by Tim Moore
My neighbour Bernie was in her front garden when I trundled up the road. ‘So here’s the famous bike,’ she said. ‘Is it really one hundred years old?’
‘Not entirely.’ I held up a plastic bag containing the recently severed chain, in a hand that might have pulled seagulls out of an oil slick.
‘Oh,’ she said, frowning doubtfully at the Evans-sourced replacement chain, then the Hirondelle in general, then me. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you absolutely sure this is sensible?’
The postman had been. On the mat lay a vintage postcard depicting an Edwardian lady being upended bloomers-first from her runaway bicycle. It was from my parents, the message on the rear less of a bon voyage than a last-minute appeal to reason. ‘Go slowly and be careful!’ That was in my father’s hand, the last two words underlined twice. ‘It’s never too late to change your mind,’ my mother had written beneath it. ‘We will love you whatever you choose to do.’
Beside the card sat a slim, transatlantic-stamped package. I tore it open and those siren calls of paternal and neighbourly concern began to recede. Inside: a bespoke black-leather frame bag, just large enough to accommodate a wallet and phone, with stout brass press studs on straps to be slung round the top tube. I’d ordered it two months before; it had arrived with just a day to spare. I held the bag up to the fading light and saw that my special request had been thrillingly fulfilled: just above the bottom seam, stamped deep into the leather in an aptly archaic typeface, were the words ‘ALFONSO CALZOLARI’.
Some gland within me squirted a cocktail of raw emotions directly into my spine. Who thought this was a good idea? Not Bernie, not my parents, not me. But I knew a man who did and his name was here in my hands. Then I flung the old chain into the new bag, clipped it to the Hirondelle’s crossbar and pedalled straight back to Evans, where I bought a little chain-repair link and failed to obtain a refund for the now-filthied item I’d bought there an hour before.
CHAPTER 5
IT HAD BEEN damp and more than a little nippy when I’d pedalled off into the west London dawn, bound for Heathrow Terminal 4. Here in Milan it was vehemently neither. Down by the lonely ‘weird shit’ carousel at the far end of Linate Airport’s baggage hall, every time a lawn mower or a surfboard parted the rubber-strip curtains, it brought in a sauna waft of outside air. I’d been waiting almost an hour, yawning hugely and contemplating the miracle of impracticality that was my all-white civvy outfit: canvas shoes and trouser hems already streaked with ancient chain oil from the eight-mile ride to Heathrow, shirt cuffs blackened by a protracted ordeal in the Terminal 4 ‘repack area’.
The Alitalia website offered a helpful welcome to passengers transporting bicycles, but the reaction at their Italian-staffed Heathrow check-in suggested I had turned up with a horse. ‘Please, signore, how can you believe this is possible?’ It took twenty minutes to persuade them to consult their own regulations on bikes as baggage, then another forty to package the Hirondelle to their ever-changing satisfaction: tyres deflated, pedals off, handlebars turned in – no, the other way – front wheel off, front wheel back on, bubble wrap, more bubble wrap, even more bubble wrap.
Right at the death, a senior official arrived to demand a ‘special luggage charge’: the commendably random sum of €118, ‘euro cash only, no card please’. None of this seemed at all in keeping with the bike-loving amenability Lance had painted into the national character.
‘Would it help if I promised not to shag your sister?’
Nothing in his expression implied that he’d understood any part of this proposal, but the fact remains that the bike and I got on board without an extra penny changing hands.
The carousel conveyor lurched into life and a huge iceberg of plastic sheeting forced itself through the rubber strips. I heaved it off, made a terrible shredded mess, and then, before a gathering throng of baggage handlers and customs officials, laboriously returned the Hirondelle to its pre-Alitalian condition. When it was done I filled the bidons from a drinking fountain and propped the bike and my back against the wall, waiting for the audience to disperse. Bad news for the elderly male cleaner who chose to linger: my final public performance was a costume change, which began with taking absolutely all of my clothes off.
Against the odds, I was at once very glad of those leather-shielded blue goggles, my Robin Gibbs. Pushing the Hirondelle through the arrivals hall with half my face hidden, I felt gratefully removed from the attention, as if somebody else was being stared and tittered at. The heat outside was smothering, and the airport’s hinterland typically grotty, but the Gibb goggles bathed the world in a cool and flattering azure wash. Then I pedalled off towards the city centre on a six-lane expressway, taking it easy, and even easier once I’d confirmed a suspicion formed on my 8-mile ride to Heathrow: the application of cork pad to wood rim exerted little influence on the speed of a fully laden Hirondelle No 7 Course sur Route. How very fortunate that on a Thursday afternoon in high summer, the traffic was extremely sparse.
Downtown Milan proved quieter still, a broiled ghost town. Italians, I surmised, adhere to French-pattern holiday traditions: the entire nation spends August on the beach. The shops were shuttered and the pavements empty. A digital display outside a pharmacy told me it was 16.04, and 41 degrees centigrade.
My quarry, as I flap-slapped over tram-tracks up the deserted, flagstoned boulevards, was the 1914 Giro’s start line on the Corso Sempione, and I think you can guess what lead me to it. That’s right: smell, the distinctive scent of history itself overlaid with fragrant top notes of heroic accomplishment. Verified, when necessary, by a sat-nav mounted on my crossbar. (I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. This was an absolutely original period device, made out of two pocket watches brazed to a portable theodolite.)
Plotting my route with the help of Alfonso’s race diary, as abridged by Paolo Facchinetti, I’d established that the 1914 Giro followed many roads that had subsequently fallen into deep obscurity. Getting lost would certainly be authentic: in that race as in every other grand tour of the era, wrong turnings were an almost daily tribulation. But cycling even 2 feet further than necessary seemed like a young man’s game. Plus, in addition to the catalogue of progress-monitoring data that is the very life-stuff of male middle age, this particular sat-nav – I appear to have told a fatuous lie about that theodolite – had a feature that allowed you to race against a virtual competitor who advanced at the rate of your choosing. On the plane I’d calculated and programmed in Alfonso Calzolari’s average overall speed – 23.374kmh seemed far from shabby given the 400km stages, the available technology and a booze-centric approach to chemical performance enhancement. A little digital Alfonso now sat astride his pixelated bike, raring to go, on a subsidiary menu of my Garmin 800 Edge – a device that was so much more than the Huret speedometer I never had. This omniscient infoholic on my handlebars would tell me how hot it was and how high we were, and where we were, and where we were going, and when it was getting dark, and how many calories I was burning and my current state of mind via a library of over two hundred on-screen emoticons, from ‘pompous sneer’ to ‘sickening wink’. (Feature not available on real Garmin 800 Edge.)
Have a look online and you’ll find some wonderful images of the Grand Ristorante Sempioncino in its gas-lit heyday, mostly depicting Edwardian couples in evening wear waltzing graciously around an enormous palm-lined dance floor. The venue that hosted the 1914 Giro’s opening ceremony had, of course, long since been demolished, and squeaking to a drawn-out, corky halt outside the appointed address I understood that 61 Corso Sempione was not going to see me off in style. In place of the Grand Ristorante stood a diligently unmomentous seven-storey apartment block, gazing blandly out across a boulevard lined with thirsty plane trees.
I rooted out Paolo’s book and looked again at the photo of the riders gathered outside the Sempioncino with their bikes for final registration. No fisherman’s jumpers and sou’westers just yet: they were still in their
Sunday best, three-piece suits and straw boaters. One was looking right down the lens with an air of impressive insouciance, hands in pockets, backside propped on crossbar, face half-filled by a mighty handlebar ’tache. The caption identified him as Carlo Durando of the Maino team; I riffled through Paolo’s index and was almost tearfully pleased to find him listed as one of the eight finishers.
‘A test for none but the strong – and the desperate.’ Provided by one of the journalists who would follow the 1914 Giro in a fleet of Fiat Tipo Zeros (my word, Paolo did his homework), this neatly summarised the groundbreaking awfulness of that year’s itinerary, and the dreadful poverty that drove eighty-one men to the start line. Pre-war Italy was a place of shocking deprivation: tens of thousands died every year from hunger and deficiency diseases, and half of all Italians were illiterate. No surprise to learn that three million of them – a tenth of the entire population – emigrated to the US in the first fifteen years of the century.
A career in professional cycling was one of the very few routes out of grinding hardship. ‘To ride is to work,’ said Armando Cougnet, who organised the first Giro in 1909 and ruled the event as race director for half a century. ‘Each turn of the pedal is like a blow of the worker’s hammer.’ Every great Italian rider before the 1960s was raised in extremely humble circumstances, their talent unearthed through epic feats of work-related cyclo-commuting. Take Costante Girardengo, the original campionissimo, champion of champions, reared in rural poverty with eight siblings and sent out to earn his keep at a distant factory, a job that involved a daily 40km round-trip ride. Girardengo proved himself a glutton for pedalling punishment, who went on to win the notoriously demanding Milan–San Remo race more times than anyone but Eddy Merckx, and was still riding the Giro – an event he won twice – at the age of forty-three. Four days after the 1914 Giro rolled away from Milan, the twenty-one-year-old Girardengo would come home first in what was and remains the event’s longest ever stage, 430.3 non-stop kilometres from Lucca to Rome. Two days later, this self-evidently super-hardcore endurance athlete abandoned by the roadside in tears, undone not by injury or breakdown but by the event’s soul-destroying relentlessness.
Drawn up by Cougnet in full Bastard-General mode, the 1914 route deliberately set out to explore the very limits of human desperation. The number of stages was cut and the overall length increased, meaning riders faced the unparalleled attritional brutality of covering 3,162km in just eight non-stop stages, averaging very nearly 400km each. Cougnet was encouraged in his devilish work by the Giro’s new chief sponsor, a newspaper group keen to promote itself throughout Italy: the 1914 route dutifully encompassed the nation from the northwestern Alps (thanks, Armando) to Bari right down in the southeast. The bike manufacturers who sponsored the pro teams were just as hot on a properly awful ordeal, to showcase the durability of machines that were now being pitched to the mass-market as indispensable workhorses. They were also hoping to impress the military: after winning the 1911 Giro, Bianchi was awarded a Ministry of War contract to supply 63,000 bicycles for Italy’s imminent invasion of what is now Libya. In May 1914 it would have seemed a fair bet that other conflicts with even more lucrative potential lay in wait.
As the sour cherry on top of the pain-cake, Cougnet announced that the 1914 Giro would be decided by time alone, casting aside the simpler and more humane points system (riders were previously awarded points for their finishing position in each stage, totted up to decide the overall winner). In this he was inspired by Tour de France director Henri Desgrange, his partner in violent crime, who had recently dropped the points system from the Tour after blaming it for ‘a worrying decline in competitive aggression’. Once their finishing position in a stage seemed secure, riders would unsurprisingly take it easy, and there was nothing that infuriated Cougnet and Desgrange more than one of their professionals not flogging himself into the ground. Racing against the clock, every second had to be fought for; in the 1914 Giro there would be no let-up.
What of the carrot that Cougnet dangled before his riders, as he prepared to stripe their buttocks raw with the stick of physical suffering? Well, the winner of the 1914 Giro was promised 3,000 lire, a sum that after adjustment for inflation translates to around €9,000 in today’s money. When you consider that Giro victory is now rewarded with precisely fifty times that amount, it’s not too hard to understand why Cougnet found himself a few starters short of a peloton. With twelve days to go, he boldly addressed this situation by throwing entry open to all comers. So it was that amongst the hard-bitten, long-suffering pros lined up outside the Grand Ristorante Sempioncino were fifteen of the rankest of rank amateurs. ‘Extraordinary young adventurers,’ is Paolo Facchinetti’s apt description of these aspiranti, who turned up in Milan on borrowed bikes with no inkling of what they were letting themselves in for. ‘Most were unemployed,’ says Facchinetti, ‘and all were desperate. Many may have felt they would at least eat better in the race than they could at home.’ The youngest, Umberto Ripamonti, was a local boy of nineteen.
A crowd of over ten thousand stood along the moonlit Corso Sempione as Milan’s many clocks struck midnight. Every stage of the 1914 Giro would commence at this extraordinary hour, designed to ensure a well-attended evening turnout when the riders toiled up to the finish line eighteen or nineteen hours later. Surveying the massive, peloton-ready boulevard yawning out before me, I could quite easily picture the scene, even though it was August, not May, four in the afternoon rather than midnight and I had several hundred feet of hot, broad pavement all to myself.
This was it, then. In place of a starter’s pistol I propped the camera on the seat of a parked scooter and took a self-timer shot. Looking at it now, what strikes me is how very clean everything is. My crisp white cap and jersey, the Hirondelle’s shiny grey tyres and varnished rims, the starched black canvas of the saddlebag and the gleaming brass press-studs of my Alfonso-branded frame pouch. And my fresh, pale face with its bloodless half-smile, a gawp of abject disbelief clearly visible through those polished blue lenses.
I double-checked the safety pin holding my shorts up and took a girding swig of sun-warmed airport water. Then I slammed an old man’s shoe into a toe-clip and eased my behind onto a dead man’s saddle. Off the pavement – ker-thunk – and steadily away up the desolate heat-hazed boulevard, northwest into a mighty low sun. ‘To ride is to work,’ I said to my knees. ‘Each turn of the pedals is like a click of the freelance writer’s mouse.’
Back in 1914, things started to go wrong almost at once. The clear night sky abruptly vanished behind scurrying storm clouds, and at the satellite town of Rho, after a mere fifteen minutes in the saddle, the heavens tore open. What unfolded in the seventeen hours ahead has no parallel in sporting history, unless you count Captain Scott’s 2,600km Antarctic steeplechase. In faithful tribute, my own Giro took its own rather dramatic turn after fifteen minutes, though of course I wasn’t even halfway to Rho by then.
Beyond the virgin fragility of its subject, the other conspicuous feature of my start-line photo is the lopsided heap of stuff piled on top of the saddlebag. My predicted failure to shoehorn everything into that canvas anti-Tardis had left it stacked with overspill, held in place with a strap borrowed from what I’ve just been loudly informed is – was – my wife’s second-smartest evening handbag. An inauthentic micro-fleece top (sorry) and Gore-Tex rain jacket (look, give me a break), a number of the heavier tools, and crowning all this a bulky pair of tubular tyres. It had been my intention to wrap these spares round my torso in homage to the 1914 riders, in fact to every rider in every professional race up to the 1950s. But my reflection, clad thus in the glass doors at Linate Airport, was less noble-giant-of-the-road than the Michelin man’s weedy, bullied nephew; I pulled the tyres off, folded them up and strapped them round the fleece.
This bundle had been bobbing gaily about behind me all the way from the airport, but as I swung out to overtake a parked bus it did something else: it fell off, striking some rearw
ard part of the Hirondelle in a manner that caused the back wheel to buck across the shiny flagstones. A corrective yank of the handlebars neatly introduced the front wheel into the slot of an adjacent tram rail, and over we went. My unaccustomed feet did all the wrong things and I slid gently along the road with both of them jiggling helplessly in their toe-clip cages.
To state the obvious, I wasn’t going fast. Together with the persistent absence of traffic and onlooking pedestrians, this meant not even my pride was hurt. Nonetheless, as I strapped everything back together and shakily remounted, I had cause to question my stance on the trade-off between authenticity and responsible common sense, which had meant staying faithful to period peloton fashions at the cost of protecting my brain with a linen cap. Thankfully, in the event everything turned out absolutely fin31^GIUGHHHKJNnnnnnnnn.
It was an otherwise benign reacquaintance with the business of sustained cycling. The old highway out of Milan was straight, flat and empty, giving little cause to regret the absence of gears or any effective means of slowing down. An interest in seeing where I’m going means I generally ride with my hands on top of the bars, but with this zone annexed by bell and bidons I had no choice but to grab the drops. My neck wasn’t mad on this arrangement, but rolling through the city’s outskirts I began to feel at home down there.
The Hirondelle seemed far happier than a massively overloaded hundred-year-old bike had any right to. Stripped of all luggage at the Heathrow repacking area it had weighed in at 14kg, half as much again as my Tour bike, yet even burdened with an extra 85kg of tools, possessions and middle-age spread the bike seemed anything but cumbersome. Road bikes back then were much longer, their wheelbase typically 1.2m rather than today’s 1m. I dare say this stretched profile made them in some biomechanical manner less efficient, but it soaked up the bumps and was certainly kinder on an old man’s back. Good work, long-dead frame designers!
