Coppi brought radical ideas to training. When Coppi was out on the road with the little group of the blind
soigneur
’s protégés, they never stopped. Two at a time they would go to a roadside fountain for water while the others would accelerate to make it difficult for them to catch up. In the final hours, they would simulate racing. When Coppi wanted a workout, they would be made to set a blistering pace up a particular hill. Geminiani underlines: ‘Before Coppi, the belief was you trained for 150 kilometres at 24 kilometres per hour and it would do you good. Coppi followed the example of
athletics and brought in interval training: 130 kilometres at a high pace, or 130 kilometres in the morning, 100 kilometres in the evening, flat out. That gave him the top-end speed in a race, which was enough for him to leave the others behind. He didn’t get that from training at 25kph.’ Coppi was also an early adherent of motor-paced training and would time himself up particular climbs to check his form.
He was one of the first
campioni
to take a strategic overview of a three-week stage race rather than taking things as they came. He would plan to ‘
fare il vuoto
’ – open a huge gap – on two or three major stages, and then control the remaining stages. For a one-day event, he was prepared to inspect the final kilometres up to twenty times over.
Similarly, Coppi left nothing to chance in his choice of back-up staff. When he moved from Legnano to Bianchi, part of the deal was that he took with him the mechanic Pinella di Grande. With his Brylcreemed hair, big-pocketed overalls and checked shirt, the mechanic was legendarily laid back, a vital asset at a time when many more wheel changes had to be made in races than is the case today. Coppi said of the mechanic that he was so unflappable that he wondered whether he actually understood how important a given situation was. Di Grande was a perfectionist himself, who would yell at the domestiques if they punctured their expensive tyres. One of his tricks was to get a piece of specially shaped hard-wood such as oak and hammer it up the steering column so that if, as sometimes happened, the steel fractured due to the pounding on the poor roads of the time, the wood would hold the bike together.
Bianchi’s team managers, Zambrini and Tragella, were adept at the deals which greased the wheels of competition. When foreign
campioni
, such as Louison Bobet, came to race in Italy, they were permitted to ride for Italian teams. Bianchi snapped up the best as useful allies for Coppi. They would use Bianchi’s
economic muscle on Coppi’s behalf more directly as well. For example, Vito Ortelli, probably the best Italian cyclist of the post-war years after Bartali, Coppi and Magni, was offered 100,000 lire to work for Coppi in the 1947 Giro. Ortelli was also paid 20,000 lire to give Coppi an easy ride through to the final of the Italian pursuit championship in 1946. Unfortunately, Ortelli’s team didn’t bother telling him about the deal.
And, of course, Cavanna was still a ubiquitous presence, still massaging Coppi, still haranguing him and the whole team over every subject under the sun. He had a massive influence on Bianchi’s recruitment through his amateur squad, which ended up acting as a feeder club for Coppi’s Bianchi. Sponsored by SIOF, a local chemical company, they used second-hand tubular tyres and hand-me-down bikes from the Bianchi mechanics. The result of this production line that took local riders from this corner of Piedmont and turned them into domestiques to serve the great man was a close-knit unit. The fact that they were largely Ligurians like Coppi, mainly from the Novi/Alessandria area, was an important factor at a time when people had dialect as a first language, Italian as their second. Simply being able to communicate on more than a basic level would do wonders for team spirit, while if they talked
dialetto
in a race, the opposition might not understand what they were saying.
Raphael Geminiani, a relative latecomer to Bianchi, believed that Cavanna played a vital wider role at the team, sitting at the dinner table, listening to the riders talk and assessing their state of mind and their needs. More than the introverted Coppi, he was the man who worked on the team’s morale, encouraged them each day. But there was inevitably a conflict with the team manager, Tragella, who could not stand having Cavanna in the team car shouting at Coppi and made the blind masseur stay in the hotel instead.
Details were important at Bianchi, and that didn’t apply
only to their leader, who lost his confidence if he felt he had lost control of things. Coppi was a stickler for punctuality, and insisted on clean handlebar tape for every stage of a major race – an old morale-boosting trick. At Bianchi, much was made of personal presentation. The
gregari
would be sent back to their rooms to shave if they came down in the mornings with stubbly chins, and if they didn’t have clean socks and jerseys they would be made to change them. A team manager would go and check their rooms when they left the hotel: if they were not in good order, they would be made to go upstairs and tidy them.
Equipment mattered, too. It was a vital imponderable at a time of bad roads and slow wheel changes and variable quality control. If Coppi considered that his tyre sponsor was not providing what he wanted, he would obtain special tyres and persuade contacts to smuggle them to the team – though sometimes the sponsors would get wise and change them all back again. He experimented with shortened frames, giving a more dynamic ride. The Castelli clothing company made him special warm winter jerseys. He rode higher gears than the
gregari
, who cursed if they were given a ‘Coppi wheel’ when they punctured. His position on the bike changed enough after the war to imply that he had sought to become as aerodynamic as possible: his back becomes stretched out on the bike parallel to the ground, where before it is rounded. His bars are wider, so his arms are more comfortably extended, without the elbows flapping.
His drive for perfection was mirrored by that of the Italian cycle industry: in the Coppi years the Italians made multi-speed gears and the double chainring ubiquitous. Italy was where the best tubular tyres were produced by companies such as Vittoria, Pirelli and D’Alessandro. The Columbus tubing company produced lighter steel tubes. It was an era when followers of the sport were continually seduced by the
technological advances coming out of Italy – ‘Each year saw a new marvel, be it a kind of tyre or a Campagnolo derailleur, the kind of thing we could only dream of in France,’ recalls Jean Bobet. Half a century on, northern Italy is still the hub of the world cycle industry. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Coppi alone drove this growth, but the process was partly inspired by the presence of a dominant figure, driven by a need for technical perfection.
There were other things Coppi was unwilling to leave to chance. He worked out, together with Cavanna, that he should avoid crowded places such as dance halls and theatres where there was a greater chance that he might pick up infections. He had to stay in the open air. Hence his love of hunting, although long sessions were needed on stationary rollers to get his legs used to cycling again after hours wandering with his gun and his dogs.
In those days before doping was prohibited, drugs of any kind were worth investigating. Coppi was overt about his use of stimulants, which were not banned until five years after his death. His comment to the radio reporter Mario Ferretti that he only used drugs ‘when necessary’ is now widely quoted, with the caveat that it was ‘almost always’ necessary. It is a philosophy, understandable back then, unforgivable now, which conditioned the way most professional cyclists saw the issue for the next half-century. He explained to Rino Negri: ‘I’m a professional. If I could discover a medicine which didn’t damage my heart and nervous system I wouldn’t hesitate to use it to win, and often. I’d be crazy with joy if I was the chemist who found it.’
For his hour record he took five tablets of simpamine, a mild form of amphetamine which Cavanna utilised to give his protégés a boost while they were out training before the war; Coppi was adamant, however, that he would have gone far faster if he had used one of the stronger forms of amphetamine
which had become available after the war. Cavanna spoke with professional pride about his ability to make
intrugli
, (‘brews’) – mixes of caffeine, alcohol and amphetamine, to be taken at an appropriate moment in a race. Then there was
la bomba
, a bottle containing seven or eight espresso coffees, sugar, peptocola and two or three mild amphetamine pills.
There are plenty of instances of doping involving Coppi, enough to underline that amphetamines of various kinds were ubiquitous at the time. He gave two white pills (to be taken with food just before the finish) to another cyclist, Gianni Malabrocca, to help him win a stage in the Giro in 1946. In Marco Pastonesi’s
Coppi ma Serse
, fellow professional Renzo Zanazzi tells of entering a hotel room to see Serse and Fausto on their single beds with a tray of pills on the cupboard between them. ‘We are working out what colours we are going to take tomorrow.’
Raphael Geminiani emphasises: ‘There is someone avantgarde in every field, and Coppi was the avant-garde of cycling. First he got to know himself, how far he could go physically, then everything else followed that. Every cyclist since has been inspired by him. Nothing fundamental has been invented since Coppi.’ The Tour organiser Jacques Goddet wrote after Coppi’s death that ‘the worthy brute who merely pedals is an extinct species. Cycling has become a sport of intelligence, care and technical expertise. Thanks to Coppi.’ Louison Bobet, the first man to win the Tour de France three times, felt his way of working had been transformed after riding the 1948 Giro with Coppi. He said: ‘Now I know how to do my profession.’
* * *
The 1950 Paris–Roubaix and Flèche Wallonne saw Coppi at his finest. The two Classics had completely different characteristics: Roubaix a long, flat slog with lengthy sections of
cobbled roads; Flèche a shorter but tougher slog over the Ardennes hills. Of the two, Coppi’s victory in Paris–Roubaix came to be seen as a turning point, a demonstration of the way he had transformed cycling since the war.
He had been outwitted – to his intense annoyance – by Gino Bartali in Milan–San Remo in mid-March, but conversely a few weeks later Roubaix went entirely to plan in spite of foul weather, wind and rain. Early on, he was sheltered from the wind by Carrea, Oreste Conte and Fiorenzo Crippa, and Carrea and Serse pushed him time after time, unseen by the race referees, who were keeping dry in their cars. When a crash happened, it was Ettore Milano who led Coppi from the back of the peloton to the front to keep out of trouble. Meanwhile, Conte was seen to have his pockets full of race food: tarts, rice cakes, honey sandwiches – ‘enough to withstand a siege’, Pierre Chany noted.
The food was passed to Coppi just before the feeding station in Arras. Here, as the peloton collected food bags from support staff, most of the riders had to slow down. Coppi did not have to pick up a bag and attacked in pursuit of an earlier escape. There was chaos as the other favourites tried to launch a chase. Within a few kilometres, Coppi was in the lead, with only the Frenchman Maurice Diot, one of the earlier break-aways, for company. They shared the pacemaking, until Diot refused to collaborate, on the grounds that his team-mate Van Steenbergen (he of the previous year’s world championship) was leading the chase behind.
Chany takes up the story: ‘Fausto moved instantly right up to the edge of the pavement and left Diot with no shelter. He accelerated once to get the measure of Diot, a second acceleration shook the robust Maurice, a third attack stunned him. Coppi’s race was over and the demonstration began.’ In the final forty-five kilometres, ‘on roads that were barely fit to ride on’, Coppi opened a three-minute gap on the
Frenchman and nine minutes on Van Steenbergen. Whatever Diot achieved on his bike is now forgotten, apart from the words he said on finishing that race. ‘I’ve won!’ ‘What about Coppi?’ ‘Coppi is in a different race. I feel I have won.’
Coppi’s win in Flèche Wallonne was even more crushing: at roughly half-distance, he repeated the attack at the feed station that had worked so well en route to Roubaix and again raced alone until he caught up with an early escape on one of the climbs. He then took out his water bottle, drank a little, sprayed the back of his neck, took out an orange and ate it, while two of the earlier escapees tried desperately to hold his pace. Having cooled down and had a bite to eat, he turned to the other two and suggested that they should begin riding harder, as the peloton might catch up. Their reaction was to stop and get off their bikes in disgust. Coppi simply rode alone to the finish in Charleroi; the next man was five minutes behind.
On his day Coppi was completely unstoppable. Alfredo Martini explained to me: ‘Staying on his wheel seemed an easy thing at the beginning, you would feel good. But then, every kilometre that you did was like someone putting a brick on your back, one at a time, inexorably. Until ten bricks, you could take it, but with the eleventh … you collapsed and off he went.’ Other cyclists described how on a mountain climb he would change up his gears as the climb progressed, continually increasing his speed to a point where the opposition had no answer.
Fiorenzo Magni, the ‘third man’ of Italian cycling at the time, says that Coppi was uncatchable: ‘I remember one race, he was flat out, I was flat out a few yards behind him, I just couldn’t get to him. And when he went away, say on the Ghisallo to win the Giro di Lombardia, he would open a three-minute gap over the best guys, who would be chasing: Bartali, me, Kübler, Louison Bobet. He was a locomotive.’ In a Giro
del Veneto not long after the war, Coppi broke away early on; Magni led the chase, enlisting the rest of the field to help, yelling at them and forcing the pace. The gap increased, and when it got to five minutes in spite of his best efforts, Magni stopped, got off his bike, picked it up and threw it in the ditch.
Coppi’s run of form and luck was not destined to last, and on 2 June 1950 it came to an abrupt end as the Giro d’Italia tackled its first mountain stage in the Dolomites. The crash stemmed from a mere trifle. As the field tackled a small climb near the town of Primolano, Coppi moved past a rider named Armando Peverelli, who a year earlier had crashed into a rockface during the Tour de France, losing the sight in his left eye. Coppi came past on Peverelli’s blind side; unseeing, the other man moved, catching Coppi’s front wheel, and he fell. The first to get to him was the Giro director, Giuseppe Ambrosini, who tried to lift him back onto his bike. There was no sign of any bleeding, although the right side of his shorts was torn, but putting any weight on his right leg, or simply moving it, left Coppi in unbearable pain.