Authors: William Fotheringham
The start of 1951 had been wrecked by another crash, when his front tyre slipped as he sprinted on the soaking wet velodrome where Milan–Turin finished. A broken collarbone meant a further month without racing and no time to prepare properly for the Giro d’Italia. There, with Fiorenzo Magni rampant, he still managed to win a time trial and a major mountain stage and finish fourth overall.
As they had during the 1949 crisis at St Malo, Coppi’s confidants rallied round to persuade him to stay in cycling and to start the Tour. Bartali was one of the main influences, with particular power because he had been in precisely the same situation fifteen years earlier. He too had wanted to quit
cycling, to join the clergy, after his brother Giulio had hit a car as he descended a mountain in an amateur race. Although, like Serse, Giulio Bartali had died as a result of a medical error, both deaths typified the dangers cyclists ran in those days due to poor tyres, abysmal road surfaces and a lack of head protection. Such deaths were by no means uncommon.
Not surprisingly, Cavanna was persuasive as well, rationalising the situation thus: ‘It is a disaster but it could have happened to anyone and it could have happened in another way.’ Another team-mate, Luigi Casola, told Coppi he would go to the Tour in Serse’s place – although he actually went in his car, as he was not selected. In the end it came down to hard cash: as Carrea puts it, they were paid to go – 500,000 francs – so they went. ‘If we hadn’t earned it, someone else would have.’ The lengthy spells Coppi had missed through injury in the previous eighteen months meant that it was in everyone’s economic interests that he rode the Tour.
Physically, in theory, Coppi was capable of riding the Tour and doing well. He had, after all, just ridden himself into good enough form to win that mountain stage in the Giro. But when he arrived at the Tour, he had not slept for three nights. One eyewitness said he had the look of an automaton. Not surprisingly, he eventually cracked, in dire heat on the relatively flat stage from Carcassonne to Montpellier. Coppi had raced well enough through the Pyrenees to be lying fourth overall behind the eventual winner, Hugo Koblet. He was well placed until the final 100 kilometres of the stage, but he began vomiting and found himself completely devoid of strength. He rapidly lost sixteen minutes on the leaders, notably Koblet and a bevy of French riders led by Raphael Geminiani. Half a dozen of the Italian
gregari
rallied by Carrea, Martini, Milano and Luciano Pezzi did their best to help him limit his losses, but to no avail. Pezzi, who died in 1998, gave his version of the battle to Jean-Paul Ollivier twenty years earlier:
‘He was leaning over his bars with an indefinable grimace on his face. His empty eyes were fixed on the road. He was transfixed, as if he had been stunned. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t answer our questions. There was no reaction.’ Coppi only came to life when Pezzi grabbed a bottle of wine from a spectator and poured it over his head.
It was a classic cycling calvary: the champion suffering in agony, zigzagging along the road, surrounded by his loyal servants. Ironically, given his earlier wish to quit the sport, Coppi would not contemplate getting off his bike. The battle for survival depended on whether they could get him to the finish within the day’s time limit, calculated as a percentage of the winner’s time. The normal margin was 10 per cent, but Coppi stood no chance of finishing in time. However, an obscure rule stated that if more than a tenth of the field were outside the 10 per cent limit, it could be extended to 15 or 20 per cent. It was Pezzi who worked out that if the group containing Coppi finished together, they would all be safe. But one Spanish cyclist, who did not understand the rule, kept trying to leave them behind, hoping to regain some time and finish within the 10 per cent limit. The
gregari
had to grab his saddle and slow him down each time he sped ahead, to ensure the group kept to the right number.
Coppi remained in the race, although there is some debate as to whether the organisers would have wanted him to go home even if he had been outside the 15 per cent time limit. As Carrea says: ‘There were newspaper sales of 300,000 a day [in France] at stake; without Coppi there was no interest in Italy. It was in their interests that Coppi should be there.’ It was a battle against the odds that strengthened his hold on the hearts of the French and Italian public, although the race referees were implacable. They fined three of his domestiques, Pezzi, Milano and Biagoni, 200 francs each for pushing their captain, while Coppi was fined a total of 600 francs for three
offences: allowing himself to be pushed by each of the trio on various occasions.
The illness was probably caused by the cumulative effect of the strain of the three weeks since Serse’s death; it was only temporary and Coppi recovered rapidly, scoring a familiar lone victory in the Alpine stage to Briançon and riding well enough to finish tenth overall behind Koblet. The Italians went home with 800,000 lire between them. Honour, and their bank balances, had been saved. However, the rest of Coppi’s season was blank, apart from a win in the Grand Prix of Lugano time trial and the usual string of ‘victories’ in exhibition events across France and Italy. The world championship was a target, particularly as it was held that year on Italian soil, at Varese. But he did not even make it to the start due to a bout of illness.
There was speculation in the Italian press that the illness was an excuse as he had realised that he would not have the strength to beat Koblet, but Coppi was adamant this was not the case: ‘I would have been very stupid not to have seized the chance of competing in a world championship on a course which suited me, in front of my fans, at a time when the fatigue of the Tour was only a memory.’ Whatever the debates, to salvage his season there remained only the Giro di Lombardia, which he had won four times in the past five years. Try as he might, he could not shake off a small select group including Bartali, Magni and Bobet, and in the final sprint on the Vigorelli velodrome it was the Frenchman who triumphed, a bitter end to a bitter season.
* * *
Coppi’s closest associates, such as Sandrino Carrea and Ettore Milano, still have not come to terms with Serse’s death, more than fifty years on. For Milano, the tragedy still has a dream-
like unreality about it, with the twist that in his view Serse predicted his own end, on the way to the race. Milano recalls that he and Livio drove with Serse to the race start, and as they arrived at the railway bridge in the nearby town of Alessandria, Serse said, ‘I’m not going home again.’ He had bought a new suit, and he apparently said, ‘Put these clothes on me when I’m dead.’ These were throwaway statements: Serse was going to stay with a semi-steady girlfriend in Turin, so of course he wasn’t coming back. His crack about the clothes was typically flippant. They only took on any meaning after the event.
Fausto himself also felt that Serse had had a presentiment of his death. He had, he said, listened all the night before the race to a dog barking, ‘as if it wanted to bring me bad luck’. His mother said that after packing his suitcase Serse had been unwilling to leave the family home. She had, of course, warned him to take care, but that was because he was as lunatic a driver as any professional cyclist. For Sandrino Carrea, the death points to what he sees as a curse on the entire family, ‘exterminated by misfortune’ from the father downwards.
More important and more clear-cut, however, was the effect on Coppi’s relationship with his wife, Bruna. In that sense the death was definitely a curse. To start with, Coppi changed, becoming even more pensive and withdrawn. It was, says Piero Coppi, as if ‘something inside him had died’. ‘He never laughed after Serse’s death,’ Carrea told me. ‘Before, Serse would play the fool for him. After Serse’s death we all felt it was in our interests to stick close to him, look after him, make him smile.’
Ettore Milano was specially assigned to look after Coppi, and that was not without its strains: Alfredo Martini asserts that Milano’s devotion became ‘almost pathological’, beyond the call of duty. He worried more about his master’s health
than his own. ‘Between them relations were so close that I believe without Milano at the races Fausto felt disorientated,’ says Martini. ‘Coppi confided everything in him.’ It was Milano who took over Serse’s role as room-mate, not with total success at first. ‘I shared with him after Serse died, he didn’t like to sleep alone. The first time I did, I got to the room, put on a poker face and went straight to sleep. He said
porca miseria
, you’ve come here to keep me company and you’ve just nodded straight off.’ It was also noticed that Coppi became more nervous. After a nasty accident to a fellow cyclist in the Giro, one eyewitness recalls him announcing that he was giving up cycling.
Bruna Coppi became ever more convinced that her husband should stop racing, because the dangers were too great. Raphael Geminiani was explicit: ‘[Bruna] didn’t like cycling. She made Fausto put on a crash hat, obliged him to wear elbow pads. Everyone said to him, “Come on, stop this nonsense.”’ Magni concurs: ‘She said the things a mother would say.’ And Coppi’s mother said the same as his wife: Angiolina Coppi had been scared about Fausto racing from the very start, and his father had had to persuade her to let him compete. Now she felt that losing one son prematurely was enough, and, like Bruna, she pleaded with Fausto to give up competing. It is said that as she stood in front of Serse’s body she yelled ‘Give me that bike and I will break it with my own two hands.’
In one sense, Bruna’s fears were understandable. During their marriage, Coppi had had only two serious crashes, and they had come in the last two years, together with Serse’s tragic death. Later, Coppi acquired the reputation of being a particularly accident-prone cyclist, and this is certainly true of the latter part of his career. Including the broken pelvis in 1950, Coppi had six major crashes in ten seasons. The 1950 and 1951 accidents deprived him of vital racing – without them,
could he, perhaps, have won the Tour three times, or even four? Biagio Cavanna, for one, felt that Coppi was not particularly unlucky. As the
soigneur
saw it, he had no more crashes than the average cyclist, but took more harm when he fell heavily because he had less muscle to cushion the bones.
Such rationalisations would have meant little to Bruna, a woman who never had a particular taste for the limelight and found Coppi’s celebrity hard to cope with. Was there a subtext when Coppi – or rather his ghostwriter – wrote in his 1950 autobiography
Le Drame de Ma Vie
that ‘the important thing is to find a wife who understands the life a cyclist is forced to live’? His was, unfortunately, not a life that was easy to empathise with; being a professional cyclist’s wife has never been straight-forward. To this day, cyclists’ marriages seem to break down at an alarming rate, but maintaining a marriage must have been particularly hard half a century and more ago. Marina recalls that she and Bruna experienced Coppi’s victories, defeats and crashes only through the radio, in the same way as the rest of the Italian population. There were occasional phone calls as well, such as the one during the 1949 Tour de France when she told her father, ‘Keep the pink jersey, Daddy’. ‘She hasn’t quite got the hang of her colours yet,’ smiled her father as he told the tale.
The long trips to get to races meant, for example, that a four-week Tour could turn into a six-week trip, at a time when communications were rudimentary. Adriana Bartali remembers going to the cinema to see how her husband was getting on in his races, working out his health by looking at his picture in the newspapers, and having to book telephone calls for eight o’clock. Coppi rarely spared himself: in the winter of 1949, for example, he undertook a marathon trip together with Serse, racing in Tunisia, then driving across North Africa to race in Casablanca, Tangiers and Algeciras before crossing back to Spain and driving most of the way to Paris. It was hardly necessary, but the money was there to be earned.
Moreover, Coppi’s life bore no relation to that of a shop-keeper’s daughter in provincial Italy. The transition from poverty-stricken prisoner of war to cycling star had happened virtually overnight. How on earth could Bruna have understood all that her husband was experiencing, and how could she have imagined the addictive qualities of the glamour, the adrenaline and the acclaim? She was not a woman who enjoyed the public gaze.
However, the notion that Bruna did not attend bike races is a myth: one of the most touching images of her and her husband is from the 1946 Giro d’Italia, where they are looking into one another’s eyes, behind a bike. There is another picture of her kissing Fausto after the 1946 Giro di Lombardia. The affection looks deep and mutual. Exceptionally, Bruna was permitted to visit the Tour de France in both 1949 and 1951 – in the latter year on compassionate grounds. She was also at the 1952 Giro and Tour. When she did attend races, however, she made a point of remaining in the background. She would not sit among the guests of honour. Instead, she sat on the steps, to remain unseen. ‘There were places but I never took them. I stayed on the steps so that any expressions I had of worry in a crash or joy in a victory could not be noticed.’
She travelled to criteriums and track races with Coppi, Fiorenzo Magni and his wife, and Magni recalls one revealing episode in Paris. ‘The wives went shopping. Bruna kept saying, “How beautiful this blouse is, how lovely this cardigan is” and my wife said, “Why don’t you buy them?” Bruna said, “No, think how much work it took to pay for them. I mustn’t spend the money.”’ She was, says Magni, ‘too Genovese’ – in Italy the Genovese are thought unwilling to spend money – ‘but it was not tightfistedness, rather a modest mindset. That’s the heart of the problem. Bruna stayed the same, and he changed. He learned about the world, he travelled, she wanted to remain a housewife, go to the hairdresser’s once a fortnight
not once a week, have one set of best clothes not two. That [mindset] is not something you change, that’s for life.’
As Italy’s biggest sports star, her husband was no longer only hers. No matter how much affection he bore her, or how much he loved little Marina, his life was dictated by other things. Biagio Cavanna had a simple take on the marriage: Fausto was Bruna’s husband when he was at home, but belonged to the people of Italy, to his sponsor, to his team-mates when he was away. Cavanna’s son-in-law, Ettore Milano, felt the same way: ‘Bruna didn’t understand like the wives of Gino [Bartali] and [Fiorenzo] Magni understood,’ he told me. ‘When they were at home each was a husband, when they were away, no. Due to her ignorance of cycling, Bruna didn’t figure that out, and that was her fault. You can’t clip a man’s wings.’ Nino Defilippis, who came to know the couple as their marriage crumbled, has a more subtle view: Bruna married a man who turned into someone else: ‘Bruna was a country miss,’ he told me. ‘When Coppi married her he wasn’t the Coppi that he eventually became. His wife married Coppi the ordinary man not Coppi the
campione
. Coppi became Coppi, she remained the same and couldn’t adapt.’