Bianchi’s team managers, Zambrini and Tragella, were adept at the deals which greased the wheels of competition. When foreign campioni, such as Louison Bobet, came to race in Italy, they were permitted to ride for Italian teams. Bianchi snapped up the best as useful allies for Coppi. They would use Bianchi’s economic muscle on Coppi’s behalf more directly as well. For example, Vito Ortelli, probably the best Italian cyclist of the post-war years after Bartali, Coppi and Magni, was offered 100,000 lire to work for Coppi in the 1947 Giro. Ortelli was also paid 20,000 lire to give Coppi an easy ride through to the final of the Italian pursuit championship in 1946. Unfortunately, Ortelli’s team didn’t bother telling him about the deal.
And, of course, Cavanna was still a ubiquitous presence, still massaging Coppi, still haranguing him and the whole team over every subject under the sun. He had a massive influence on Bianchi’s recruitment through his amateur squad, which ended up acting as a feeder club for Coppi’s Bianchi. Sponsored by SIOF, a local chemical company, they used second-hand tubular tyres and hand-me-down bikes from the Bianchi mechanics. The result of this production line that took local riders from this corner of Piedmont and turned them into domestiques to serve the great man was a close-knit unit. The fact that they were largely Ligurians like Coppi, mainly from the Novi/Alessandria area, was an important factor at a time when people had dialect as a first language, Italian as their second. Simply being able to communicate on more than a basic level would do wonders for team spirit, while if they talked dialetto in a race, the opposition might not understand what they were saying.
Raphael Geminiani, a relative latecomer to Bianchi, believed that Cavanna played a vital wider role at the team, sitting at the dinner table, listening to the riders talk and assessing their state of mind and their needs. More than the introverted Coppi, he was the man who worked on the team’s morale, encouraged them each day. But there was inevitably a conflict with the team manager, Tragella, who could not stand having Cavanna in the team car shouting at Coppi and made the blind masseur stay in the hotel instead.
Details were important at Bianchi, and that didn’t apply only to their leader, who lost his confidence if he felt he had lost control of things. Coppi was a stickler for punctuality, and insisted on clean handlebar tape for every stage of a major race – an old morale-boosting trick. At Bianchi, much was made of personal presentation. The gregari would be sent back to their rooms to shave if they came down in the mornings with stubbly chins, and if they didn’t have clean socks and jerseys they would be made to change them. A team manager would go and check their rooms when they left the hotel: if they were not in good order, they would be made to go upstairs and tidy them.
Equipment mattered, too. It was a vital imponderable at a time of bad roads and slow wheel changes and variable quality control. If Coppi considered that his tyre sponsor was not providing what he wanted, he would obtain special tyres and persuade contacts to smuggle them to the team – though sometimes the sponsors would get wise and change them all back again. He experimented with shortened frames, giving a more dynamic ride. The Castelli clothing company made him special warm winter jerseys. He rode higher gears than the gregari, who cursed if they were given a ‘Coppi wheel’ when they punctured. His position on the bike changed enough after the war to imply that he had sought to become as aerodynamic as possible: his back becomes stretched out on the bike parallel to the ground, where before it is rounded. His bars are wider, so his arms are more comfortably extended, without the elbows flapping.
His drive for perfection was mirrored by that of the Italian cycle industry: in the Coppi years the Italians made multi-speed gears and the double chainring ubiquitous. Italy was where the best tubular tyres were produced by companies such as Vittoria, Pirelli and D’Alessandro. The Columbus tubing company produced lighter steel tubes. It was an era when followers of the sport were continually seduced by the technological advances coming out of Italy – ‘Each year saw a new marvel, be it a kind of tyre or a Campagnolo derailleur, the kind of thing we could only dream of in France,’ recalls Jean Bobet. Half a century on, northern Italy is still the hub of the world cycle industry. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Coppi alone drove this growth, but the process was partly inspired by the presence of a dominant figure, driven by a need for technical perfection.
There were other things Coppi was unwilling to leave to chance. He worked out, together with Cavanna, that he should avoid crowded places such as dance halls and theatres where there was a greater chance that he might pick up infections. He had to stay in the open air. Hence his love of hunting, although long sessions were needed on stationary rollers to get his legs used to cycling again after hours wandering with his gun and his dogs.
In those days before doping was prohibited, drugs of any kind were worth investigating. Coppi was overt about his use of stimulants, which were not banned until five years after his death. His comment to the radio reporter Mario Ferretti that he only used drugs ‘when necessary’ is now widely quoted, with the caveat that it was ‘almost always’ necessary. It is a philosophy, understandable back then, unforgivable now, which conditioned the way most professional cyclists saw the issue for the next half-century. He explained to Rino Negri: ‘I’m a professional. If I could discover a medicine which didn’t damage my heart and nervous system I wouldn’t hesitate to use it to win, and often. I’d be crazy with joy if I was the chemist who found it.’
For his hour record he took five tablets of simpamine, a mild form of amphetamine which Cavanna utilised to give his protégés a boost while they were out training before the war; Coppi was adamant, however, that he would have gone far faster if he had used one of the stronger forms of amphetamine which had become available after the war. Cavanna spoke with professional pride about his ability to make intrugli, (‘brews’) – mixes of caffeine, alcohol and amphetamine, to be taken at an appropriate moment in a race. Then there was la bomba, a bottle containing seven or eight espresso coffees, sugar, peptocola and two or three mild amphetamine pills.
There are plenty of instances of doping involving Coppi, enough to underline that amphetamines of various kinds were ubiquitous at the time. He gave two white pills (to be taken with food just before the finish) to another cyclist, Gianni Malabrocca, to help him win a stage in the Giro in 1946. In Marco Pastonesi’s Coppi ma Serse, fellow professional Renzo Zanazzi tells of entering a hotel room to see Serse and Fausto on their single beds with a tray of pills on the cupboard between them. ‘We are working out what colours we are going to take tomorrow.’
Raphael Geminiani emphasises: ‘There is someone avantgarde in every field, and Coppi was the avant-garde of cycling. First he got to know himself, how far he could go physically, then everything else followed that. Every cyclist since has been inspired by him. Nothing fundamental has been invented since Coppi.’ The Tour organiser Jacques Goddet wrote after Coppi’s death that ‘the worthy brute who merely pedals is an extinct species. Cycling has become a sport of intelligence, care and technical expertise. Thanks to Coppi.’ Louison Bobet, the first man to win the Tour de France three times, felt his way of working had been transformed after riding the 1948 Giro with Coppi. He said: ‘Now I know how to do my profession.’
* * *
The 1950 Paris–Roubaix and Flèche Wallonne saw Coppi at his finest. The two Classics had completely different characteristics: Roubaix a long, flat slog with lengthy sections of cobbled roads; Flèche a shorter but tougher slog over the Ardennes hills. Of the two, Coppi’s victory in Paris–Roubaix came to be seen as a turning point, a demonstration of the way he had transformed cycling since the war.
He had been outwitted – to his intense annoyance – by Gino Bartali in Milan–San Remo in mid-March, but conversely a few weeks later Roubaix went entirely to plan in spite of foul weather, wind and rain. Early on, he was sheltered from the wind by Carrea, Oreste Conte and Fiorenzo Crippa, and Carrea and Serse pushed him time after time, unseen by the race referees, who were keepi
ng dry in their cars. When a crash happened, it was Ettore Milano who led Coppi from the back of the peloton to the front to keep out of trouble. Meanwhile, Conte was seen to have his pockets full of race food: tarts, rice cakes, honey sandwiches – ‘enough to withstand a siege’, Pierre Chany noted.
The food was passed to Coppi just before the feeding station in Arras. Here, as the peloton collected food bags from support staff, most of the riders had to slow down. Coppi did not have to pick up a bag and attacked in pursuit of an earlier escape. There was chaos as the other favourites tried to launch a chase. Within a few kilometres, Coppi was in the lead, with only the Frenchman Maurice Diot, one of the earlier break-aways, for company. They shared the pacemaking, until Diot refused to collaborate, on the grounds that his team-mate Van Steenbergen (he of the previous year’s world championship) was leading the chase behind.
Chany takes up the story: ‘Fausto moved instantly right up to the edge of the pavement and left Diot with no shelter. He accelerated once to get the measure of Diot, a second acceleration shook the robust Maurice, a third attack stunned him. Coppi’s race was over and the demonstration began.’ In the final forty-five kilometres, ‘on roads that were barely fit to ride on’, Coppi opened a three-minute gap on the Frenchman and nine minutes on Van Steenbergen. Whatever Diot achieved on his bike is now forgotten, apart from the words he said on finishing that race. ‘I’ve won!’ ‘What about Coppi?’ ‘Coppi is in a different race. I feel I have won.’
Coppi’s win in Flèche Wallonne was even more crushing: at roughly half-distance, he repeated the attack at the feed station that had worked so well en route to Roubaix and again raced alone until he caught up with an early escape on one of the climbs. He then took out his water bottle, drank a little, sprayed the back of his neck, took out an orange and ate it, while two of the earlier escapees tried desperately to hold his pace. Having cooled down and had a bite to eat, he turned to the other two and suggested that they should begin riding harder, as the peloton might catch up. Their reaction was to stop and get off their bikes in disgust. Coppi simply rode alone to the finish in Charleroi; the next man was five minutes behind.
On his day Coppi was completely unstoppable. Alfredo Martini explained to me: ‘Staying on his wheel seemed an easy thing at the beginning, you would feel good. But then, every kilometre that you did was like someone putting a brick on your back, one at a time, inexorably. Until ten bricks, you could take it, but with the eleventh … you collapsed and off he went.’ Other cyclists described how on a mountain climb he would change up his gears as the climb progressed, continually increasing his speed to a point where the opposition had no answer.
Fiorenzo Magni, the ‘third man’ of Italian cycling at the time, says that Coppi was uncatchable: ‘I remember one race, he was flat out, I was flat out a few yards behind him, I just couldn’t get to him. And when he went away, say on the Ghisallo to win the Giro di Lombardia, he would open a three-minute gap over the best guys, who would be chasing: Bartali, me, Kübler, Louison Bobet. He was a locomotive.’ In a Giro del Veneto not long after the war, Coppi broke away early on; Magni led the chase, enlisting the rest of the field to help, yelling at them and forcing the pace. The gap increased, and when it got to five minutes in spite of his best efforts, Magni stopped, got off his bike, picked it up and threw it in the ditch.
Coppi’s run of form and luck was not destined to last, and on 2 June 1950 it came to an abrupt end as the Giro d’Italia tackled its first mountain stage in the Dolomites. The crash stemmed from a mere trifle. As the field tackled a small climb near the town of Primolano, Coppi moved past a rider named Armando Peverelli, who a year earlier had crashed into a rockface during the Tour de France, losing the sight in his left eye. Coppi came past on Peverelli’s blind side; unseeing, the other man moved, catching Coppi’s front wheel, and he fell. The first to get to him was the Giro director, Giuseppe Ambrosini, who tried to lift him back onto his bike. There was no sign of any bleeding, although the right side of his shorts was torn, but putting any weight on his right leg, or simply moving it, left Coppi in unbearable pain.
Coppi was taken to the Santa Chiara hospital in Trento, where he received flowers that afternoon from the winner of that Giro stage, none other than Gino Bartali. He had broken his pelvis in three places – which makes those attempts to get him back in the saddle seem all the more ludicrous – and would not race again until September. That very same evening, he was visited in room 20 by Dr Enrico Locatelli and his wife Giulia, who had come from their home in Varese to watch the stage. The news of Coppi’s crash was broadcast to the crowds at the roadside by the race announcer’s car; immediately, Giulia decided to visit her idol in his hospital bed, in spite of her husband’s remonstrations that only the family would be allowed into the room.
At the hospital door she showed the same determination that had taken her into riders’ quarters at races across northern Italy. The duty doctor insisted that she could not enter. She made him call Coppi and tell him Dr Locatelli and his wife were there. By now, clearly, Coppi knew who they were, as they were duly summoned upstairs. Coppi, Giulia recalled, was pale, sweaty, unable to smile because of the pain. He tried to sit up as they entered, but fell back at once. Few words were exchanged. Coppi showed Dr Locatelli the plaster cast and the location of the fractures; the doctor reassured their hero that he would be well looked after.
It was almost two years since Fausto and Giulia had first set eyes on each other, and it would be several more before their relationship went further. There are accounts of a correspondence after Coppi was transferred to Roncegno, a village outside Trento, to convalesce in the cooler air of the mountains. Her letters would arrive at his hotel, the Hôtel des Thermes, where he was staying with his wife Bruna and their daughter, Marina; his were sent to a poste restante address in Varese. This side of the friendship was something that should be kept from her husband. However, none of these letters have been published, and in 1979 Giulia produced what she stated was the first letter Coppi ever sent her – dated September 1953. Giulia herself gave diverging accounts of what happened next, but one thing is certain: she fell pregnant later in 1950, and gave birth to a son, Maurizio, to follow her daughter Lolli. This, plus an attack of typhoid fever – probably in the summer of 1950 – would explain why she and Coppi did not have another significant meeting until 1952.
CHAPTER 10
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LOSS OF THE LUCKY CHARM
‘The man drags constant worry in his wake and it is his most cruel adversary’ – Jacques Goddet, after Coppi’s 1949 Tour win
The crash near the Turin velodrome on 29 June 1951 seemed relatively minor. According to one eyewitness, a local amateur named Nino Defilippis, a few of the cyclists in the Giro di Piemonte one-day race misjudged a bend, one of them put his front wheel down a tramline, and down they went. Serse Coppi was among the fallers; he skidded across the road and banged his head on the pavement. ‘We picked him up,’ Defilippis told me. ‘He said he was fine, so we rode into the finish with him. He signed the finish sheet and then we showed him the way to his hotel, because we were local and knew the roads. We said goodbye. Not long afterwards he died.’
Serse Coppi went to his hotel room and washed, taking the rare step of using the vinegar bath that had been prepared for his elder brother, because he did not feel well. When Fausto arrived with another gregario, Giovannino Chiesa, Serse complained of a headache. ‘The pain was on the left side of his head, so we lifted his hair and had a look,’ said Chiesa. ‘There was no blood. There was a small mark, like the scratch a child might make on its mother’s face.’
Serse’s decline was shockingly rapid, the attempts to save his life increasingly desperate. The riders called for an ice pack; by the time it had arrived he was asleep, but, according to Chiesa’s account, he was not sleeping properly. The riders grew afraid. A doctor was called. As he lay there, Serse was rolling his eyes, extending his toes as if he had cramp, tensing his body. His face had darke
ned. They called an ambulance; as he was taken to hospital, Coppi and Chiesa moved his head to stop his tongue dropping down his throat. He had stopped breathing. An operation for cerebral haemorrhage was delayed because there was no blood or plasma in the hospital and it was a Sunday. He died before he reached the operating table.
He was buried quickly: Fausto had to start the Tour de France in four days’ time. The impact was terrible. The mamma of the Coppi family, Angiolina, never fully recovered. It was the same for Fausto. He had persuaded Serse to race so that they could be together as they had been in the village. He had got Serse a place at Bianchi so he could have him at his side. Serse had been riding the race to prepare to support him in the Tour. Now he had just watched him die, suddenly and horribly after a desperate battle to save his life. The guilt must have been immense. Like his war service, this was something Fausto never discussed.
There is a consensus among those who knew Fausto that the death of his brother was a turning point in his life. Milano, Carrea, Piero Coppi, Martini and Pugnaloni are unanimous: after this, nothing was quite the same. To his contemporaries, the disintegration of Fausto’s marriage, his disastrous divorce, his long, painful decline, even his premature death, all seemed to stem from this initially banal crash on a tramline in Turin.
* * *
When Sandrino Carrea talks about Serse, he doesn’t use words to begin with. He throws his arms wide and makes a noise somewhere between a pack of hounds scenting blood and a steam engine’s safety valve under high pressure. The sound is obscure but the meaning is clear: Serse was a character, a big character. The scene with Carrea is repeated, in various ways, whenever one of the Coppi brothers’ associates discusses Coppi junior.
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