Fallen Angel (6 page)

The pink jersey was saved, but next day came the toughest mountain stage of the entire race, finishing in the town of Ortisei; only 110 kilometres long, it included three massive climbs, the Falzarego, Pordoi and Sella. With only a rest day
and two more days' racing to follow before the finish, this was where the race would be decided. To make sure his riders would have the extra kick they needed, Pavesi set out the night before and drove up both the first two passes. In a café at the top of the Falzarego he provided the café owner with two bottles and told him to fill them with coffee and hand them to the first two riders over the pass. ‘How do you know they will be your riders?' asked the proprietor. ‘One will be wearing red, white and green [Italian national champion, the jersey worn by Bartali] and the other will be in pink,' answered the manager.

He was correct in his prediction that Coppi and Bartali would ride the stage together, but the precise account of what happened depends on the point of view:
Bartaliano
or
Coppiano
. Bartali made the running early in the stage, with Coppi struggling to follow him. Twice Coppi punctured, with Bartali waiting. On the final climb, however, it was Bartali's turn to have a flat tyre. Coppi attacked at once, only to be told by Pavesi that he must wait: ‘Pacts are things that you must respect!' In his autobiography, Bartali was adamant: ‘If I'd been from another team he wouldn't have won the Giro. He was not experienced and had his limits on the climbs, he would suddenly have nothing in the tank. When that happened in the Dolomites I was the one who saved him from disaster. I didn't do it for him, but for Legnano who paid my wages.' He added that if he had helped Coppi he had done so unwillingly, ‘because he asked for things he shouldn't have'.

One eyewitness, Beppe Pegoletti, writing for
La Nazione
, described how Bartali waited for Coppi, shouting encouragement, pacing him ‘with patience, even with love' as the young man struggled to hang on to his wheel. At one point Coppi stopped, and Bartali took a handful of snow and rubbed it on Coppi's forehead, then he dropped it onto the nape of
his neck. Towards the end of the stage, on the descent to the finish in the little town of Ortisei, Coppi missed a turning and punctured: it was Bartali who gave him his wheel.

Coppi rode into the vast Arena in Milan two days later, the clear winner of the Giro at his first attempt at the age of twenty. The 27,000-lire first prize was his, including a 10,000-lire
Premio del Duce
. The entire Coppi family had travelled to Milan to welcome him in the great open-air stadium, deliberately built to resemble an ancient Roman amphitheatre, on the edge of the Sempione park. The men of the family – Domenico, Uncle Fausto, Livio, Serse – had listened to the mountain stages around the one radio in the village, which was kept in the schoolroom. They had received occasional postcards from their Faustino, two or three of them with a brief message: ‘Don't worry, the
maglia rosa
is on its way.'

Whatever the extent of Bartali's assistance, it was a remarkable achievement in a race of such complexity and distance. Usually, stage races favour the older rider: winning such an event at twenty is truly rare. Suddenly Coppi was thrust into the limelight, as he recognised in his memoirs
Le Drame de Ma Vie
, published in 1950. ‘It's a curious thing, becoming a star. In one day, a hundred new friends turn up whom you didn't know the day before; the cinema, press and radio take you over. Your legend is born in such a different form compared to the reality that it astounds you. Another Fausto Coppi came into the world, who bore no resemblance to the Fausto Coppi I felt I had quite a few good reasons to know.'

It was also the first act in what would become Italy's greatest sporting rivalry. Bartali clearly resented playing second fiddle to his young team-mate. ‘You can rest but don't have too many illusions: give it a year and I'll put things back how they should be,' he told Coppi. Instead, they had to wait six years for the Giro to be run again.

Two days after shocking Italy with his Giro d'Italia win, Coppi was called up. The transformation from obscurity to overnight celebrity to infantryman No. 7375 in a couple of weeks must have been bewildering, but this was in keeping with the times. Italy had declared war on France and Britain the previous day, on 10 June 1940. Mussolini was about to perform his ‘stab in the back', the attempt to conquer France through the Riviera. Invasions of Greece and North Africa were shortly to follow.

Incongruous as it is to think of sport continuing in a relatively normal way at such a time, the formative years of Coppi's career had coincided with Europe's descent into war. In Italy, the fascist regime had always taken a close interest in cycling. ‘A sport of poets', Mussolini called it. Stages of the Giro were run down newly opened autostradas, and ministers put pressure on Gino Bartali to race, and win, the Tour de France, in order to enhance Italy's prestige on the international stage. The coming conflict had had little impact on the sheltered world of two wheels, in Italy at least. In summer 1939, the world track championship had been cancelled after the French, Belgian and Dutch Federations pulled their riders out. In autumn that year, the Giro di Lombardia had gone ahead with only one car in the caravan due to fuel shortages.

But as Coppi was learning the art of cycling with Cavanna in 1938, Italy was coming to terms with Mussolini's anti-semitic
laws, which placed Jews on the same footing as in Nazi Germany. The newspapers that described his first victories in the late summer of 1939 had Hitler's invasion of Poland and Britain's entry into the war on their front pages. In May and June 1940, even as Coppi and Bartali scrapped in the Dolomites, Hitler's armies were marching on Paris. Italy had its mind elsewhere in those weeks: when would Mussolini take his country to war?

Italy entered the conflict on 10 June, the day after Coppi had returned to Castellania in triumph and given his young cousin Piero a new bike.
La Gazzetta dello Sport
had summed up his win in martial terms: ‘Fausto is the conscript who has broken with tradition and won the Giro on his debut … this Giro was won by a little soldier with permission to take his leave.' This was actually more than a standard metaphor for a team worker who had won with the approval of his leader; Coppi's military service had been postponed by a month to enable him to ride that Giro. Soon, however, he was a conscript for real.

Coppi said later that the notion of having to kill another man revolted him, but he did not see action for two and a half years. Initially he was posted to Limone Piemonte, near the Alpine front; when the brief French ‘campaign' was over, he was sent to Tortona, just up the road from Novi Ligure. His commanding officers were sympathetic, so his life barely altered, even though he was now in barracks: he kept his bike in a workshop behind the barracks, continued training and racing and went to Cavanna's almost daily for massage. By his own admission, he was not a good soldier: something was always missing when his kit was inspected, and ‘four or five times a day', he said, he had trouble with his puttees.

There was another significant change, but it occurred more gradually. In late August 1940, a shy, brown-haired girl named Bruna Ciampolini came to ask the star for his autograph at a race. He promised her a signed postcard, but never delivered;
eventually she wrote to him at Castellania, addressing her postcard simply to
Corridore Ciclista Fausto Coppi
, politely asking if he could provide the card. Bruna was a couple of years younger than Fausto and came from a suburb of Genoa called Sestri Ponente, where her parents had a grocer's shop. For the duration of the war, to avoid the bomber raids that were expected over Genoa, she had been sent to stay with her aunt at Villalvernia, a village between Castellania and Novi.

They were both shy individuals, and the relationship developed slowly. This was a small world, though, and there were connections. Bruna and Coppi would happen to meet as they both rode their bikes down the road between Novi and Tortona; they went to the same bike shop, Rossi's, in Tortona. One of Bruna's friends was related to a team-mate of Coppi's. They were photographed in a courtyard, among apple blossom and budding vines, the kind of image that must have been reproduced in hundreds of thousands of photograph albums across the world in those years. The young soldier is in his fatigues, leaning casually next to his girl; Bruna wears a striped skirt and plain jumper. By the time he left for the front in March 1943, they were engaged to be married, according to one version because it was the only way they could get permission from her old-fashioned father to go to the cinema together.

Life in Italy remained relatively normal in those early years of conflict. There was limited rationing – and, being Italy, ways were found to get round it – cinemas and theatres continued to open, and the
calcio
(football) championship continued. As in much of Europe, cycle racing never quite came to a complete halt. The Giro d'Italia stopped with the outbreak of war, although in 1942 and 1943 the authorities arranged for a circuit of eight one-day events that carried the name. Criteriums – circuit races on a short course run for a paying public – continued, but professionals were made to compete for free as their contribution to the war effort.
Following the example set by Nazi Germany, the Italian Federation took upon itself to scrutinise those amateurs who applied for professional licences, to filter out ‘undesirable' cyclists.

Nicknamed the ‘rocket express' by his fellow conscripts, Coppi was allowed to train three days a week as long as he was back in barracks for curfew, and he was allowed to race, though only to boost the prestige of his regiment rather than to fill his own pocket. Wrapped up as he was in his own sporting world, he cannot have been the only Italian to have felt, as he put it, that the conflict did not really concern him at this time. The war, he said, was ‘a very regrettable phenomenon, but one which happily had only a moderate effect on my personal life and my cycling career. I paid a sort of tax, by being in barracks four days a week, and that was all I had to do.'

The rivalry with Bartali became intense, even though the two cyclists were still competing together in the colours of Legnano, and Bartali was nominally his leader. In the autumn following his Giro d'Italia win Coppi was close to matching the older man in the Giro di Lombardia. He escaped from an early break on the climb leading to the chapel at Madonna del Ghisallo, only for his stomach to play up – a recurring weakness – enabling Bartali to overtake him 300 metres from the top. In 1941, however, Coppi scored a string of wins in the other provincial single-day events that are the mainstay of the Italian calendar: Giro dell'Emilia, Giro del Veneto, Tre Valli Varesine, Giro della Provincia di Milano. He was still working with Cavanna, with the blind man on a percentage of his prize money. Within Legnano, he had recruited at least one team-mate, Mario Ricci, to work for him rather than Bartali, who had, he said, begun to try to sabotage him by making him eat more than his fragile stomach could stand before a race.

Most significantly, and most bitterly for Bartali, Coppi opened his 1941 season by winning the Giro della Toscana: this event was in the Italian No.1's backyard, in front of his home crowd. Coppi rode the final forty miles ahead of the field to finish three minutes ahead of Bartali, in spite of heavy, chilly rain that turned the roads on the main climb, the Colle Saltino, into heavy mud and made the gravelly descent highly dangerous. The fourth rider was twenty-four minutes behind. Coppi, already, was showing the ability to judge a solo effort and the smooth pedalling style that would be his hallmark. In victory, he was opening up huge margins, and the implication was that the young upstart, in only his second season as a professional, was about to overtake his master.

During 1941 it became clear that Bartali and his young team-mate were ahead of all the opposition, although
La Gazzetta dello Sport
felt that Coppi was ‘the strongest cyclist of the season in Italy'. In 1942 Coppi edged ahead in the stakes by beating Bartali once more, in the national road race championship. He did so after it seemed a puncture had put him totally out of the running, and he recalled Bartali's shock when he finished and found out who had relieved him of the title. ‘He went as grey as ash. He shook, as if the news weighed more heavily on his legs than the kilometres he had just ridden. His
soigneurs
hurried to support him.' Bartali, on the other hand, took the first ‘Giro di Guerra', the regime-backed circuit of eight events that had replaced the three-week Giro.

In one area, however, Coppi was in a class of his own. His ability to judge his pace translated well to one discipline on the track: pursuiting, in which two riders start on opposite sides of a velodrome and ‘pursue' each other over a given distance, in those days 5,000 metres for professionals. Pursuits would draw the paying crowds because the stars of the road
racing world – a Giro winner, a Classics specialist – could be hired to ride: the stars were visible for the whole six minutes or so that a pursuit lasted, it was easy to work out who was winning and the confrontation could be hyped up even if the stars were just there for the fee.

In a pursuit, Coppi was so superior to the other riders that he would usually close the half-lap gap on his opponent, ending the race early. Three weeks after winning the Giro he took the Italian national pursuit championship, at an average speed verging on 50kph, precociously fast for a twenty-year-old. His fame spread, within the bounds of a Europe at war; he was invited to race in Berlin, and on the Oerlikon track in Zurich in a contest against the rising Swiss star Ferdi Kübler. These were Coppi's first trips abroad and it showed: en route to Switzerland he was not permitted to change money, on arriving he could not find a taxi, so he had to walk the four miles to the stadium, asking the way as he went. At the stadium, the guard had no idea who he was, did not speak Italian and would not let him in until an angry crowd had gathered insisting this was indeed Fausto Coppi and not an imposter. In front of a home crowd numbering 10,000, Kübler was overtaken after less than four kilometres.