Gironimo!

by Tim Moore

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Moore

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Appendix

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Twelve years after Tim Moore toiled round the route of the Tour de France, he senses his achievement being undermined by the truth about ‘Horrid Lance’. His rash response is to take on a fearsome challenge from an age of untarnished heroes: the notorious 1914 Giro d‘Italia. History’s most appalling bike race was an ordeal of 400-kilometre stages, cataclysmic night storms and relentless sabotage – all on a diet of raw eggs and wine. Of the 81 who rolled out of Milan, only eight made it back.

  Committed to total authenticity, Tim acquires the ruined husk of a gearless, wooden-wheeled 1914 road bike, some maps and an alarming period outfit topped with a pair of blue-lensed welding goggles.

  What unfolds is the tale of one decrepit crock trying to ride another up a thousand lonely hills, then down them with only wine corks for brakes. From the Alps to the Adriatic the pair steadily fall to bits, on an adventure that is by turns bold, beautiful and recklessly incompetent.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Having ridden the route of the Tour de France in French Revolutions, led a donkey on a 500-mile pilgrimage in Spanish Steps and driven round the worst places in Britain in an Austin Maestro for You Are Awful (But I Like You), Tim Moore can look back on a towering career in daft misadventure. Gironimo!, his latest and most imposing pedal-powered endeavour, is a story he will be dining out on for years – alone at a table for one. Moore lives in London and still wears those googles at Christmas.

  ALSO BY TIM MOORE

  French Revolutions

  Do Not Pass Go

  Spanish Steps

  Nul Points

  I Believe in Yesterday

  You Are Awful (But I Like You)

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1.Le Tresor Ancien de Max – le grand bullshitter de Bretagne.

  2.My state-of-the-art outdoor restoration facility.

  3.Wheelwright? Wheel wrong.

  4.The La Française-Diamant that never was.

  5.Alfonso Calzolari (right) accepts another handshake after his victory.

  6.Negotiating the purchase of a 1914 Hirondelle Course sur Route No 7 with one of the world’s Frenchest men.

  7.Let the shoe-weighing commence!

  8.The first chain / another false start

  9.Fresh off the conveyor belt at Milan airport.

  10.All dressed up and ready to go. Three minutes before taking this photo, I was in the same spot entirely naked.

  11.Carlo ‘The ’Tache’ Durando and his fellow competitors register for the 1914 Giro d’Italia on the Corso Sempione in Milan.

  12.At the start line.

  13.The ritual of the bidet-laundry ritual.

  14.Day 2 and my 98-year-old saddle calls it at day. OW.

  15.Oven chips – the unacceptable face of pizza topping.

  16.The dispiriting view from my hotel room in Susa – Gateway to the Sodding Alps.

  17.My wine-cork brakes after two days of light usage.

  18.Operation Corky McBrake-o-Carve

  19.The very wonderful St Fabio of FREE-BIKE.

  20.Mondovi. This is what 147km does to an under-prepared man of 48.

  21.The Riviera: much less flat than I would have wished.

  22.In your FACE, Passo del Bracco.

  23.La Spezia’s famous Tunnel of Hate.

  24.Sweet dreams from the bedroom goblins of Lucca.

  25.First over the line at the Women’s Tour of Tuscany.

  26.The white roads of Chianti plotting my downfall.

  27.Paul thoughtfully captures my grovelling distress up Monte Bibico.

  28.Pushing hard into Umbria. Must emphasise that my vast rearward bulge is a rear pocket full of travel essentials rather than weird flesh.

  29.Bye, Paul. Off you go then. Don’t worry about me.

  30.Yes, this man is 48 years old.

  31.Another road-closure defied. I don’t play by the book but I get results.

  32.The Snails of Dehydrated Madness.

  33.On 11 September 2012, Timothy Moore Cried Here.

  34.Lunch of champions.

  35.Alfonso Calzolari: a five-foot man with watermelon bollocks.

  36.Topless family breakfast at Matera.

  37.The double-brandy descent after Roccaraso.

  38.Dr Stan’s Sticky White Fluid squirts into my valve once more.

  39.My three-hour beach-hut pit stop at Senigallia.

  40.The default Tim’s-eye view of Italy.

  41. The bastard plague of midges: up my nose and down my jersey.

  42.A filth-slathered Alfonso Calzolari (left) and his faithful wingman Clemente Canepari held upright by their Stucchi team bosses at the finish.

  43.The final analysis: slow and steady loses the race by 635km.

  44.Celebrating with a slightly bemused Alberto Masi outside his workshop at the Vigorelli velodrome in Milan.

  45.Alfonso Calzolari at 90. What a man.

  Thanks to Paolo Facchinetti, Jim Kent, Matthew Lantos, Lance McCormack, Suneil Basu, Thierry, Emile and the other tontons, Fabio at Free-Bike, Paul Ruddle, Matt, Fran and Bethan at Yellow Jersey, C.D. Conelrad and many others at AS, my arse, and my mummy and my daddy.

  Gironimo!

  Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy

  Tim Moore

  PROLOGUE

  The sun has just slipped behind the lonely Campanian Alps, taking summer with it and surrendering a dishevelled mountain-top lay-by to shadowy, misted silence. Briefly, at least, for an ugly noise now builds from beneath Monte Licinici’s final hairpin, the desperate gasps and creaks of aged toil. At length, inching waywardly out of the gloom, comes the ghost of a bike, and hunched over it the ghost of a man. Even in this light the pair are visibly past their ride-by date. The man could, theoretically at least, be a great-grandfather; the bike could have belonged to his. Their geriatric struggle demands sombre respect, but doesn’t get it, because the man is wearing a giant Rubettes cap and blue-glassed leather goggles, and when he comes to a squeaky halt in the lay-by his woollen-pouched nuts slam stoutly down onto the crossbar.

  As formerly round objects, the man’s reproductive organs are not alone in this scene. You now note that his bicycle’s wheels are rather less circular than is considered traditional, and 100 per cent more wooden. The rear is unencumbered by gears, and keen eyes may spot the words ‘VINI DI CHIANTI’ printed on the crudely hand-crafted brake blocks. A wise observer – he’s just behind you – might take account of all this, and the rust-mottled frame’s heft and geometry, to date the machine to the very dawn of competitive endurance racing. That bicycle, he will tell you, is one hundred years old. And that man, you will tell him, has just burst into tears.

  Set into the lay-by’s rocky retaining wall are two weather-beaten plaques, each honouring a long-gone local cyclist.
His unbecoming tears are a tribute to their lives and times, the glorious, brutal age of Fausto Coppi and a generation either side, when those who gave their all in the saddle stood alone as towering national heroes. He’s weeping for them, and for anyone who’s ever ridden a bike up a hill too far. Which, predictably enough, means he’s really weeping for himself, because it is getting dark and he’s a spent force in the unpeopled middle of a mountainous nowhere; because he has never felt so far from home; because he and his ancient steed have both aged twenty years since the distant foot of this mountain; because a largely decorative braking system means he should put his name down for a plaque on that wall of death before the forthcoming descent.

  This is a man on the cusp of surrender: he has just emptied himself once too often, and is barely halfway through a ride that a century before decimated a field of braver, better and much, much younger men. All things considered, it’s just as well that his nuts have by this stage long since been pummelled and battered into a pain-resistant coma, or he’d probably still be crying up there now.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘YOU HAVE SOME, uh, expérience mécanique with the bicycles?’

  My questioner smiled at me across a stained garage floor bestrewn with dead and dismembered machines.

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘You know: un peu.’

  This was a hard, straight fact, delivered in a deceitful tone of manly understatement. I had driven to a village in Brittany’s damp, green fundament to meet this man, whose name was Max, and purchase the mountain of ancient bike bits he had advertised for sale. The trip had involved a dawn ferry and several hours of wet autoroute. I gazed across the jumble of corroded spokes, sprockets, rims and tubing and felt my mind clog with misgivings.

  ‘Voilà,’ said Max, picking up a dented tin full of hollow, square-ended brass bolts and handing it to me. ‘Très importants!’

  I weighed it with a knowing smile, thinking: What in the name of crap are these? More generally, why have I gone to all this trouble for the privilege of filling my car – and then my family home – with rusty artefacts of largely unknown purpose? Above all, how had I come so far without considering, even once, the ludicrous enormity of the task I had set myself?

  The hands that held this tin had not attempted such an overwhelming technical challenge since the Airfix age. The legs beginning to tremble on Max’s oil-blotted concrete had last been put to sustained athletic use twelve years previously. Yet somehow I expected to employ these appendages first to assemble a functioning bicycle from the century-old components piled up before me, then ride it around the 3,162km route of the toughest race in history.

  I passed the tin back to Max and asked him where his toilet was.

  The journey that led me to this Breton garage had started sixty mornings earlier, when I opened the inside back page of my paper and read that US federal prosecutors were dropping a two-year investigation into allegations of systematic doping by Lance Armstrong and his former team, US Postal. The article ended with a quote from the world’s best known and my least favourite cyclist, muted by his usual pugnacious standards but still enough to pepper the insides of my cheeks with angrily shattered fragments of Bran Flake. ‘It is the right decision, and I commend them for reaching it.’

  In June 2000, I rode the route of the Tour de France, a race that Armstrong was about to win for the second time. His first victory had seemed like the ultimate feel-good comeback: from the ravages of cancer to triumph in sport’s most fearsome physical challenge. But when I watched his second – on telly and, for a couple of stages, from the roadside – something was beginning to trouble me. Not simply Armstrong himself, who although uniquely disagreeable, certainly wasn’t alone in unearthing a previously well-hidden command of the core Tour-winning skill, that of riding extremely fast up mountains. It was a more general unease, a sense that even average riders seemed to be breezing through an undertaking that had reduced their predecessors to vacant, mumbling wrecks of men. As a physical challenge, it seemed much less fearsome.

  Disquiet crystallised as I stood amongst the flag-faced young drunkards on Mont Ventoux’s most brutal section, a pine-lined stretch so steep we should have all been roped together. Armstrong had already sped past us, in an elite group whose combined career accomplishments are now absent from the records or served generously salted. When two of his US Postal deputies presently trundled by – irrelevant domestiques whose work for the day was done – no one else paid much attention. I alone tracked their progress with wide, unblinking eyes. These two men had just cycled 140km at an average speed in excess of 35kmh, pacing their leader up three substantial climbs and the relentless lower slopes of Ventoux. I knew what they’d just done – a month before, I’d done it myself, albeit rather more slowly and without Lance Armstrong up my arse. The memory of that terrible, hollowing day was still fresh and raw, and here were these two blokes rolling up an especially tender 11 per cent slice of it, nattering to each other. Sharing a joke with one hand on the bars and the other scratching an earlobe.

  This probably isn’t the place to hold forth at righteous length about the curse of EPO and all the other forms of blood doping that have blighted professional cycling over recent decades (for a full overview, I would direct you to Jeremy Whittle’s Bad Blood, and The Secret Race, by Armstrong’s former teammate Tyler Hamilton). Suffice to say that all the bad thoughts came rushing back when I read that Armstrong, the cheatingest cheat in Cheatsville, had once again somehow cajoled and bullied and lawyered his way out of trouble.

  The basely gladiatorial incident that hooked me on cycling was Stephen Roche collapsing just past the line at La Plagne in the 1987 Tour, oxygen mask clamped to his waxen face, eyes a million miles away, too far gone to grasp that his extraordinary, soul-flaying effort had all but won him the race. That, with apologies to Roche’s mother, was what Grand Tours were supposed to be about. As if to emphasise the extent to which they no longer were, during the 2001 Tour I had to put up with Armstrong feigning exhaustion, gasping theatrically for the cameras before slipping away to victory up Alpe d’Huez without breaking sweat.

  In the years that followed, improved drug-testing and public opprobrium at least reined in the blood-doping free-for-all. But something had changed, and for good. Riders, in the preferred argot of endurance sport, just didn’t seem to bury themselves any more. Legs seemed fresher and so did minds. Races became ever more predictable, more calculated, more professional in the worst sense of the word. When the camera closed in on a rider’s face, you rarely saw suffering. You saw concentration.

  Sport, of course, was the real loser in all this. Sport, and me. I had pushed myself to the vomity edge of my capabilities riding the Tour route, and now people would look at these focused cyclo-bots pedalling calmly around it and think: Meh. Every race that finished without some shattered Rochian collapse seemed to erode my accomplishment. The age of blood, sweat and tears – my age – was fading into sepia-toned history.

  Three months after my Tour ride, I went up to Manchester to watch Chris Boardman take on Eddy Merckx’s twenty-eight-year-old hour record. Boardman had, in fact, already beaten the mark on several occasions, and by gigantic margins: four years previously, he had cycled almost seven kilometres further than the 49.5 that Eddy had managed in sixty minutes. The intensity of Merckx’s 1972 effort – he called it the hardest ride of his life – took something out of the great man that he would never recover. Boardman, though an indubitably talented athlete, was no Merckx: his Eddy-battering achievements were a tribute to the technology and wind-tunnel ergonomics of a new era. Chris Boardman piloted a disc-wheeled carbon-fibre space-racer with his arms out like Superman and a big plastic teardrop on his head. Eddy had just stuck on his old leather-sausage track helmet and ridden a bike.

  Shortly after Boardman rode 56km in an hour, the cycling authorities drew up new rules to defend the integrity of the sport’s blue-riband record. Merckx’s distance was reinstated as the official mark; any future attempt to
better it would have to be undertaken in comparable fashion. Old-school bike, equipment, riding position. When Boardman accepted the challenge, it seemed almost foolhardy. I remember looking at him as he sat on the start line astride his stock, steel-framed track bike, thinking: Fair play for giving this a go, Chris, but you’re not going to make it. He very nearly didn’t. As the velodrome roof loudly rose, a superlative, bankrupting effort in the final seconds hauled him past Eddy’s mark, by a mere 10 metres.

  Spooning up the last Bran Flakes, I thought of Boardman, and how he had struck a blow for old-fashioned grit and old-fashioned kit. He had shown it was possible, after all, to reclaim cycling from the high-tech, low-sweat Generation Armstrong, clicking impassively through its electronic gears, taking orders from the cardiac monitor on its handlebars and the directeur sportif in its earpiece.

  I noisily turned the newspaper page, feeling a quiver of righteous, flinty determination run up my spine. On another day, this neurological tremor would have fizzed swiftly through my synapses and been forgotten. Instead, and in impressively unanticipated fashion, the words of survival expert Ray Mears now caused it to splatter my brain with raw, claggy hunks of earnest resolve.

  The interview laid out two compelling facts: Ray was precisely my age, and he was hanging up his bush hat. Announcing that he would henceforth focus on reviewing past adventures rather than planning new ones, Ray said: ‘You get to a point where you can look back and enjoy the view, because you’re not having to climb the ladder so hard.’ Jesus. An ex-adventurer at forty-seven. Was I at that point? Was I shit. Speak for yourself, Mears. I’ve got a few rungs left in me.

  I set my jaw, and scratched the grizzled stubble that lined it. OK, so maybe at my age I wouldn’t be Raying it up in the woods, living off bark and making a tent out of cuckoos. But surely I still had some big bike miles in my legs, enough for a proper ride. Something epic, a challenge from the old school. Keeping it real, Boardman style, two fingers up at Lance and a salute in tribute to cycling’s whey-faced, lion-hearted heroes of old.