Fallen Angel (20 page)

Coppi was taken to the Santa Chiara hospital in Trento, where he received flowers that afternoon from the winner of that Giro stage, none other than Gino Bartali. He had broken his pelvis in three places – which makes those attempts to get him back in the saddle seem all the more ludicrous – and would not race again until September. That very same evening, he was visited in room 20 by Dr Enrico Locatelli and his wife Giulia, who had come from their home in Varese to watch the stage. The news of Coppi’s crash was broadcast to the crowds at the roadside by the race announcer’s car; immediately, Giulia decided to visit her idol in his hospital bed, in spite of her husband’s remonstrations that only the family would be allowed into the room.

At the hospital door she showed the same determination
that had taken her into riders’ quarters at races across northern Italy. The duty doctor insisted that she could not enter. She made him call Coppi and tell him Dr Locatelli and his wife were there. By now, clearly, Coppi knew who they were, as they were duly summoned upstairs. Coppi, Giulia recalled, was pale, sweaty, unable to smile because of the pain. He tried to sit up as they entered, but fell back at once. Few words were exchanged. Coppi showed Dr Locatelli the plaster cast and the location of the fractures; the doctor reassured their hero that he would be well looked after.

It was almost two years since Fausto and Giulia had first set eyes on each other, and it would be several more before their relationship went further. There are accounts of a correspondence after Coppi was transferred to Roncegno, a village outside Trento, to convalesce in the cooler air of the mountains. Her letters would arrive at his hotel, the Hôtel des Thermes, where he was staying with his wife Bruna and their daughter, Marina; his were sent to a
poste restante
address in Varese. This side of the friendship was something that should be kept from her husband. However, none of these letters have been published, and in 1979 Giulia produced what she stated was the first letter Coppi ever sent her – dated September 1953. Giulia herself gave diverging accounts of what happened next, but one thing is certain: she fell pregnant later in 1950, and gave birth to a son, Maurizio, to follow her daughter Lolli. This, plus an attack of typhoid fever – probably in the summer of 1950 – would explain why she and Coppi did not have another significant meeting until 1952.

‘The man drags constant worry in his wake and it is his most cruel adversary’ – Jacques Goddet, after Coppi’s 1949 Tour win

The crash near the Turin velodrome on 29 June 1951 seemed relatively minor. According to one eyewitness, a local amateur named Nino Defilippis, a few of the cyclists in the Giro di Piemonte one-day race misjudged a bend, one of them put his front wheel down a tramline, and down they went. Serse Coppi was among the fallers; he skidded across the road and banged his head on the pavement. ‘We picked him up,’ Defilippis told me. ‘He said he was fine, so we rode into the finish with him. He signed the finish sheet and then we showed him the way to his hotel, because we were local and knew the roads. We said goodbye. Not long afterwards he died.’

Serse Coppi went to his hotel room and washed, taking the rare step of using the vinegar bath that had been prepared for his elder brother, because he did not feel well. When Fausto arrived with another
gregario
, Giovannino Chiesa, Serse complained of a headache. ‘The pain was on the left side of his head, so we lifted his hair and had a look,’ said Chiesa. ‘There was no blood. There was a small mark, like the scratch a child might make on its mother’s face.’

Serse’s decline was shockingly rapid, the attempts to save his life increasingly desperate. The riders called for an ice pack; by the time it had arrived he was asleep, but, according
to Chiesa’s account, he was not sleeping properly. The riders grew afraid. A doctor was called. As he lay there, Serse was rolling his eyes, extending his toes as if he had cramp, tensing his body. His face had darkened. They called an ambulance; as he was taken to hospital, Coppi and Chiesa moved his head to stop his tongue dropping down his throat. He had stopped breathing. An operation for cerebral haemorrhage was delayed because there was no blood or plasma in the hospital and it was a Sunday. He died before he reached the operating table.

He was buried quickly: Fausto had to start the Tour de France in four days’ time. The impact was terrible. The
mamma
of the Coppi family, Angiolina, never fully recovered. It was the same for Fausto. He had persuaded Serse to race so that they could be together as they had been in the village. He had got Serse a place at Bianchi so he could have him at his side. Serse had been riding the race to prepare to support him in the Tour. Now he had just watched him die, suddenly and horribly after a desperate battle to save his life. The guilt must have been immense. Like his war service, this was something Fausto never discussed.

There is a consensus among those who knew Fausto that the death of his brother was a turning point in his life. Milano, Carrea, Piero Coppi, Martini and Pugnaloni are unanimous: after this, nothing was quite the same. To his contemporaries, the disintegration of Fausto’s marriage, his disastrous divorce, his long, painful decline, even his premature death, all seemed to stem from this initially banal crash on a tramline in Turin.

* * *

When Sandrino Carrea talks about Serse, he doesn’t use words to begin with. He throws his arms wide and makes a noise somewhere between a pack of hounds scenting blood and a
steam engine’s safety valve under high pressure. The sound is obscure but the meaning is clear: Serse was a character, a big character. The scene with Carrea is repeated, in various ways, whenever one of the Coppi brothers’ associates discusses Coppi junior.

Ironically, in view of Serse’s relative lack of talent as a cyclist, his personality made far more impression on those around him than that of his brother. Fausto’s contemporaries tend to remember him in general terms: ‘a gentleman’, ‘a wonderful person’. Asked to pin down precisely why Fausto was so nice, they um and ah. Detailed anecdotes are hard to find. Serse, on the other hand, was the sort of larger-than-life figure who leaves many crystal-clear memories behind him, partly because he was not obscured by the aura that envelops his god-like elder brother.

There is no reverence when Serse is discussed, but there is plenty of laughter. It was Serse who took the lead when the village boys’ games took them into forbidden territory: an orchard to steal apples, football in a hayfield. Later, when they went shooting together, the obsessive Fausto would go for partridge; Serse would shoot towards the road to scare the passers-by and laugh fit to burst. That summed up the relationship: Fausto wanted Serse at his side; Serse simply wanted to play.

They were divided during the war when – and here memories become dim, leaving a sense of something hidden – Serse chose to fight for the fascist rump, the Repubblica di Salò. Post-war the younger brother emerged to persuade Fausto that he should continue racing, living with him for a few months in Rome as the Germans were driven northwards and the professional cyclists began competing amidst the rubble. He did so wearing Fausto’s pink jersey from the 1940 Giro, a little ragged and very baggy by now, and he was not above pretending to be his brother. Immediately after the war
Serse won a major race, Milan–Varzi, ahead of his older brother, and thus earned his place in the Bianchi team along-side Fausto in 1946.

In his cousin Piero Coppi’s view, Serse had some of the qualities needed by a
campione
– the charisma, the personality, powerful legs – but he didn’t have the necessary application. Like his elder brother, Serse went to visit Biagio Cavanna and was told of the conditions that he imposed on his pupils: in bed at ten o’clock, up at six in the morning, taking turns to collect the freshly drawn milk, plus the training. He didn’t come back. His only major win came in Paris–Roubaix in 1949 – a victory shared with France’s André Mahé, who was leading but was sent off course at the finish. Mahé pointed out that Fausto gave Serse a hand-sling as he bridged to the break and then instructed his brother to protest when the judges initially awarded the Frenchman first place.

Serse was ‘an uglier, smilier version of Fausto’, according to Orio Vergani. He was nicknamed ‘
oreggiat
’’, because of his sticking-out ears, but there was enough of a resemblance for autograph hunters such as Giulia Locatelli to confuse them. Serse had a rounder face, more marked with laughter lines, and a pointy chin. Dino Buzzati wrote, somewhat unfairly, that he was ‘an ironic imitation’ of his brother: the same features, but a tenth of the talent and the style of ‘a duck, a giraffe, an accordion’. A photo of the two of them on their bikes in the Giro in 1951 illustrates the contrast perfectly. Fausto looks utterly relaxed and at one with his machine, head perfectly poised, arms slightly bent. Under his crinkly grin, Serse’s chin is lower than his shoulders – slightly broader than his brother’s – while he has magnificent leg muscles but the uncomfortable look of a man to whom cycling does not come naturally. He leaned to the right as he rode his bike. ‘An ugly little guy,
un po’ gobbo
’ – a bit of a hunchback – ‘with no neck and his head sunk between his shoulders,’ says an ex-pro of the time.

Four years younger than the
campionissimo
, Serse became one of Fausto’s
gregari
, and, as a popular personality, would do the rounds in the bunch when a threatening breakaway developed, persuading the other teams to join Bianchi in pursuit. Any help he gave on the road was, however, merely the visible element of a far deeper relationship of co-dependence. He described himself as Fausto’s ‘
gregario
of the mind’: it was his presence that mattered. He shared his brother’s hotel room and rode ‘in the shadow of Fausto’s shadow’ (Mario Ferretti). As Buzzati put it: ‘Fausto cannot do without Serse and feels lost if he doesn’t know that behind him, in the group of backmarkers, Serse is slogging faithfully away …’ And, indeed, before taking flight on a mountain, his elder brother would say kindly, ‘We’ll wait at the [stage] finish.’ ‘We would say goodbye and off [the back of the bunch] Serse would go,’ recalls Carrea.

The relationship was complicated: Fausto was his brother’s boss, but Serse knew he had the psychological whiphand; his elder sibling needed him. Perhaps the monastic Fausto lived vicariously through Serse, who did the frivolous things he did not permit himself to do. So it was that the elder brother would give detailed instructions for their next day’s training, but Serse would go out dancing. While Fausto went to bed early and avoided crowded places, Serse smoked, played boule, hung out in bars, chased women, played practical jokes and loved to party. He would go out dancing and ‘come home with the morning papers’, as Carrea put it. He had a simple and apparently efficacious policy with the opposite sex; an ugly woman was ‘
meno sfruttata
’, underutilised. ‘He was not overgifted for cycling, but for love, yes,’ recalls another contemporary who had showered with him: ‘[he had] equipment that made you envious.’ His conquests were rumoured to include celebrated actresses. Together with Bianchi’s other playboy, Luigi Casola, he would disappear in search of adventure on the rest days of the Giro.

Serse’s nocturnal lifestyle meant he had trouble keeping up with Fausto when they trained, which was daily, in theory at least. After his marriage to Bruna, Fausto was living in Sestri Ponente, while Serse remained with their mother in Castellania. They would ride in opposite directions down the same road to meet for training in the mornings; Fausto would know by where they met just what time Serse had got to bed the previous evening. Serse would ask the other
gregari
to phone up Fausto and provide his alibis. Milano recalls covering for him: ‘
Dov’è quello là?
’ he shouts, mimicking Fausto’s Piemontese accent, then he tells how he would spin some tale to satisfy their leader. But there was, says Carrea, no jealousy, no arguments.

Serse was not the first or the last brother to make a living in cycling on the back of his elder sibling. In the 1990s, Stephen Roche and Laurence Roche formed a brief double act, while the five-times Tour winner Miguel Indurain took his younger brother Prudencio with him to the Tour; as Serse did for Fausto, Prudencio signed autographs on Miguel’s behalf. The German Jan Ullrich employed his brother Stefan as a mechanic. Other cycling champions have had their joker figures, as important for boosting morale as for their cycling skills, for example Sean Kelly and an obscure Belgian called Ronan ‘Ronnie’ Onghena. It was Serse, along with Casola, who kept morale high at Bianchi: they threw him in the sea on a rest day in one Giro.

Out training before one race, Alfredo Martini was struck by the way they would complete each other’s sentences. Fausto was reliant on Serse for psychological support in his lowest moments. The light-hearted Serse acted as a buffer against his inner doubts: it was Serse who kept Fausto racing as the war ended, who made Fausto continue in the 1947 Giro after he, Serse, had gone home due to a crash. ‘A father figure’ was Orio Vergani’s view of the younger brother, while Buzzati
described Serse as ‘Fausto’s lucky charm, his guardian spirit, a sort of living talisman – a little like the magic lamp without which Aladdin would have remained forever a beggar. It is Serse who really wins because without him Fausto would have fallen apart a hundred times. Neither is capable of living without the other.’

* * *

As in the face of other crises, such as the death of his father, Fausto’s immediate reaction was that he wanted to quit cycling. There was, however, no time to reflect. The previous year had been disastrous by his standards thanks to his broken pelvis. The vast plaster enveloping his left leg and most of his upper body while the broken bones mended had been removed after forty days; he had convalesced for two months, then begun racing again that September, with no time to gain any meaningful results. The Giro di Lombardia was as close as he got; he was not strong enough to escape on his own, yet made it into the race-winning escape, only to lose any chance in the finish sprint when he and the other leaders caught a slower group as they lapped the Vigorelli.