Gironimo!

by Tim Moore

  Twenty raw eggs seemed overly bold at this stage of my game – with three-quarters of the 1914 Giro retraced, this was not the moment to welcome salmonella into my life. I took five boiled eggs from a basket in the corner of the breakfast buffet, leaving as many as none left in it, ate four and a half and checked out, burping uncontrollably and pelting onlookers with shells.

  I rode out of L’Aquila under cloudless skies, those messily bisected houses and piles of bulldozed masonry telling an incontrovertible tale in the light of a pin-sharp morning. The hills beyond were plumply swathed in chlorophyll, with none of the jagged browns and greys of weeks gone by, as long as I didn’t look too closely at the distant hulk of snow and rock that was the 2,912m Gran Sasso d’Italia. It was days since I’d seen a squashed snake, and though the heavens blazed, it was chilly enough to reverse my recent habit, by steering into patches of sun rather than shade. Conclusion: I was back in the north, and heading norther.

  During one of the idle contemplations that while away those in-saddle hours, I realised I’d now touched every compass point. Sestriere was as far west as I’d go, Vietri di Potenza as far south, Bari as far east and Arona, where in some faraway previous life my saddle had broken in half, as far north. That morning I’d christened my last disposable razor, number four of four: almost 900km still remained, but I was past third base and on the run for home.

  A return to Italy’s top half meant roads filled once more with keen and elderly cyclists. The climb up to Montereale – no pimple at 950m – proved a particular granddad-magnet, thronged with wrinkles and Lycra. Aware that the mountains were running out, I went for it, powering past group after wiry, nut-brown group. I hadn’t slipped into my ladies’ gear for two weeks – now there’s a bold admission – and on days like this felt ready for a hairier-chested sprocket than the twenty-two-toother spinning my rear wheel.

  Approaching the summit I cut rather dismissively past a Spike Milligan beard-alike in yellow and black on a matching bike. Ten minutes later he eased to a halt by my table as I sipped a celebratory espresso outside a bar in the hilltop town. ‘Piano, piano,’ he said rather sternly, gently plumping an imaginary pillow with both hands. Slowly, slowly. Cool your boots. Easy there, sport. I gave him a wide berth when I shot back past him two descents later, but he still wailed theatrically. Sorry, Gramps: I’d just hauled my AVS back to 17.1, and was bent on doing stage seven – 429km from L’Aquila to Lugo – in three days. This was no time to soft pedal.

  I’d lately deduced that I began each day with one good climb in my legs. Invariably it would be the first; sometimes I’d also make a decent fist of the last, which allowed me to forget all the uphill humiliations in between. This, however, was a different sort of day. I motored on with relentless purpose, up thousand-metre hills and down tumbling dales, dispatching impatient sandwiches and bars of cocoa fat in the sleepy towns between. As the afternoon rolled forth the challenges piled up: a twisting gorge full of unlit tunnels and heavy-goods traffic, a swarm of bees, a couple of assassination attempts by a school bus and a farmer’s wife in a Fiat Panda. It was as if the bike-hating gods were laying a trail of hazard and tribulation before me, a ride-through Room 101 of known weaknesses. I flicked them the Vs and pedalled placidly through it all. Or most of it: no point pretending those bees were negotiated with panache or in silence.

  With the sun still high above the hills behind, the road broadened out and coiled lazily downwards. In moments I was freewheeling into Ascoli Piceno, a town I hadn’t expected to reach before dark. It was only 4.20 p.m., but surveying the map on the cathedral steps I saw the route ahead squiggle away into miles and miles of lumpy, town-less nothing. Then I looked up to appraise the scene before me, and accepted how incredibly stupid it was to even consider staying the night somewhere else.

  I had no expectations of a place I’d never even heard of, marooned in the hills and 40km from the sea. Had Ascoli been full of open-cast bauxite mines and brawling derelicts, I couldn’t have felt let down. As it was, the private smile of sporting fulfilment that had embellished my face when I rode into the town broadened all night, ending up as a wet-lipped, slack-jawed gurn of boozy awe.

  I booked into a hotel just behind the cathedral square, confident that nothing in Ascoli could trump the marbled magnificence of this piazza’s fountains and loggias. A pre-dinner saunter proved me gloriously wrong. Every street and citizen was a study in well-scrubbed grace, testament to many and ongoing centuries of unbroken prosperity. For an hour I ambled past elegant public edifices and arcades agleam with well-presented merchandise, admiring once more the showmanship that urban Italians bring to everything they do: the shampoo-ad girl laughing into her phone as she cycled by hands-free, the white-coated barber wafting hair from a customer’s shoulder with a deft flourish of his badger brush. Have you ever seen a grandfather suavely manoeuvring a pushchair down a flight of steps? That night I saw two.

  In the event it was a challenge to decide which of the town’s embarrassment of winsome piazzas I should dine in. The one with the palm trees and the statues? The one girdled by Renaissance palazzos? Or – yes, yes and thrice yes – the Piazza del Popolo, a civic space of almost outrageous beauty, laid in travertine marble and edged with period Italian architecture in all its most venerable and appealing forms: the dome, the tower, the crenellation, the arch. So captivating was its splendour that I shed all pretence of haughty ennui and just touristed out big-style, snapping dozens of beaming self-timer shots from all angles and taking up station at an outside table of a corner restaurant with its menu printed in four languages. In mind of the view, I hardly cared that previous experience of such establishments guaranteed dull fare at daft prices, served by dead-eyed sycophants who would coerce me into an oversized tip by asking how I like Ascoli, is pretty town, no?

  But as this was a place that could do me no ill, everything from my bruschetta onwards proved delightful and unexorbitant and was placed before me by a shy young man whose commitment to gouging customers was so slack that he forgot to put my second carafe of bianco on the bill. Until I pointed it out to him. Yes, that’s how much I loved this town. One day, I thought, swaying back to my hotel through the gay crowds, I shall return here and put right everything that was wrong in my life and in Ascoli Piceno’s, by opening and running a pharmacy on the Piazza del Popolo.

  I woke in a blue-skied morning that smelled of basil and Vespas: the scent of summer was back. The last four days had ended with the water in my bidons cold enough to hurt my teeth, but looking at the map I sensed those days were over. If all went to plan, by evening I’d have put the mountains behind me.

  They didn’t go down without a fight. Straight out of Ascoli I was launched up an extortionate incline that would, in the sweaty fullness of time, deliver me from under 200m to over 800. It seemed very poor manners to issue such a demand when I still had bits of breakfast brioche stuck in my teeth. Exhausted delirium of the type that didn’t usually kick in until sundown began to take hold: when I looked deep inside myself for reserves of fortitude, all that turned up were the full lyrics to ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’. I also managed to ride for some time on a truly terrible section of road before realising it was in fact beautifully smooth. I had punctured my front – and final – tyre; it was time for Stan’s Sticky White Fluid to come into its own.

  Suneil had given me the bottle of what is more properly known to grown-ups as Stan’s Sealant. He spoke glowingly of its miraculous properties of puncture cure and prevention; in pursuit of the latter I had squirted both replacement tyres full of this liquid latex, the front at Fabio’s place in the Alps, the rear just after Paul left, near Rome. My dismay that Stan had literally let me down abated now that I examined the airless front tyre in detail: its rim was scarred with gashes and gouges, each one a puncture magically sealed at source. And those in addition to a pair of finger-long open sores in the centre of the tread, fringed with tufts of bare fabric, the consequence of asking a grass-track cyclo-cro
ss tubular tyre to cover more than 2,000 gravelly, potholed and heavily-laden kilometres.

  The sun was fierce, the hillside empty and I’d just passed a sign banning handcarts from the road: this environment was not one pregnant with the possibilities of expert outside assistance. In what may have looked like a panicked frenzy to the casual observer, and indeed his professional counterpart, I pulled out the front wheel, ripped its tyre off, and yanked the least shit of my two used and pre-punctured spares gluelessly onto the rim. (I could perhaps be forgiven for not sourcing new tyres – as it had taken weeks to hunt down the last four Vittoria Cross Evo XNs in the UK, it hardly seemed worth trying – but the failure to replenish my stock of readily available sticky tyre tape or glue was one of unfathomable stupidity.)

  Having squeezed Stan’s final dribbles into the valve hole, I span the rim and pumped. No hissing: it held air. God bless you, Stan. Trying hard to ignore the eccentric gyrations of that unaffixed front tyre – my bidons were now being stirred, not shaken – I nursed the Hirondelle onwards.

  In the hours before the bare handful of 1914 survivors pedalled away from L’Aquila, ‘waves of strong emotion’ splashed through every team hotel. Some of these lapped sympathetically around Giuseppe Azzini’s calamitous race-losing sequel, Barn Coma II, but the serious storm was being whipped up by those push-me-pull-you shenanigans on the Svolte. A red-eyed Alfonso Calzolari spent the entire day visiting journalists to promote his frankly laughable version of events, explaining in a cracked voice that the slights upon his integrity had suffered him to weep through the night. You’ve got to hand it to the guy. In what looks very much like a masterstroke of PR deflection, in the afternoon he ran out of his hotel room waving an anonymous letter that someone had supposedly just pushed under his door. Within minutes, every journalist in L’Aquila had read its succinct contents: ‘YOU WILL NEVER WIN THE GIRO!’

  Calzolari’s desperation was understandable: word had got out that the Italian Cycling Union, outraged by the reports of wholesale cheating, was telegramming an order to invalidate the entire race should the next stage begin with the Svolte Three still in the field. This telegram was duly dispatched, but before it arrived – so they would claim – the race committee rushed forward the start, hurrying the riders out of L’Aquila with that traditional pistol shot into the air. (In the fierce power struggle that inevitably then erupted, the Giro’s chief financier and effective owner – the newspaper group that published the Gazzetta dello Sport – emerged triumphant: the president of the ICU was forced to resign, and his governing body effectively reduced to a puppet institution run by pro cycling’s commercial paymasters. Plus ça change!)

  With their main man Azzini out, the two remaining Bianchi racers figured they had nothing left to ride for, and withdrew before the stage start. That left just ten competitors, a field so startlingly denuded that the organisers now sent home half the motorcade of journalists and officials, to make for a less embarrassing balance. It was – no, really – pissing down, and these ‘ten anguished souls’ pedalled through the sodden night in close company.

  Given the ratcheting traumas and Calzolari’s prodigious two-hour lead, no one had the stomach for a fight – literally so in the case of ’Tache Durando, who began throwing up almost at once. At the Ascoli Piceno feeding-station, he locked himself in a lavatory and didn’t emerge for an hour. Durando had started the stage a distant fifth overall, and to finish it now faced riding alone for another 300km, leaking egg from both ends. The temptation to retire must have seemed irresistible; he resisted it. Who were those guys? My AVS had just clicked up to 17.2kmh: way to cast my celebrations into unflattering perspective, Signore Durando.

  After Amandola, where I rode through a well-attended Festival of Lovely Cakes, the hills shrank and the road straightened. Was that really it for the mountains? As I scanned the horizon for signs of life, the long-forgotten sound of a better cyclist on a faster bike hoved once more into rearward earshot.

  ‘You are crazy English, yes?’

  For some kilometres I now rolled alongside Silvio, a gladsome geologist in a Spiderman cycling jersey, who had acquired his knowledge of English, and the ability to spot a crazy native, while spending five months of his masters course studying in, um, Cardiff. ‘Fantastic adventure, bici incredibile,’ he said after I had explained myself in return. ‘You must show to my father, he will fucking love it.’ (I gathered later that Silvio had picked up the bulk of his vocabulary in Cardiff’s pubs.) And so, having succumbed to the cheerful insistence of an Italian host-to-be, a short while afterwards I found myself sharing a trough of spaghetti vongole with three generations of Silvians.

  In the lonely mountains of post-parental Italy, I had rather lost touch with my fellow man. How good it was to rediscover him in his most affable indigenous habitat: the family-packed dining table. I was welcomed into a seat between Silvio’s mother and his twelve-year-old son, with no hint of the suspicious froideur that would have underscored this scene in a more northerly European country. I looked around at the smiling faces and thought: So this is why I’ve never, ever managed to find a restaurant open at lunchtime.

  Nobody but Silvio spoke any English, and my Italian curled up into a ball once I’d furred my brain with sweet white wine. Before it did I learned that his son was called Leonardo, that his wife was a fire fighter, and that lunch breaks in this country really are something else (Silvio’s applied understanding of earth materials was interrupted by our leisurely repast and the long bike ride that preceded it, and if you ever find yourself engulfed by Italian flames, pray to God it’s not between 1 p.m. and 3.30).

  When the coffee pot came out, Silvio disappeared onto the balcony to take a phone call. Cross-table communication in this phase leaned heavily on the exchange of Harpo Marx smiles, which did the job until Silvio’s wife and mother hauled me aloft and began to barge me cheerfully down a corridor towards the bathroom. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said when he returned to rescue me. ‘They just ask if you like to have a fucking shower.’ I’d like to dedicate this highlight of my career as a guest to the pharmacist who sold me that very expensive miniature odorant.

  I befouled Casa Silvio a while longer, finishing with a tour of the shed housing Granddad’s pride: a vintage town bicycle ingeniously powered by a little petrol engine, which released brown fluid all over my shoes in response to a witless prod. As the clan gathered to see me off, Silvio’s dad – who had been smiling slightly too much since the witless prod – fixed me with a beckoning wink. I wheeled the Hirondelle over to him and he palmed me two orange sachets marked ‘Sustenium Plus Intensive’. This name and its encirclement of thrusting upward arrows suggested a cure for chronic impotence; I slipped them into my jersey pocket and he smiled more broadly than ever. His family followed suit, and after a festival of waving I left these wonderful people behind.

  ‘Jesi? What the fuck?’

  Silvio’s reaction when I’d told him where I was intending to sleep that night suggested this town was at best unremarkable. I’d been reluctant to explain that Jesi bagged a tangential mention in my account of the 1914 race, and lay at the approximate end of my daily physical tether. In truth, now slightly beyond it: it was past four, and I still had 65km to go. No time to pause at Urbs Salvia, the Roman town whose entirely unprotected ruins Silvio had explored as a boy, and which I rattled through now. Glancing at the massive, stubby remains, I thought of the magnificent Renaissance laundry I’d passed in Ascoli that morning, six hundred years old and still in daily civic use. It is a source of bottomless wonder that Italians have led the Western world out from the grunting darkness, not once but twice. (To be fair, Silvio must have felt a similar astonishment while pondering that the island that spawned the free-swearing drinkers of Cardiff had, not so long before, built an empire even greater than Rome’s.)

  I might have left the Appenines’ foothills behind, but their endless toehills made a terrible mess of my afternoon. Up to 250m, down to 100, back to 250: on it went for hou
r after shattering hour. If this was the mountains’ last gasp, then they could certainly hold their breath. I tipped a sachet of Sustenium Plus Intensive into a bidon and put my head down.

  The road seemed determined to prolong my exposure to this restless landscape, zigzagging distractedly between hilltop farms and the last gildings of sunset. While doing so it also fell very neatly to bits, shedding geometric hunks of surface until I felt I was riding along the Giant’s Causeway. (When Silvio offered to lend me his mountain bike for the ride to Jesi, he evidently hadn’t been joking.) My new-old front tyre reacted to this challenge by squirming about the rim I hadn’t stuck it to, offering me peek-a-boo flashes of fabric underbelly. Speeding round a valley-bottom left-hander, a mild shimmy suddenly blossomed into a crazy, spin-cycle jolting judder. I pulled over and in the gloaming beheld a tyre twisted to buggery, more off the wheel than on.

  Prickly with alarm, and perhaps the first stirrings of Sustenium Plus Intensive, I let the air out, pulled things back into some semblance of order, reinflated and rode more warily on. Then less warily, once I noticed that my AVS had dropped back to 17.1. Our lives, as I’d discovered during a hotel Google session in L’Aquila, had overlapped by precisely three months. But at this rate, Mario Marangoni really would be the death of me.

  With 130km up for the day, the clustered lights of a hill town asserted themselves through the dusk. Those final kilometres passed in a light-headed, heavy-legged blur of drained infirmity. Sustenium Plus Intensive, I can now report, does not refresh the parts other performance supplements cannot reach, though after the second sachet I did try and get off with a tractor.

  CHAPTER 22