Authors: William Fotheringham
It was during these years of decline that Coppi made two legendary appearances in London, racing at the Herne Hill velodrome in what are still called simply ‘the Fausto Coppi meetings’ by fans of a certain age. For the first meeting, on 14 September, 1958, Coppi was paid £300 – half his usual fee – and the 12,000 crowd paid £1 10s each, twelve times the usual entry price. The great concrete bowl has not been full since. The afternoon’s entertainment, with an Italy v England format, began with a Catholic cardinal blessing the crowd, and included a ‘tea break’ in which the professionals rode slowly around the track, stopping to sign autographs.
Herne Hill came shortly after a rare high point for Coppi: the 1958 world road race championship, held in the French city of Reims. He had to fight hard merely to qualify for the Italian team, led by Ercole Baldini, his partner in the Baracchi time trial the previous autumn. Baldini had succeeded Anquetil as the holder of the hour record, once held by Coppi himself, and Baldini took the world title that day, with the support of the older man. It was Coppi who advised Baldini to infiltrate an early escape – although there were malicious whispers later that he had done so in an attempt to make the young man burn himself out – and he managed seventh, a considerable feat at almost thirty-nine years old.
In one sense Coppi’s ‘slow sporting suicide’, as Jean-Paul Ollivier terms it, was not that remarkable. It was not uncommon in the post-war years for cyclists to continue racing up to and beyond the age of forty. Bartali was the most
celebrated example; he rode his last race in November 1954, four months after his fortieth birthday. Other stars of the period such as Brik Schotte, Rik Van Steenbergen and Jean Robic also continued until they were over forty. What was surprising about Coppi’s final years was how poorly he raced in major events, when he could bring himself to start them. In contrast, Bartali rode one poor Giro, 1954, when he was thirteenth, and retired the following winter.
Journalists of the time, who had followed Coppi in his glory days, clearly could not fathom why he now kept going. One commentator, Indro Montanelli, wrote after Coppi’s death that there was a kind of glory in his stubborn refusal to accept reality. In his prime, Montanelli felt, it had taken only Bartali’s shadow to sap Coppi’s willpower; now, he refused to surrender in the face of impossible odds. ‘At forty, he had found the grit he lacked at the age of twenty or thirty.’
Biagio Cavanna, for one, appears to have believed that physically Coppi was still capable of victories in major races: in 1953 he had told a magazine that his protégé would go on winning past the age of forty and he continued to supply advice and massage until Coppi’s death. However, Cavanna had a vested interest in the
campionissimo
continuing to race: he was receiving a percentage of his winnings until shortly before Coppi died. Even for 1959, his share was 740,000 lire.
Those close to Coppi have various explanations for the slow, depressing coda to his career. Most say that he could not contemplate life without competing. ‘He asked me, “What will I do if I stop racing?"’ recalls Michele Gismondi. ‘You imagine it: you are used to being constantly on the move, travelling to races, training, you are always in cars and trains, everything imaginable, and suddenly you are sitting looking at the walls. He loved the bike too much.’ Perhaps he went on racing in the same way that his father worked the fields in Castellania. It is the oldest principle in farming: if the
weather is good when the crops are coming in you keep going because it might rain overnight. There was no reason for Coppi to stop, as long as the race organisers still wanted him and he could still earn more in an afternoon than a manual worker earned in a month.
That did not make it any less painful. During the disastrous Vuelta a España of 1959, after one particularly poor performance a French journalist asked Coppi if he understood that he was risking his reputation. He replied that he understood what was at stake: ‘I have signed contracts and I have to honour them. If I had understood how hard the Vuelta was, I would not have agreed to ride. Up to now, I have been privileged as a cyclist. Everything came easily to me. I did not know what suffering was.’ He added that Giulia was calling him every day asking him to stop racing.
Nino Defilippis, for one, does not believe that Coppi tarnished his reputation by continuing in this way: ‘Perhaps he didn’t actually need the money. The bike was his life. He had come from obscurity; stopping racing would have meant going back to the past, being forgotten, leaving that world behind. He raced for the people, the public, and they respected that. He went to the races as Coppi [rather than as a competitor]. People knew he wasn’t winning, and we [the other riders] knew that as well. It wasn’t a question of his looking bad, even when he had to plead with other riders to slow down. The people didn’t look at who won, didn’t go to them for autographs. They only wanted Coppi.’
* * *
Inevitably, the White Lady was castigated for Coppi’s decline. It was easy to blame her for emasculating the champion. His son Faustino dismisses this. ‘His decline was in the normal order of things, because he was old and had other interests.
My mother would certainly have preferred him to stop earlier, but it was his life, his work.’
Speculation about the corrosive effect that Giulia Occhini had on Coppi goes further than this. Some claim that he had to keep racing to earn the cash to subsidise her extravagant lifestyle, while paying money both to Bruna and Dr Locatelli. Others suggest that he raced for small contracts in order not to spend time at home with her, which seems far less likely. Raphael Geminiani is adamant: ‘He was ruined financially – he had to pay off the doctor and Bruna, assure the future of his children, and the White Lady was expensive, and what’s more at the end of his career he earned less money.’ He had settled 50 million lire on Bruna; the attempts to get his and Giulia’s marriages annulled via the Holy See cannot have come cheap.
Life with his White Lady bore little resemblance to his old existences, either the peasant childhood in Castellania or the gentle routine of Sestri with Bruna and little Marina. Visits to two former team-mates on successive days fifty years on showed how that new life was viewed. On the first day, I was told that at the Villa Coppi there were silver plates on the table. The following morning’s interviewee remembered the under-dishes being gold. Perhaps there were both in the cupboard, if Coppi adopted the same belt and braces policy as he did with his cars, of which he had four: two distinctively curved, powerful Lancia Aurelias (as driven by Formula One drivers Mike Hawthorn and Juan-Manuel Fangio), a Fiat Seicento and a Millecento, which he used as a support car in races.
‘Fausto was a simple man, with uncomplicated tastes, but he was discovering another world,’ says Raphael Geminiani. ‘Giulia transformed him completely. Everything changed! Fausto used to dress elegantly, soberly, but now – check suits, cravats. I remember going to dinner there, there was a
maître
d’hôtel
with white gloves. I said, “Fausto, this is not where you should be,” and he shook his head like a man who has no power. But he liked it because he was discovering new things.’ Another team-mate is more succinct: ‘She polished him up and at home she acted the fine lady.’
A former team-mate and his wife clearly felt the Villa Coppi was scandalously lavish by the standards of the post-war years; there were five servants, the bed linen was changed every day. When the cyclist asked for water a servant boy brought a large silver jug, inadequately filled. Giulia shouted at the lad, and he explained that the jug was so heavy that he had thought it was full. Her response was, ‘Fausto, you must sack him tomorrow.’ And they claim Fausto did just that.
Just how far Coppi had come from his natural element – wandering the hills around Castellania with his dog and his gun – was shown by a curious television appearance, on the variety slot
Il Musichiere
, where he sang ‘Nel blu, dipinto di blu’, the song that had won the San Remo Music Festival Prize in 1958. Coppi is ill at ease, appears strangely diminished (those who knew him say that he usually seemed taller than might have been expected), and his slightly hoarse voice sounds infinitely unhappy as he sings the words, the tale of a man who paints his hands and face blue and is whisked away by the wind. He is truly a man alone.
* * *
Coppi was chasing more than his old form when he set off to race in 1958 in a new Bianchi jersey. He was in search of the happy little world that had cocooned him in the five years before Serse’s death. Bianchi had taken him back in 1958, after an agreement was reached at the end of 1957 giving the bike manufacturer the right to make machines bearing the name Coppi. But this Bianchi team bore little resemblance to that
of his heyday. When Coppi left to form Carpano-Coppi the team had split, some
gregari
remaining with their leader, others remaining with the team, others quitting altogether. He would return to his own team on his own bikes in 1959, when he raced for Tricofilina-Coppi.
His relationship with Giulia had done more than tear his family apart; it had wrecked his ‘second family’, the close-knit inner circle within his team. Briefly, he fell out with Biagio Cavanna, but they resumed working together in his final season, 1959. Sandrino Carrea and other team-mates wanted nothing to do with the White Lady (‘There was a point when I just said, “enough is enough”’) but it was more than that. ‘The White Lady said we were just trying to take things from him, so we got angry and didn’t see him any more,’ says the wife of one former team-mate. ‘What can you say? When you come to my house, I don’t say you are going to steal something.’ In the glory days of Bianchi, they had all lived in each other’s houses, coming and going as they wished. ‘She eliminated his old companions, although I was allowed to visit, because I was a foreigner,’ says Raphael Geminiani. Masons and peasants were probably a little too sweaty for the world Giulia was building; and anyone who had been close to her Fausto amounted to competition.
Bruna had been unobtrusive but the presence of Giulia at Coppi’s side at bike races led to friction. Alfredo Binda’s and Fiorenzo Magni’s disputes with her were not isolated instances.
La Dama
or
La Damazza
, the riders nicknamed her. The first has overtones of ‘a fine lady’, the second is simply offensive. Predictably, she did not get on with Cavanna, although equally predictably she persuaded him to massage her. She threatened to shoot him during one of their arguments; he responded that if he didn’t have dark glasses on, he would rip her head off before she lifted the pistol. Michele Gismondi also had words with her on several occasions – the only incident he
will speak of is on one occasion in Naples when she wanted him to take little Faustino home and he refused. Another Bianchi rider, Guido de Santi, recalled that he was training with Coppi for the Giro di Campania in Naples when Giulia came alongside in a team car and accused him of talking about Fausto behind his back. He replied with ‘rude words’, adding that ‘Fausto, next to me, said nothing.’
Raphael Geminiani feels that Coppi continued racing because he was isolated. ‘Champions’ lives are built on personal success to such an extent that they lose touch with the outside world. They need to be kept in touch by having a band of close friends around them. They need an entourage.’ There was no one to advise Coppi against racing, or at least no one he trusted. His closest confidant, Serse, was long dead; his
gregari
were banished. Ironically, the person he was closest to, Giulia, most probably did not want him to go on racing. Letters she published in 1980 in the magazine
Occhio
indicate that his absences made her insecure: she accused him of infidelity and of not bothering to write.
The letters, written while Coppi was on a lengthy racing trip to South America in early 1958, reveal more about Giulia than they do about him, although clearly he is ‘racing and earning’ as ever, even if he is winning less. She makes constant declarations of love, pleads for attention, details her ill health. He appears distant; she sounds desperate. The letters suggest that there was a cooling in the relationship, at least on Coppi’s side, after the initial heat due to the pleasure of mutual discovery, the shared feeling that the world was against them. There are only hints of this elsewhere; Louison Bobet, for one, was shocked when he heard the way Giulia addressed Fausto at a race in 1959. There are persistent stories of arguments between the couple, often over money, according to Italian biographers. At times their squabbles could be overheard in the factory next door to Villa Coppi.
One reason for the lack of stability was the issue of the children. Giulia had given up access to Lolli and Maurizio, under conditions that stated she was permitted to see them every three months, at a religious school, with a nun in attendance so that she would not corrupt them. Faustino, on the other hand, had been registered as Dr Locatelli’s son immediately he was brought back to Italy, because in Argentina his mother had had to acknowledge that she was still Locatelli’s wife; according to Italian law, unless he formally gave up the child, Faustino was his. The doctor, not one to smooth his wife’s exit from the marriage, refused and his claim to paternity was to remain ongoing until well into 1960, several months after Fausto had died. Faustino did not bear the name Coppi, legally, until 1978, when the doctor was dead. When we discussed the issue a quarter of a century on, he did not once utter the name ‘Locatelli’.
* * *
Rumours that Coppi and the White Lady were going to part company first emerged in the Italian papers in October 1959. Those close to him are divided on the issue: some say he planned a quiet life on his own without her, others that he could never have left Faustino. That seems certain, given his love for his son, who was pictured in magazines surrounded with toys such as the massive pedal car he received on his first birthday, or waving at his father when the 1958 Giro d’Italia passed in front of the Villa. Coppi, it was said, persuaded a friend with an aeroplane to fly over the villa on Faustino’s fourth birthday, dropping flowers from the sky.