There were a total of eighteen Italians in the race, split into two teams: the national team itself (who wore jerseys in the red, green and white of Italy rather than the sky blue of today) and the cadetti, a team of younger riders. One of the latter, Alfredo Martini, remembers the afternoon well. He told me that once Coppi was with the bunch again, he told the Italians not to bother chasing the leaders, although they tried several times. The race, Coppi said, was over as far as he was concerned. ‘He said’ – and Martini suddenly lapses into the throaty Ligurian patois, half French, half Italian – ‘I might as well be at home under an umbrella with a cold beer.’
Coppi was not even willing to stick with the peloton, and when he drifted off the back Binda asked another Italian, Mario Ricci, to wait and escort him to the finish. There was more psychology here. Ricci was an old friend of Coppi’s from his Legnano days and was also the best-placed Italian overall. Asking him to give up his own chances was a way of making Coppi aware that his status in the team was not being challenged. But even as he rode, Coppi continued to repeat that the Tour was a madhouse, and he was going home. At the finish on the St Malo outdoor cycling track, he had the body language of a man defeated: drooping shoulders, ponderous footsteps. He was almost nineteen minutes behind the stage winner, Ferdi Kübler, and a massive thirty-seven behind Marinelli, and the Italian team’s next job was to persuade him to stay in the race overnight.
It took a concerted effort, led by Binda. The manager’s memoirs, La Testa e I Garun, include a photograph from that evening: Binda is standing next to Coppi’s bed, in his white cap with an Italian tricolour on the side, goggles around his neck (the team cars are open-top jeeps, the roads are very dusty), his arms spread out in a gesture of supplication. Coppi lies on the bed with his arms spread like a wounded bird, his mind clearly elsewhere. Fiorenzo Magni was among those who did not believe Coppi now stood a chance. It was, says Ettore Milano, a chaotic evening in the team hotel just outside St Malo: some of the team in tears, pleas and curses flying through the air.
Milano told me: ‘We said to him, “Look, mate, we are at war here, we will go on to the end. We don’t want to be disrespectful, [pulling out] is not just like being cheated on by your wife, it’s like having your balls cut off.” What could we do but joke? We all made him go on. We got round him and made him continue in the race.’ Milano also pointed out to Coppi that he was marrying shortly – Cavanna’s daughter – and needed money. If Coppi went home, he would have no wedding. Binda again played his man well, persuading Coppi to postpone his departure for a few days: he knew that the next day’s stage was relatively easy, the day after that was a rest day, and that in turn was followed by a time trial which ‘he, the king of racing against the watch, was capable of winning on one leg’. It was a familiar picture: Coppi needing to be influenced by stronger minds at a turning point.
With hindsight, the campionissimo acknowledged that his behaviour was not rational. To his critics, he said, ‘You try, just once, sitting on the roadside with an unusable bike, with the impression of being terribly alone, and with the knowledge that your rivals are all against you.’ There was, inevitably, intense speculation over the reasons for his crisis of confidence. Partly, it was put down to the rivalry with Bartali. Coppi told team-mates that in his view Binda and Bartali were in league and the reason his bike was not on the van was because Binda wanted Bartali to win. Binda, ironically, said later that Bartali never forgave him for persuading Coppi to remain in the race, because it deprived him of a second Tour win.
There was another explanation: Coppi had trouble adapting to the Tour. This was not the schematised, controlled racing of Italy, where the gregari looked after things until the campioni took over. ‘Coppi’s morale fell to bits because he realised that the Tour wasn’t like the Giro,’ says Raphael Geminiani, a friend and rival, and later a team-mate. ‘In the Giro there was a kind of arrangement between the riders that you wouldn’t really race until the feeding station, whereas in France we would attack as soon as the start flag was dropped. Controlling the race was much harder, because everyone went from the gun, everyone was a danger, breaks could get a huge amount of time; it was more chaotic.’
For foreigners like the Italian team in France, there was also massive uncertainty involved in racing away from home terrain. The route would be unknown territory, as maps were in short supply and the break in racing because of the war meant that the riders had little experience to draw on. Given the importance of gearing for climbs, pacing yourself and knowing where the roads were bad, this was a serious handicap to riders from abroad. There was also Coppi’s innate need for reassurance, the background of potential double-dealing involving Bartali, and the sudden transition from dominance – ten minutes ahead of the great rival on the road, a massive statement being made – to complete powerlessness.
The crisis en route to St Malo looks bizarre on the face of it, but it is actually understandable given the circumstances and Coppi’s character. Indeed, it could be argued that it marked a turning point. Beforehand, Coppi had finished first in only one major road race outside Italy, the previous year’s Het Volk Classic, where the judges disqualified him for being given a wheel by a fellow competitor – another example of the difficulty of racing abroad. The dominant victories that followed, in the next couple of weeks and the next five years, suggested that getting back into the 1949 Tour in fact made him a more formidable competitor.
* * *
What came after St Malo was stage racing at its finest: a dramatic comeback as Coppi ate into that thirty-seven-minute deficit, against a background of constant intrigue, gossip and speculation about double-dealing. As Binda expected, Coppi won the time trial, down France’s west coast from Les Sables d’Olonne to La Rochelle. He regained eight minutes, inspiring the Tour de France organiser, Jacques Goddet, to write a eulogy in L’Equipe in which he compared the purity of Coppi’s pedalling style to the lucidity of Dante’s Italian in The Divine Comedy. The sniping with Bartali remained constant, however. After the stage to San Sebastian, Coppi accused the older man of a treacherous attempt to get away from the field, and Binda had to intervene. In the Pyrenees it was Bartali who claimed he had been betrayed when Coppi attacked after he crashed on the climb of the Col de l’Aubisque. That one was defused when Coppi explained that he had not been aware that Bartali had a problem. Neither trusted the other; both were waiting to find out just who was the best.
With the Pyrenees behind him, Coppi had reduced the deficit on Marinelli to just over thirteen minutes. The two days’ racing through the Alps were to decide the winner. The epic stage from Cannes to Briançon, over the snowy Col d’Izoard, began with a 4 a.m. start, before which Bartali went to Mass, and closed with il pio in the yellow jersey. Along the way, the stage saw a major imbroglio when Tragella was not in evidence at a feed station when he was supposed to be giving Bartali his bag of rations. According to most accounts, Tragella simply hid, because he could not bear to help Bartali; ironically, it was his protégé Coppi who realised this was unacceptable behaviour and gave his rival his bag.
On the Izoard, according to Binda’s version of events, the two men staged a near repeat of the Valkenburg farce. They were both clearly stronger than the rest of the field on the climb, escaped together and gained a big lead, but then slowed to tourist pace, each apparently afraid that the other would benefit. Again, it fell to Binda to resolve matters, not a rapid process. The manager began by reminding them of their deal, then pointed out their responsibility to the national colours. Finally he warned that as repeat offenders they would face heavy fines if they disobeyed him and disgraced themselves. He talked of the shame they would feel in front of their families, wives, children. Gradually, they speeded up, and remained in front of the field. On the climb, Coppi slid in the mud and fell into the ditch; Bartali waited. On the descent, it was Bartali who punctured and Coppi who waited, enabling his rival to win the stage and pull on the yellow jersey at Briançon, on his thirty-fifth birthd
ay.
Again the image of unity is undermined by the partisans: Cavanna said later that Coppi heard Binda telling Bartali that evening, ‘No one will take the jersey from you now.’ If that is the case, Binda was either wildly inaccurate in his reading of the race or he was trying to reassure Coppi’s great rival; the younger man was only one minute and twenty-two seconds behind, with a time trial stage still to come, and he had looked the stronger as they climbed the Izoard. The following day, en route to the Italian town of Aosta, Coppi was again the strongest, forcing a selection in the field on the Col d’Iseran, the highest point in the Tour at 2,800 metres, then leading Bartali away on the Grand St Bernard. The pair began the descent together, but Bartali punctured, then, having changed the tyre, he crashed, leaving Coppi with a dilemma: should he wait? Initially, he slowed down, in the hope that Bartali would catch up, but eventually Binda told him to go on. The Italian manager had to tell him twice, first sending a motor-cyclist with a message, then driving up to him. The outcome was inevitable: at the finish Coppi had almost five minutes’ lead, and the yellow jersey.
To this day, Bartaliani insist that Binda told their man he had not given Coppi the order to leave his team-mate, the race leader. The Dutch writer Benjo Maso speculated that Bartali knew he had lost, and was lucky to puncture because he was able to portray himself as an unfortunate loser. Certainly, Bartali milked the situation afterwards, saying: ‘When my tyre went flat my first thought was: Italy! The most important thing was that an Italian should win in Italy. So I told Fausto to go on as fast as he could.’ Later, however, he accused the Italian cycling federation of working for a Coppi win, under pressure from the powerful Bianchi bicycle company.
As it turned out, Coppi’s physical superiority was clear from the results of the two time trial stages: in the second, from Colmar to Nancy, over 137 kilometres, Bartali was over seven minutes slower. This was, probably, the moment when the rivalry ceased to matter in sporting terms: there was no question that Coppi was the stronger. His overall victory left no room for doubt: Bartali was ten minutes and fifty-two seconds behind him, while Marinelli, in third place, was twenty-five minutes and thirteen seconds back, having lost over an hour since St Malo.
There was, however, far more to Coppi’s victory: no cyclist had ever managed the double of wins in the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in the same year, and only six others were to match the feat in the next sixty years. They are numbered among the very greatest road racers in the history of the sport: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, Stephen Roche, Marco Pantani. Coppi, Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain are at the top of cycling’s tree because all managed it twice in their careers; Merckx, the greatest of them all, did it three times. Lance Armstrong, so dominant in the Tour in the early twenty-first century, never attempted it even in his heyday.
Coppi’s friend Raphael Geminiani cannot think of any sporting achievement to compare with winning the two great stage races. ‘There is no parallel. The Giro is more than twenty days’ racing, the Tour another twenty or twenty-two. So there are over forty days of competition when you are obliged to perform at the highest level if you want to win both. If you have an off-day you may lose everything. The double requires strength of character, an ability to perform on the key days. Only the greats of cycling have it in them.’
From a twenty-first-century perspective, this first double remains a colossal achievement, because the demands the sport made on the athlete at the end of the 1940s were far greater than today, and there were many more things that could go wrong in a three-week race, as Coppi had found out when he hit the deck at Mouen on stage five of the Tour. Races were run on roads that in places were hardly surfaced, on bikes which were unreliable, with team back-up that was primitive. To overcome these obstacles took vast strength of character, for Alfredo Binda and the whole of the Italian team as well as for Coppi.
Coppi was already a huge star in France, and the Tour win made ‘Fosto’, as they called him, almost as popular there as he was at home. Jean Bobet tells the tale of a track meeting at Rennes in the early 1950s, pitting him and his brother, the future Tour winner Louison, against the Coppi brothers. They drew a record 9,061 entries, with more than 2,000 turned away. At Paris’s Vél d’Hiv the fans would start queuing in the morning to get tickets for evening meetings with Coppi. As the Tour de France’s official historian, Jacques Augendre, says, ‘Our country quickly fell under his spell. It’s no exaggeration to say that he contributed to the reconciliation between France and Italy after the war.’ (The Bartaliani, naturally, would point to their man’s win in the Tour in 1948, and his reception by the French president Vincent Auriol.)
Those international triumphs helped Italy itself regain its pride after the years of defeat and exclusion. Uniquely among Italian national teams, the Tour de France squads of those years were tricolori not azzurri, wearing the national colours of green, red and white rather than the usual light blue. This merely added to the sense that Italy’s cyclists were flying the flag. There was no denying the symbolism of Italians crossing the Alps in those colours to the applause of French crowds, and ‘conquering’ France just eight years after Mussolini’s disastrous invasion attempt.
Coppi and Bartali were reconciled as well: not long after the race, the pair visited the Ursus tyre company, a sponsor of Coppi’s, where the Tour winner received a bonus of 500,000 lire which he shared with his great rival. A week later, they went together to the cyclists’ chapel on the Madonna del Ghisallo, on a high hill overlooking Lake Como north of Milan, and presented the parish priest with a yellow jersey. Coppi donated a bike; Bartali’s was, apparently, lost in Portugal.
* * *
Among the fans who now flocked to watch Coppi wherever he went in Italy were the doctor from Varese and his dark-haired, striking, strong-minded wife. In her attitude to cycling, Giulia Locatelli bore no resemblance to the woman who, a year earlier, had been indifferent to her husband’s passion. Her obsession had outstripped that of Dr Locatelli. She was now the one who went out to get the newspapers, which she would scan for mentions of Coppi. Giulia’s passion raised eyebrows in the little village near Varese. She was pursued in the street by children shouting Viva Bartali.
At races, she showed the same urge to get close to the champion which had marked their first meeting. She would demand more of him than the average fan, grabbing his hand when they met. She would lie outrageously to gain access to areas restricted to the cyclists and their entourages. ‘I was the fan of the house, a maniac, more obsessed than my husband. From then on, our Sundays were filled with cycling, races, cyclists, Coppi above all. We would go together, or I would go with friends, to anywhere where there was a race, a track meeting, an award ceremony. It didn’t matter what as long as there was a chance of meeting Coppi.’
CHAPTER 9
* * *
EXTINCTION OF THE WORTHY BRUTE
To help me find Sandrino Carrea’s house, his wife Anna sellotaped a copy of La Gazzetta dello Sport to their gate, which opens onto the main road that runs through the valley below Castellania. The pink paper flapped on the ironwork, which was big, wide and attractive for a relatively small house. Its size is down to Coppi. At the time Carrea was building the house, he and his team leader often passed the site as they trained. ‘You should make that wider,’ recommended the Bianchi leader. Carrea was hardly going to ignore him: as one of the campionissimo’s best domestiques, he had spent his working life obeying the great man’s orders, so he duly enlarged the entrance.
After all, both the gate and the house had come to him thanks to his master. Carrea still has the item that was, in effect, the down payment on his home. It is kept in a clear plastic bag, and he takes it out to show me. It’s made of coarsely woven wool, dyed yellow, and has the initials HD in stylised lettering on one breast. It’s a yellow jersey from the 1952 Tour de France and it was Carrea’s for a single day. He pulled it on in Lausanne, having infiltrated a lucky break with
Coppi’s wholehearted approval. Even so, he feared that Coppi might feel he had delusions of grandeur and send him home. ‘That would have ruined me.’
It was hot that night in Lausanne. Alfredo Martini left the window of his hotel room open and he overheard Coppi saying to Carrea, ‘Don’t get to like that jersey too much, Sandrino, it will be mine tomorrow.’ Carrea duly relinquished the maillot jaune to his leader the next day, but even so he became, briefly, a celebrity. He earned a dozen track-racing contracts and a trip to Algeria to race with Raphael Geminiani. His share of the prize money from Coppi’s win in the 1952 Tour was two million lire. He doubled it by riding appearance races, criss-crossing Europe, sleeping with his bag of contract cash under his pillow, and he built the house when he came back.
Carrea is now in his eighties, but still going strong. He calls the dog to order, and potters out into the garden to pull vegetables for dinner. That evening everything on the table, it seems, is Sandrino’s own produce: wine from the grapes that grow up the hill, sausage from the pigs, his own apples and chicken, rocket salad. He still loves to go hunting in his patch of ground up the hillside behind the house. Anna wishes he would slow down, but Carrea will not stop.
It is not in his make-up, any more than he ever dreamt of shirking when he worked for Coppi. By then Carrea had survived a spell in Buchenwald and two death marches; in 1945 he was working as a mason when he was brought into cycling by Coppi’s brother Serse, who introduced him to Cavanna. The sage felt his neck and hands; the callouses convinced him that Carrea had potential and he was sent on a training ride with Coppi and his team-mates. Later, with Ettore Milano and Serse, Carrea was one of a three-man elite within the elite that was the Bianchi team.
While Serse and Milano were Fausto’s confidants off the bike, Carrea came into his own on the road: he was the strong man who would wind up the pace to stretch Coppi’s rivals before the leader put in the killer attack. ‘Vai piano, Andreino,’ Coppi would yell as Carrea strung the field out. ‘If you don’t slow down, you’re going home this evening.’ Carrea would drive even harder; the warning was their coded signal to him to increase the tempo. Carrea was the epitome of the team worker who denies himself all glory to serve his leader. He later received the ‘golden water bottle’ after being voted ‘domestique of the century’.
Fallen Angel Page 13
