Ironically, in view of Serse’s relative lack of talent as a cyclist, his personality made far more impression on those around him than that of his brother. Fausto’s contemporaries tend to remember him in general terms: ‘a gentleman’, ‘a wonderful person’. Asked to pin down precisely why Fausto was so nice, they um and ah. Detailed anecdotes are hard to find. Serse, on the other hand, was the sort of larger-than-life figure who leaves many crystal-clear memories behind him, partly because he was not obscured by the aura that envelops his god-like elder brother.
There is no reverence when Serse is discussed, but there is plenty of laughter. It was Serse who took the lead when the village boys’ games took them into forbidden territory: an orchard to steal apples, football in a hayfield. Later, when they went shooting together, the obsessive Fausto would go for partridge; Serse would shoot towards the road to scare the passers-by and laugh fit to burst. That summed up the relationship: Fausto wanted Serse at his side; Serse simply wanted to play.
They were divided during the war when – and here memories become dim, leaving a sense of something hidden – Serse chose to fight for the fascist rump, the Repubblica di Salò. Post-war the younger brother emerged to persuade Fausto that he should continue racing, living with him for a few months in Rome as the Germans were driven northwards and the professional cyclists began competing amidst the rubble. He did so wearing Fausto’s pink jersey from the 1940 Giro, a little ragged and very baggy by now, and he was not above pretending to be his brother. Immediately after the war Serse won a major race, Milan–Varzi, ahead of his older brother, and thus earned his place in the Bianchi team along-side Fausto in 1946.
In his cousin Piero Coppi’s view, Serse had some of the qualities needed by a campione – the charisma, the personality, powerful legs – but he didn’t have the necessary application. Like his elder brother, Serse went to visit Biagio Cavanna and was told of the conditions that he imposed on his pupils: in bed at ten o’clock, up at six in the morning, taking turns to collect the freshly drawn milk, plus the training. He didn’t come back. His only major win came in Paris–Roubaix in 1949 – a victory shared with France’s André Mahé, who was leading but was sent off course at the finish. Mahé pointed out that Fausto gave Serse a hand-sling as he bridged to the break and then instructed his brother to protest when the judges initially awarded the Frenchman first place.
Serse was ‘an uglier, smilier version of Fausto’, according to Orio Vergani. He was nicknamed ‘oreggiat’’, because of his sticking-out ears, but there was enough of a resemblance for autograph hunters such as Giulia Locatelli to confuse them. Serse had a rounder face, more marked with laughter lines, and a pointy chin. Dino Buzzati wrote, somewhat unfairly, that he was ‘an ironic imitation’ of his brother: the same features, but a tenth of the talent and the style of ‘a duck, a giraffe, an accordion’. A photo of the two of them on their bikes in the Giro in 1951 illustrates the contrast perfectly. Fausto looks utterly relaxed and at one with his machine, head perfectly poised, arms slightly bent. Under his crinkly grin, Serse’s chin is lower than his shoulders – slightly broader than his brother’s – while he has magnificent leg muscles but the uncomfortable look of a man to whom cycling does not come naturally. He leaned to the right as he rode his bike. ‘An ugly little guy, un po’ gobbo’ – a bit of a hunchback – ‘with no neck and his head sunk between his shoulders,’ says an ex-pro of the time.
Four years younger than the campionissimo, Serse became one of Fausto’s gregari, and, as a popular personality, would do the rounds in the bunch when a threatening breakaway developed, persuading the other teams to join Bianchi in pursuit. Any help he gave on the road was, however, merely the visible element of a far deeper relationship of co-dependence. He described himself as Fausto’s ‘gregario of the mind’: it was his presence that mattered. He shared his brother’s hotel room and rode ‘in the shadow of Fausto’s shadow’ (Mario Ferretti). As Buzzati put it: ‘Fausto cannot do without Serse and feels lost if he doesn’t know that behind him, in the group of backmarkers, Serse is slogging faithfully away …’ And, indeed, before taking flight on a mountain, his elder brother would say kindly, ‘We’ll wait at the [stage] finish.’ ‘We would say goodbye and off [the back of the bunch] Serse would go,’ recalls Carrea.
The relationship was complicated: Fausto was his brother’s boss, but Serse knew he had the psychological whiphand; his elder sibling needed him. Perhaps the monastic Fausto lived vicariously through Serse, who did the frivolous things he did not permit himself to do. So it was that the elder brother would give detailed instructions for their next day’s training, but Serse would go out dancing. While Fausto went to bed early and avoided crowded places, Serse smoked, played boule, hung out in bars, chased women, played practical jokes and loved to party. He would go out dancing and ‘come home with the morning papers’, as Carrea put it. He had a simple and apparently efficacious policy with the opposite sex; an ugly woman was ‘meno sfruttata’, underutilised. ‘He was not overgifted for cycling, but for love, yes,’ recalls another contemporary who had showered with him: ‘[he had] equipment that made you envious.’ His conquests were rumoured to include celebrated actresses. Together with Bianchi’s other playboy, Luigi Casola, he would disappear in search of adventure on the rest days of the Giro.
Serse’s nocturnal lifestyle meant he had trouble keeping up with Fausto when they trained, which was daily, in theory at least. After his marriage to Bruna, Fausto was living in Sestri Ponente, while Serse remained with their mother in Castellania. They would ride in opposite directions down the same road to meet for training in the mornings; Fausto would know by where they met just what time Serse had got to bed the previous evening. Serse would ask the other gregari to phone up Fausto and provide his alibis. Milano recalls covering for him: ‘Dov’è quello là?’ he shouts, mimicking Fausto’s Piemontese accent, then he tells how he would spin some tale to satisfy their leader. But there was, says Carrea, no jealousy, no arguments.
Serse was not the first or the last brother to make a living in cycling on the back of his elder sibling. In the 1990s, Stephen Roche and Laurence Roche formed a brief double act, while the five-times Tour winner Miguel Indurain took his younger brother Prudencio with him to the Tour; as Serse did for Fausto, Prudencio signed autographs on Miguel’s behalf. The German Jan Ullrich employed his brother Stefan as a mechanic. Other cycling champions have had their joker figures, as important for boosting morale as for their cycling skills, for example Sean Kelly and an obscure Belgian called Ronan ‘Ronnie’ Onghena. It was Serse, along with Casola, who kept morale high at Bianchi: they threw him in the sea on a rest day in one Giro.
Out training before one race, Alfredo Martini was struck by the way they would complete each other’s sentences. Fausto was reliant on Serse for psychological support in his lowest moments. The light-hearted Serse acted as a buffer against his inner doubts: it was Serse who kept Fausto racing as the war ended, who made Fausto continue in the 1947 Giro after he, Serse, had gone home due to a crash. ‘A father figure’ was Orio Vergani’s view of the younger brother, while Buzzati described Serse as ‘Fausto’s lucky charm, his guardian spirit, a sort of living talisman – a little like the magic lamp without which Aladdin would have remained forever a beggar. It is Serse who really wins because without him Fausto would have fallen apart a hundred times. Neither is capable of living without the other.’
* * *
As in the face of other crises, such as the death of his father, Fausto’s immediate reaction was that he wanted to quit cycling. There was, however, no time to reflect. The previous year had been disastrous by his standards thanks to his broken pelvis. The vast plaster enveloping his left leg and most of his upper body while the broken bones mended had been removed after forty days; he had convalesced for two months, then begun racing again that September, with no time to gain any meaningful results. The Giro di Lombardia was as close as he got; he was not strong enough to escape on his own, yet made it in
to the race-winning escape, only to lose any chance in the finish sprint when he and the other leaders caught a slower group as they lapped the Vigorelli.
The start of 1951 had been wrecked by another crash, when his front tyre slipped as he sprinted on the soaking wet velodrome where Milan–Turin finished. A broken collarbone meant a further month without racing and no time to prepare properly for the Giro d’Italia. There, with Fiorenzo Magni rampant, he still managed to win a time trial and a major mountain stage and finish fourth overall.
As they had during the 1949 crisis at St Malo, Coppi’s confidants rallied round to persuade him to stay in cycling and to start the Tour. Bartali was one of the main influences, with particular power because he had been in precisely the same situation fifteen years earlier. He too had wanted to quit cycling, to join the clergy, after his brother Giulio had hit a car as he descended a mountain in an amateur race. Although, like Serse, Giulio Bartali had died as a result of a medical error, both deaths typified the dangers cyclists ran in those days due to poor tyres, abysmal road surfaces and a lack of head protection. Such deaths were by no means uncommon.
Not surprisingly, Cavanna was persuasive as well, rationalising the situation thus: ‘It is a disaster but it could have happened to anyone and it could have happened in another way.’ Another team-mate, Luigi Casola, told Coppi he would go to the Tour in Serse’s place – although he actually went in his car, as he was not selected. In the end it came down to hard cash: as Carrea puts it, they were paid to go – 500,000 francs – so they went. ‘If we hadn’t earned it, someone else would have.’ The lengthy spells Coppi had missed through injury in the previous eighteen months meant that it was in everyone’s economic interests that he rode the Tour.
Physically, in theory, Coppi was capable of riding the Tour and doing well. He had, after all, just ridden himself into good enough form to win that mountain stage in the Giro. But when he arrived at the Tour, he had not slept for three nights. One eyewitness said he had the look of an automaton. Not surprisingly, he eventually cracked, in dire heat on the relatively flat stage from Carcassonne to Montpellier. Coppi had raced well enough through the Pyrenees to be lying fourth overall behind the eventual winner, Hugo Koblet. He was well placed until the final 100 kilometres of the stage, but he began vomiting and found himself completely devoid of strength. He rapidly lost sixteen minutes on the leaders, notably Koblet and a bevy of French riders led by Raphael Geminiani. Half a dozen of the Italian gregari rallied by Carrea, Martini, Milano and Luciano Pezzi did their best to help him limit his losses, but to no avail. Pezzi, who died in 1998, gave his version of the battle to Jean-Paul Ollivier twenty years earlier: ‘He was leaning over his bars with an indefinable grimace on his face. His empty eyes were fixed on the road. He was transfixed, as if he had been stunned. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t answer our questions. There was no reaction.’ Coppi only came to life when Pezzi grabbed a bottle of wine from a spectator and poured it over his head.
It was a classic cycling calvary: the champion suffering in agony, zigzagging along the road, surrounded by his loyal servants. Ironically, given his earlier wish to quit the sport, Coppi would not contemplate getting off his bike. The battle for survival depended on whether they could get him to the finish within the day’s time limit, calculated as a percentage of the winner’s time. The normal margin was 10 per cent, but Coppi stood no chance of finishing in time. However, an obscure rule stated that if more than a tenth of the field were outside the 10 per cent limit, it could be extended to 15 or 20 per cent. It was Pezzi who worked out that if the group containing Coppi finished together, they would all be safe. But one Spanish cyclist, who did not understand the rule, kept trying to leave them behind, hoping to regain some time and finish within the 10 per cent limit. The gregari had to grab his saddle and slow him down each time he sped ahead, to ensure the group kept to the right number.
Coppi remained in the race, although there is some debate as to whether the organisers would have wanted him to go home even if he had been outside the 15 per cent time limit. As Carrea says: ‘There were newspaper sales of 300,000 a day [in France] at stake; without Coppi there was no interest in Italy. It was in their interests that Coppi should be there.’ It was a battle against the odds that strengthened his hold on the hearts of the French and Italian public, although the race referees were implacable. They fined three of his domestiques, Pezzi, Milano and Biagoni, 200 francs each for pushing their captain, while Coppi was fined a total of 600 francs for three offences: allowing himself to be pushed by each of the trio on various occasions.
The illness was probably caused by the cumulative effect of the strain of the three weeks since Serse’s death; it was only temporary and Coppi recovered rapidly, scoring a familiar lone victory in the Alpine stage to Briançon and riding well enough to finish tenth overall behind Koblet. The Italians went home with 800,000 lire between them. Honour, and their bank balances, had been saved. However, the rest of Coppi’s season was blank, apart from a win in the Grand Prix of Lugano time trial and the usual string of ‘victories’ in exhibition events across France and Italy. The world championship was a target, particularly as it was held that year on Italian soil, at Varese. But he did not even make it to the start due to a bout of illness.
There was speculation in the Italian press that the illness was an excuse as he had realised that he would not have the strength to beat Koblet, but Coppi was adamant this was not the case: ‘I would have been very stupid not to have seized the chance of competing in a world championship on a course which suited me, in front of my fans, at a time when the fatigue of the Tour was only a memory.’ Whatever the debates, to salvage his season there remained only the Giro di Lombardia, which he had won four times in the past five years. Try as he might, he could not shake off a small select group including Bartali, Magni and Bobet, and in the final sprint on the Vigorelli velodrome it was the Frenchman who triumphed, a bitter end to a bitter season.
* * *
Coppi’s closest associates, such as Sandrino Carrea and Ettore Milano, still have not come to terms with Serse’s death, more than fifty years on. For Milano, the tragedy still has a dream- like unreality about it, with the twist that in his view Serse predicted his own end, on the way to the race. Milano recalls that he and Livio drove with Serse to the race start, and as they arrived at the railway bridge in the nearby town of Alessandria, Serse said, ‘I’m not going home again.’ He had bought a new suit, and he apparently said, ‘Put these clothes on me when I’m dead.’ These were throwaway statements: Serse was going to stay with a semi-steady girlfriend in Turin, so of course he wasn’t coming back. His crack about the clothes was typically flippant. They only took on any meaning after the event.
Fausto himself also felt that Serse had had a presentiment of his death. He had, he said, listened all the night before the race to a dog barking, ‘as if it wanted to bring me bad luck’. His mother said that after packing his suitcase Serse had been unwilling to leave the family home. She had, of course, warned him to take care, but that was because he was as lunatic a driver as any professional cyclist. For Sandrino Carrea, the death points to what he sees as a curse on the entire family, ‘exterminated by misfortune’ from the father downwards.
More important and more clear-cut, however, was the effect on Coppi’s relationship with his wife, Bruna. In that sense the death was definitely a curse. To start with, Coppi changed, becoming even more pensive and withdrawn. It was, says Piero Coppi, as if ‘something inside him had died’. ‘He never laughed after Serse’s death,’ Carrea told me. ‘Before, Serse would play the fool for him. After Serse’s death we all felt it was in our interests to stick close to him, look after him, make him smile.’
Ettore Milano was specially assigned to look after Coppi, and that was not without its strains: Alfredo Martini asserts that Milano’s devotion became ‘almost pathological’, beyond the call of duty. He worried more about his master’s health than his own. ‘Between them relations w
ere so close that I believe without Milano at the races Fausto felt disorientated,’ says Martini. ‘Coppi confided everything in him.’ It was Milano who took over Serse’s role as room-mate, not with total success at first. ‘I shared with him after Serse died, he didn’t like to sleep alone. The first time I did, I got to the room, put on a poker face and went straight to sleep. He said porca miseria, you’ve come here to keep me company and you’ve just nodded straight off.’ It was also noticed that Coppi became more nervous. After a nasty accident to a fellow cyclist in the Giro, one eyewitness recalls him announcing that he was giving up cycling.
Bruna Coppi became ever more convinced that her husband should stop racing, because the dangers were too great. Raphael Geminiani was explicit: ‘[Bruna] didn’t like cycling. She made Fausto put on a crash hat, obliged him to wear elbow pads. Everyone said to him, “Come on, stop this nonsense.”’ Magni concurs: ‘She said the things a mother would say.’ And Coppi’s mother said the same as his wife: Angiolina Coppi had been scared about Fausto racing from the very start, and his father had had to persuade her to let him compete. Now she felt that losing one son prematurely was enough, and, like Bruna, she pleaded with Fausto to give up competing. It is said that as she stood in front of Serse’s body she yelled ‘Give me that bike and I will break it with my own two hands.’
In one sense, Bruna’s fears were understandable. During their marriage, Coppi had had only two serious crashes, and they had come in the last two years, together with Serse’s tragic death. Later, Coppi acquired the reputation of being a particularly accident-prone cyclist, and this is certainly true of the latter part of his career. Including the broken pelvis in 1950, Coppi had six major crashes in ten seasons. The 1950 and 1951 accidents deprived him of vital racing – without them, could he, perhaps, have won the Tour three times, or even four? Biagio Cavanna, for one, felt that Coppi was not particularly unlucky. As the soigneur saw it, he had no more crashes than the average cyclist, but took more harm when he fell heavily because he had less muscle to cushion the bones.
Fallen Angel Page 16
