by Tim Moore
My request for a room was granted with a palpable lack of enthusiasm, and only after I’d agreed to dine in the hotel’s restaurant. When I went out and wheeled the Hirondelle inside I could see him – and indeed hear him – bitterly regretting this decision. ‘No, signore, no, no!’ With sudden vigour he all but vaulted over the desk and bundled the two of us out into the street. I could hardly blame him: sodden and rust scabbed, Number 7 might have just been roused from a long slumber on the bed of an urban canal. Scrabbling out a key from the huge bunch tied to his belt, he hobbled over the road and battled open a door that sounded as if it had last been closed in 1973. It was like some mausoleum of broken crap in there, a cobwebbed jumble of discarded appliances and one-legged chairs. I should have felt guilty leaving Number 7 alone with those dusty ghosts, but then skanky dishevelment was his thing: propped between a radiogram and a listing hat-stand he looked more at home than he ever had. It seemed far more awful to drag him back out into the rain twelve hours later.
CHAPTER 12
I will never forget the day I climbed the Puy Mary. There were two of us on a fine day in May. We started in the sunshine and stripped to the waist. Halfway, clouds enveloped us and the temperature tumbled. Gradually it got colder and wetter, but we did not notice it. In fact, it heightened our pleasure. We did not bother to put on our jackets or our capes, and we arrived at the little hotel at the top with rain and sweat streaming down our sides. I tingled from top to bottom. What a wonderful tonic!
WHAT A DERANGED freak! Paul de Vivie might have invented gears, but it was difficult to admire a cyclist who harboured such wrongheaded perversions. Would Paul have tingled from top to bottom to find his kit still heavy with yesterday’s filthy moisture when he put it on the morning? To find his sodden shoes warped and thickened, his bike’s every moving part shrieking with corrosion? Yes, Paul, cycling is often great. But there really is no point denying that sometimes it’s shit.
I sloshed on down the Via Cassia, a major Roman artery enjoying a new lease of life with lorry drivers who don’t like paying autostrada tolls. What a lot of them there were! Soon I was forced hard up against the calf-slashing roadside brush, where the fraying tarmac was cleaved with long crevasses comfortably broad enough to swallow my front wheel. Doing my Tour thing I’d been regularly appalled by French road surfaces; they were hugely worse here yet so far I’d barely noticed. Reason: in the intervening twelve years, Britain’s roads have deteriorated to a condition some way below most of our Continental rivals. Cluster-bombed tarmac is now the British cyclist’s daily lot. It’s a dull but damning indicator of national decline: in the pothole chart, we’re now duking it out with the Mediterraneans.
Crevasse-monitoring vigilance restricted my scenic appreciation, and when I did snatch a glance around I usually regretted it. Drizzle fuzzed out the background, and the foreground was filled with fields of withered sunflowers awaiting harvest execution, their crusty, black heads bent down to the mud. Yesterday’s chirruping blackbird was today’s malevolent cawing crow; the broiling pre-Siena sun was now an 11-degree mist, so frigid I had to pedal hard to get some warmth in. It was an extraordinary about-face, as if somebody had just pulled a big lever and turned summer off.
The going was heavy, uphill into an insolent headwind that flung handfuls of chilled drizzle in my face. I couldn’t believe I would ever rue posting my fleece home from Lucca, and already here I was, rueing it bad. The road steepened. The Hirondelle shrieked through its rust like Laurel and Hardy’s railroad handcart. I slumped heavily into the handlebar drops and ground on towards one of cycling’s definitive tribulations: that cook-chill marriage of rain and sweat.
I turned left off the Via Cassia; the lorries vanished but the gradient pitched up yet again. We were soon pushing 700m across blasted moorlands flanked by shadowy peaks. I passed a confidence-bothering sign for a ski resort, here in the middle of bloody Italy. What was going on? It was treeless, cold and wet: I kept waiting for the Brecon Beacons to call and ask for their weather and scenery back.
‘Bordin’s solitary journey passed from night into dawn; at San Quirico he was welcomed by the town band and the cheers of a crowd who came to salute his courage.’ As I pedalled through the scene of Paolo’s spirited description, a road-sign told me that Lauro Bordin would still have been 194km from Rome. To be honest, by this point I was almost immune to the 1914 Giro’s monstrous scale: it literally defied belief that the riders were barely halfway through that absurd third stage.
The least I could do was stick faithfully to their route. I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. On the second day of my Tour de France ride, I blithely snipped off a 600km loop in order to spare myself the damp hills of Brittany. As nobody, least of all me, imagined I was up to tackling more than representative chunks of the route it didn’t seem a big deal at the time. It very much did once I’d somehow managed to complete almost every remaining kilometre: the joy of pedalling into Paris was tempered with contrition, a niggling shame that I would never be able to boast of having ridden the entire route of the 2000 Tour de France (I still do, though, all the time). Anyway, never again. I set off from Milan vowing to eschew all short cuts and half measures, a vow that was put to its most severe test yet when I saw that Radicofani – a town Paolo only mentioned in reference to the forty-five-minute lead Bordin had built up when he passed through – sat atop a massive and temptingly skirtable eminence.
Radicofani proved even loftier than it looked, a bleak and ancient village perched some two and a half Shards up in the grey heavens. Doing battle with a year-old cheese sandwich at its only bar, I gazed out at a tight little piazza and the hunkered alleys that radiated away from it. It was a town built for mean winters, the tough old houses hewn from heavy, dark stone. Having spent his post-war childhood in Rome, my father had shuddered when he spotted Radicofani on my itinerary: the place was such a notorious haven of violent criminality that his father, a famously bold adventurer who was then the Daily Telegraph’s Italian correspondent, afforded it a very wide berth on weekend family outings. No great stretch to imagine this hard-faced, lonely settlement harbouring a community of ruthless bandits.
On cue a leathery pair of ne’er-do-wells in big flat caps and donkey jackets pushed through the door and approached the bar with a proprietorial swagger, appraising me and a young German couple with gimlet eyes as they passed. On my way back from sprinkling the porcelain footprints – a sure sign I wasn’t in Chiantishire any more – I caught a snatch of their conspiratorial mumblings: an extraordinary collision of alien sounds, many almost Welsh.
‘My arse is on fire!’ Luigi Ganna’s memorable summary of his feelings as he stood atop the inaugural Giro podium silenced the Milan crowd. They weren’t shocked; they simply hadn’t understood a word he’d said. Though born and bred just 60km away in Lombardy, Ganna’s dialect was an unfathomable mystery to the Milanese throng – not a regional accent, more an entirely separate language. In 1909 Italy had only existed as a nation for forty years, and was still at heart a conglomeration of disparate kingdoms and city states, all with distinctive customs, cultures and tongues.
The Giro was touted as a truly national event that might promote a sense of shared identity: its unifying potential attracted Mussolini’s interest in the Twenties. It proved a slow-burning success. Only after the war would a Giro winner explain himself in words that made sense to everyone. The unintelligible lilt I was eavesdropping on is just one of the ten recognised dialects that still linger on today in Tuscany alone.
From my station at the back of the bar, I watched the old men order a bottle of red wine with no more than a vague nod in the barman’s direction. How old were they? I’d recently read about some mountaintop ‘village of eternity’ in Italy that boasted a life expectancy of ninety-five, the highest on earth. Could this be it? Could that pair of gabbling, crinkled rogues be pushing three figures, old enough to have scared my granddad, old enough to have been gurgling in a cot when Lauro Bordin rattled through t
his square with a forty-five-minute lead? When I left eight minutes later I decided probably not, because in this time I watched them completely drain that bottle and make serious inroads into its successor.
The descent was a crazy plunge down a wet road veined with deep cracks, like a relief map of the Nile delta. At 60kmh my amplified rattle sent birds flapping out of trees and fields across a generous area, and panicked a little black-red squirrel into a trans-tarmac dash right in front of my wheel. If I’d had any brakes this might have lured me into a lethal skid; instead, I just braced for a pulping impact that miraculously didn’t come. The more enduring miracle was that none of these lunatic downhill careens had delivered me at unstoppable velocity up to a busy junction or queue of stationary vehicles. Not yet, anyway: without wishing to spoil the suspense, I write these words from beyond the grave. (Yes, you can get Eurosport HD here.)
The rain died away and the road levelled out. A white parcel van overtook me on a bend at incautious speed, misjudging its exit in a fashion that filled the afternoon with the noise and smell of rubbery anguish and left a ten-foot streak of paint along a crash barrier. I watched him barrel carelessly off into Umbria, a lumpy land studded with ruined medieval turrets and hilltop towns. One sat imperiously above the rest, a lofty cluster of terracotta bell-towers that I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself labouring up to an hour later.
Those familiar with the epoch-defining account of my Tour de France escapade may recall that I cycled through Switzerland accompanied by a guest pedaller, Paul Ruddle. I suspect, largely because he’s repeatedly told me, that Paul wasn’t entirely delighted with every published detail of our time together – on reflection, I perhaps might have downplayed our free-ranging, sweary rudeness about Swiss people, at a time when one of us worked for a Swiss bank. Indeed, I might also have taken the time to consider how his wife – who had recently given birth to their second child – would react on learning that her husband had opted to look sharp rather than wear the helmet she had sent him out with. You may imagine my considerable surprise, then, when Paul expressed an interest in reprising our cyclo-partnership. Since my arrival in Milan this interest had matured into text-messaged commitment: Paul would, by appointment, be meeting me at Città della Pieve in the morning.
Over the years since elapsed, Paul has tirelessly applied himself in every arena of life, reaping rewards that us duller-witted idlers can but dream of: a completely flat stomach, children who take him seriously and – just a few Umbrian hilltops away – a big villa with a heated pool. In a frankly embarrassing bid to emulate his winner’s lifestyle, I now checked into Città della Pieve’s finest hotel, my virgin foray into three-digit room-rates. Facilities included a glass lift, private spa treatment rooms and a receptionist visibly resisting the urge to plunge a sack over my filthy wet head and bundle me down the garbage chute.
I left my kit marinating in a money’s-worth bidet compote of perfumed unguents, and went out for the traditional aimless stroll. In moments I had forgiven Città della Pieve for being on top of an enormous hill. The town revealed itself as a becoming cluster of intricate old brickwork, with big red churches sprouting graceful towers and thin houses that supported each other with buttresses slung across narrow, winding cobbles. I turned every tight corner expecting to bump lens-first into a fellow sunburnt foreigner or ten, but the town had somehow escaped the fate its venerable beauty should have consigned it to. Instead of shops selling souvenir olive-wood bird baths and Sambuca-infused truffle oil there were hardware shops and haberdashers. Couples crossed exquisite little piazzas arm-in-arm; old men gathered outside bars in shrinking triangles of late sunlight; a boisterous young scene was taking hold around the football pitches across from my hotel. I lingered outside one or two restaurants, scanning the toothsome specialities being convivially forked up within, before a familiar voice – mine – reminded me how much I’d paid for my room. A while later the maître d’ at my hotel handed me a spoon with the very thinnest of smiles; I took it in the fist that wasn’t clutching a carrier bag full of supermarket pasta punnets and scurried into the glass lift.
CHAPTER 13
The blind man set his hands upon the young man’s chest, then felt his legs, every muscle and tendon. ‘A strong heart and the tendons of a buffalo. Fausto, you will be a great champion.’
THE LAST TIME I’d thought about Fausto Coppi’s masseur was the first time I’d put my goggles on: Biagio Cavanna lost his sight after getting dust lodged in his eyes on a bike ride. I thought of him now after encountering this account of his hands-on meeting with Coppi, in the e-book history of Italian cycling I’d been squinting at on my phone the night before. I imagined Biagio running those appraising digits of his over the torso in my hotel mirror, then turning his sightless eyes to the gaunt figure behind him. ‘Hey, Fausto, check out the moobs on this fucker!’
Paul was putting his bike on a train that would arrive at midday, which allowed me a full morning to stare at my naked self through his eyes. (Calm down, Paul – all your friends do this.) Could these knobbly, two-tone legs keep up with a man who had finished several marathons in three hours flat? In the evenings I couldn’t cross them without sending jolts of cramp all the way from groin to ankle. My right knee was on the blink again, and Gerard Lagrost had given me corns. Cavanna once compared massaging Coppi’s legs to playing the guitar. Massage mine and he’d be smashing it against the speakers.
Everything further up looked damaged, icky or weird. My face was that of an alcoholic peasant at the end of a long harvest. The circular cut-outs in my gloves had left Japanese flags sun-branded into the back of my hands. My fingernails harboured unshiftable deposits of oily dreck: ‘I see you are a man who works,’ the receptionist at Sestriere had told me, staring hard at my cuticles. I’d lost all sensation in the tips of both little fingers and my loins were still dead to the world.
Weighed down by a breakfast blitzkrieg that left hardened buffet operatives cowering behind the bacon trough, I belched my leaden way up the road to the café that was our arranged meeting point. I spotted Paul at an outside table, delighting the barman with some lively anecdote – since acquiring his villa he has mastered the native language to a degree I’m fully authorised to describe as sickening. He bore a healthy burnish that compared well to my over-ripe fig-flesh, and a Lycra-sheathed physique honed by his 75-mile-a-week running habit.
In defiance of the middle-aged norm I looked considerably more stupid and less athletic with my clothes on, largely down to the practice of stuffing my roll-neck jersey’s fore and aft marsupial pouches with a bulging profusion of accessibles: map, camera, hankie, phone, goggles case, breakfast leftovers and – not for the first time – a hotel room key I’d forgotten to give back, despite it being attached to a fob the size of the FA Cup. Paul’s helmet – I feel obliged to emphasise its presence and full-time future usage – hung off the back of his chair; there wasn’t a grey hair on the head it would shortly be protecting. It was at once both wonderful and slightly deflating to see him.
‘Hello,’ he said, flashing teeth as white as his fingernails. ‘So where are the other Rubettes?’
With a rueful smile I passed on the bad news: they’d all been imprisoned for castrating a man who laughed at their hats.
Paul ordered more coffee, then turned his attention to the Hirondelle and its more manifest deficiencies. ‘Are those wine corks? Unbelievable.’ Another brilliant smile. ‘Fancy swapping bikes?’ This rhetorical taunt referenced a historical grievance: my shamefully petty refusal to grant Paul even a short turn on my Tour bike, a machine inestimably superior to the heavyweight clunker he’d turned up with in Switzerland. The mid-range hybrid leaning against our café table was a step up from his Swiss mount, but a stratospheric moon-shot above my current assemblage of failing pig-iron. It had twenty-four gears, an alloy frame and stop-on-a-sixpence V-brakes: facilitators of a type of safe and speedy progress with which I was no longer familiar.
Twelve years on the boot wa
s on the other foot, the helmet on the other head, the better bike under the other arse. On the other hand, Paul would have to spend three days traversing the world’s most image-conscious nation in the company of a colossal bell-end.
It was lunch by the time we’d finished poring over maps, and after I’d gone back to return my hotel key, having failed to interest Paul in tagging along to see what a high roller I was these days – ‘Not even a quick look? It has private landscaped gardens and offers a spacious and air-conditioned Wellness Centre.’ At his suggestion we dined outside one of the restaurants I’d regretfully spurned the night before, stuffing ourselves with wild boar pasta. When Paul asked if I fancied splitting a carafe of red, I rather stiffly informed him that I hadn’t touched a lunchtime drop since day one. Then said: ‘Go on then.’
Under restless, cloudy skies I led us off eastwards, to those unending ranks of dun-coloured hills. On the plunge down from Città della Pieve, a distant new sound inveigled itself into my creaks and rattles. When the gradient unwound I heard it more clearly: helpless laughter.
‘Sorry,’ shouted Paul, when he was able to form words. ‘That back wheel’s bouncing you all over the place. It’s like you’re on a runaway donkey or something.’ I stopped pedalling to let him take the lead, a position I felt it best he retain for the duration of our partnership.
The balance of the afternoon took us up and down eminences topped by slumbering villages, their slopes studded with squat, gnarled olive trees of great antiquity. In the valleys beneath crouched Romanians harvested tomatoes under scurrying, rain-bruised clouds; we threaded the needle between hillsides blacked out by sheets of precipitation and somehow got through bone dry. I held Paul’s wheel for an hour, then spent the next four watching him slowly shrink to a white-shirted speck up the road. Why can’t I have his gears? I thought rather sourly, meaning: Why can’t I have his legs, lungs and long-term commitment to intensive aerobic exercise?
