Fallen Angel (3 page)

The Coppis had lived in these parts since the seventeenth century, and were more than mere labourers, although Faustino’s family were not the best educated or the most ambitious of the clan. While Domenico worked the land, his brother Giuseppe Luigi was the mayor, his sister-in-law Albina the schoolteacher. The other brother, Giuseppe Fausto, had left to make his fortune as a sea captain, and appears to have ended up as the honorary head of the family. Initially Domenico and Angiolina lived in the house behind Casa Coppi, a smaller building which has recently been turned into the Grande Airone restaurant. Gradually they took over the larger property in front across the courtyard, and eventually its ten rooms were the home of an extended family of eleven people including various aunts, Fausto and, briefly, his wife Bruna.

Later, much was made of the fact that Fausto Coppi was transformed from a physically unprepossessing youth into the greatest athlete of his generation. Writers speculated over
the reasons for his scrawny physique. There was a theory that Faustino and his younger brother Serse, born in 1923, were both slightly stunted because their father’s genes had been affected by the strong liquor given to him when he was a soldier in the First World War before they were conceived. Another popular myth was that Coppi suffered more broken bones than the average cyclist because his frame was weakened by a vitamin deficiency similar to rickets. Small and skinny he may have been, but he was clearly strong, although Livio must have been exaggerating when he recalled ‘he could carry 100 kilos on his shoulders when he was eleven’.

Faustino was not a brawny boy, but this was nothing exceptional. A photograph from the early 1930s shows Livio, Dina and Faustino with the outsized eyes and stick legs of undernourished children, looking old beyond their years in their heavy outdoor boots and oversize, handed-down shorts. All the local children were like that: as Baselica recalls, the youngsters in the single class of pupils from Castellania and three or four surrounding villages were ‘like organ pipes: thin and small, thin and medium sized, thin and tall, thin and bald, thin and hairy. All thin.’

Faustino and Serse were already close in spite of the four-year difference between them, a relationship that lasted until the younger brother’s premature death in 1951. Faustino had begun Serse’s schooling for him by refusing to go to class unless his little sibling went as well. Despite their closeness, they were ‘like night and day’, Baselica recalls. Fausto was well behaved at home, ‘Serse was never still’, less obedient, merrier.

Fausto worked hard at school, where their attendance would depend in part on whether they were needed in the fields; when they were there they were taught about Romulus and Remus, the River Po, Mont Blanc and the difference between animal and mineral by Faustino’s lively, tough little aunt, Albina. She maintained discipline with the help of a collection of sticks kept behind her desk: thin, thick, supple, knotty, ‘the right one
for each infraction’. Put your hands out, she would order. But I’m your nephew, Serse, Faustino or their cousin Piero would reply. Put your hands out, you big ugly boy, she would repeat. At catechism in the church, an uncle Coppi presided with the help of a collection of sticks to match their aunt’s at school. Not surprisingly with the church connection on Angiolina’s side of the family, the Coppis were ‘
gente di chiesa
’, religious people: missing a service meant trouble, recalls Piero.

When not at school or working alongside their parents on the farm, the boys played a version of hopscotch, and some-times stole fruit, which wasn’t mere mischief: they were always hungry. They played soccer with a ball made of rags until it split, or until one of the boys went to tell the owner of the field that they were ruining his grass; out would come the peasant brandishing a stick, and they would run away laughing fit to burst. Serse tended to be the prankster among the children; Fausto was as serious a child as he would be as an adult.

Coppi’s first bike was a reject, picked up from a corner where it had been abandoned because it was virtually unusable. He had no money, so he restored it to working order as best he could. He remembered a frame with the chrome cracking off it, so big that he had trouble getting his leg over the crossbar. On 17 October 1927, Albina wrote the letter A, for absent, against the boy’s name in the school register. The eight-year-old Faustino had gone out on his bike that day and played truant, so she made him write out one hundred times: ‘I must go to school and not ride my bicycle.’ On their clunky old machines, the boys played at bike racing, running time trials where the lack of a stopwatch did not matter: one of them would count the seconds out loud. One such bike racing game was the Giro d’Italia.

That reflected the fact that in the time before the rise of football, cycling was Italy’s most popular sport. Although cycle ownership was lower than in France or Britain, the bike was
the main means of transport for most of the population. Since its foundation in 1909, the Giro had drawn the country together, bringing its glamour and festival atmosphere to the most far-flung areas. As well as the great one-day Classics such as Milan–San Remo and the Giro di Lombardia, monuments of the sport even today, a host of regional one-day races such as the Giro del Veneto, Tre Valli Varesine, Milan–Turin and the Giro del Piemonte drew massive crowds. The
tifosi
thronged to watch the stars at exhibition events on short circuits and banked velodromes, and the start contracts for the cyclists were correspondingly fat.

The first great national rivalry of Italian cycling, between the
campionissimi
– champions of champions – Alfredo Binda and Learco Guerra, had caught the popular imagination. Internationally, Italy could boast the first world road champion in Binda (1927) and a brace of Tour de France wins for Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924 and 1925. Together with Tuscany to the south and Lombardy to the east, the Piedmont of Coppi’s childhood was a hotbed of the sport, producing champions such as Gerbi, Brunero and Costante Girardengo, whose home was in Novi Ligure, on the plain below Castellania. As well as the
campioni
and
campionissimi
, the men who made the serious money, there were decent pickings to be had for the
gregari
, the lesser lights who helped the great men in the big races and made up the numbers in the exhibition races.

When a journalist went to Castellania with Coppi in the 1940s, the cyclist said simply: ‘Do you understand now why I became a cyclist? What could I do other than go off on my bike?’ The parallels between subsistence farming and the life of a professional cyclist are surprisingly close: both entail hours of repetitive physical labour in the open air, in all weathers, with no certainty that all the effort will have its due reward. For all the drama of the breakaway or the sprint, the podium girls and the chance of prize money, there was a distinctly
unglamorous side to cycling in those days: saddle boils from the poor roads, sickness from an uncertain diet, the bizarre remedies peddled by team helpers. The professional cyclist had to accept adversity – punctures, crashes, stronger rivals, capricious team managers, poor wages – with the stoicism with which a peasant views the weather.

Cycling was physically demanding, but it was better than the unremitting drudgery of working the land. As the Irish farmer turned racer Sean Kelly said two generations later, at least when you were on your bike you got paid more for being out in the rain all day. That was ever the case for professional cyclists who were not
campionissimi
or even
campioni
. Coppi’s contemporary Alfredo Martini explained: ‘When I left to go training early in the morning, the peasants were already in the fields; my father, my brother, bent over the spades thinking only of work and fatigue. I would ride two hundred kilometres in training and when I came back in the evening, tired but happy from the long trip, I would see the same people still thinking only of the same tiring and repetitive work.’

‘Cycle racing opened the doors to a world forbidden to mere mortals,’ writes the historian Daniele Marchesini. As well as the financial rewards and the chance to eat foodstuffs never seen on peasant farmers’ tables, cycle racing offered the chance to travel, a glamorous business at a time when the nearest market town was a major excursion for many. Martini told of the pride he felt on returning home with the labels of the best hotels in Paris and Brussels stuck on his suitcase. ‘Cycling meant leaving the status of peasant behind and travelling the world, getting to know other people, other languages, meeting famous people and – not the last thing on our minds – earning more than normal.’

* * *

At twelve, Coppi was out of school and working alongside his father on the farm; a year later, however, in 1932, he moved away from home to work at a butcher’s shop, Ettore’s, in Novi Ligure, twenty kilometres away on the plain. Such a move was common among the children of peasants: the land could only support the parents. The seagoing uncle Fausto,
il comandante
, was the man who found him the job. Coppi recalled the day he left: a cool spring morning, walking alongside his father who was on his way to the fields, pushing his bike, this one lent to him by his brother Livio, ‘an enormous heavy machine with regal handlebars and tyres like lifebelts’, carrying his lunch in a checked handkerchief. Domenico said goodbye to his son at the foot of the first hill.

Coppi did not stay long at Ettore’s. He moved to another butcher’s shop, run by Domenico Merlano at Via Paolo 17 – a single room opening onto the street under a stone lintel in the Roman style, with vast hams and salamis swinging from the door frames and two colossal pigs’ heads hanging from the wall.

Initially, Faustino stayed the entire week in Novi, but soon he grew homesick and asked his boss to allow him to sleep in Castellania and ride daily to and from his work. And here, it seems, the bike suddenly gained in importance, with a round trip of forty kilometres each day to build his young muscles and the long climb back up to the village from the
pianura
to develop the heart and lungs that would power him in the future. Angiolina would wake him at six, but Coppi liked to stay in bed as late as he could in the mornings. ‘To avoid the clips round the ear that would be waiting for me, there was only one solution: make up on the road the time I had wasted in bed. And so I ended up sprinting the twenty kilometres to the butcher’s. No one ever timed me, but none of the cyclists I met along the way could hold onto me.’

The downhill run to Novi would turn into a time trial, with a slap from his boss if he failed to make the cut. He would
‘go lorry hunting’, looking for a vehicle that was moving slowly enough for him to tuck into the slipstream. Sometimes he met local amateurs, and the story goes that, in the style of the best film scripts, one morning he met a string of them, apologised for not riding with them because he was late for work and whizzed away on his heavy bike, to their utter consternation.

Cash, meanwhile, remained scarce. The Castellania priest would walk with Faustino to catch the bus at a stop outside the village to save half a lira. So it must have been a huge gamble when one day, probably in 1933 when he was thirteen or fourteen, Faustino and Livio took their savings out of the bank in order to buy new bikes. The bank accounts had been opened for the brothers by an uncle, Cico, with ten lire apiece;
il comandante
Giuseppe Fausto, the sea captain, had gradually filled them up so they had 400 lire each. Livio bought a Maino, Faustino a Girardengo, and they rode them together, always over the climb at Carezzano, unsurfaced like most of the roads, up to one in six at its steepest. Here they would meet local amateurs and professionals; Faustino could leave them all behind. Among his victims was a cyclist named ‘Piass’, who had raced the Giro, and who refused to speak to the youngster after being left behind.

However, the butcher was less than entirely happy with the scruffy boy who turned up each morning on his bike: Faustino took far too long to do his rounds of the neighbouring villages. Unknown to Merlano, every time he rode out into the countryside he chose a route that took in a village called Gavi, an extra ten or fifteen kilometres, including a long climb. To avoid Merlano’s clips round the ear, he had no choice but to ride the circuit faster and faster. When the butcher did find out, he had trouble believing quite how quickly his delivery boy could ride his bike.

The Museo dei Campionissimi in Novi Ligure is a large, yellow building just outside the town centre, surrounded by cycling sculptures – a final sprint, a cyclist on a mountain – while inside is a celebration of the town's two cycling greats: paintings, photographs, cuttings from magazines, cartoons, all devoted to Coppi and his predecessor Costante Girardengo, nine times Italian champion and six times winner of the Milan–San Remo Classic after the First World War. Here, cycling roots still run deep. Leave the station and the first thing you see is a statue of Coppi in a small park with tired-looking goldfish in a pool. Coppi spent much of his life in Novi, and his daughter Marina still lives in the town.

Visit Novi and you can understand why Coppi became a cyclist: the town lived and breathed the sport. This was a centre of the Italian cycle industry, home of the Santamaria and Fiorelli manufacturers; when Coppi came to work here, Girardengo was the town's most famous inhabitant. Here, in the early 1930s, the
campionissimo
and the men who raced with him and lived off him were hard to avoid. The baker opposite Merlano's boasted that he had delivered his brioche to the champion. Gira' also bought meat from Merlano: on one occasion, Coppi had to take him some salami but the great man showed little interest in the bony youth on the butcher's bike.

Domenico Merlano had a number of regular clients who
would sit in the shop and put the world to rights over slices of sausage and a glass or two of wine. One of these regulars, a recently blind man named Biagio Cavanna, spent more time there than the others as he came to terms with his disability. With his Ray-Bans and his stick, Cavanna was a distinctive figure in the little town: thickset, heavy jowled, and now weighing 120 kilos due to the loss of physical activity with the onset of blindness. His bad temper was well known. The blind man had worked as a masseur and team manager; he had a dogmatic way about him as they discussed the merits of this cyclist and that footballer.