The return of Faustino and his mother from Argentina was dramatic, too, in a different way. The Giulio Cesare docked in Cannes, where the White Lady cut a glamorous figure as she came down the gangway in a blue outfit, wearing sunglasses; the infant was hidden in a large holdall held by a member of the crew. The crowd of press photographers was so large that it took a few well-aimed punches from Pinella di Grande before Giulia and Faustino were able to get to the Citroën Traction Avant Fausto had been lent by a friend, ‘with all the precision and lightning speed of a gangster getaway’, as one paper put it. The getaway included driving the wrong way up a one-way street (thanks, no doubt, to the gendarme in the front seat), with carloads of journalists and photographers in pursuit. If Giulia had aspired to join the ranks of the Lorens and Lollobrigidas in the news magazines, that ambition had been achieved.
Fausto had got what he wanted: a son. To ensure their privacy, he rented an entire hotel for Giulia and Faustino on their first night back in Europe. As Giulia told it later, he kissed her, then took his son in his arms, carried him to his room, put him on a rug and knelt down to look at him. He stayed there for a long time. A large new car – a Lancia Aurelia – was waiting for her on her return, and a ring worth, she said, 42 million lire. He was not present when she received the gifts – ‘as usual so that I wouldn’t thank him’. But inevitably Coppi headed for Rome almost immediately to race on the track.
As with his previous family, his life consisted of ‘racing, winning and earning money’: lots of it, in a highly lucrative series of exhibition events around France that summer. Coppi estimated that, compared with his heyday, his strength had diminished by a third, but he still managed one final challenge: winning the Italian national championship, run on points over a series of five one-day races throughout 1955. He clinched the title with victories in the Giro dell’Apennino, three days after his thirty-sixth birthday, and the Tre Valli Varesine (run, uniquely, as a time trial). That was the event where, eight years and a few months earlier, he had first set eyes on his new love. The season was capped with a third successive win in the Baracchi Trophy with Filippi.
In spite of his success on the road, however, it was not a peaceful existence. There were threatening phone calls and anonymous letters attacking Fausto and Giulia and calling Faustino ‘bastardo’. Coppi was still receiving abuse from the roadsides, shouts of ‘Go back to Bruna’, and ‘Down with the White Lady’. He told Tempo magazine at the end of that year: ‘I have wanted at times, so much, to put my brakes on and tell the people who are whistling or shouting insults why I’m not at the front. But they wouldn’t understand.’ The pressure told on them both: one evening Giulia told Fausto she was leaving, he gave her ‘a violent slap’, she ran away and, together with Ettore Milano, he had to restrain her.
* * *
The Giro di Lombardia is aptly nicknamed ‘the race of the falling leaves’. It threads its way around Lake Como and through the mists of the north Italian flatlands as the dead leaves gently drop off the trees on the lakeside hills. While Milan–San Remo exudes the burgeoning optimism of spring, the Giro di Lombardia is the harbinger of winter. It is the classic most indelibly associated with the campionissimo: Fausto Coppi won the race five times, and suffered one famous defeat, in the 1956 edition.
Half a century on, Fiorenzo Magni still remembers that particular race with some embarrassment. ‘I don’t know if what I did was decisive,’ he told me, but the consensus is that Magni played the key role in chasing Coppi down when his victory looked to be assured. The fading champion had escaped, as he so often had in the past, on the climb that led to the chapel of the Madonna del Ghisallo, high above the lake. On the run-in to the finish in Milan he and a young Italian named Diego Ronchini were riding ahead of a chasing group which included Magni and the other big names. The pair had a lead that looked healthy enough to keep them in front until they reached the Vigorelli velodrome.
That is, until the intervention of the White Lady. Although Magni had remained on good terms with Coppi, he and his wife had always been friendly with Coppi’s wife Bruna; to this day, although he can understand Coppi’s decision to leave her, he cannot condone it. As the car carrying Giulia Occhini over-took the line of cyclists she saw Magni in the chasing group and could not resist the temptation to point out that her man had put one over the Giro winner. Today, Magni is diplomacy itself. ‘A few words out of turn,’ he says, when asked what Giulia yelled at him out of the car window: ‘Eh, Fiorenzo, my Fausto has got you!’ He does not mention the gesture she made, but Sandrino Carrea recalls the episode: ‘When she came near Magni she went like this’ – and at this point he wallops his bicep with his hand as he mimics her obscene gesture; one raised fist, the other hand clenching the muscle – ‘and Magni chased fit to kill himself.’ The ‘Lion of Flanders’ is reported to have said that he would have chased Coppi down after that even if he had had to bust a gut all the way to Novi Ligure. Later he would say that the blow to his pride was a bigger spur than amphetamine: ‘I sunk my teeth into the handlebars to the point where I lost any awareness of being alive.’
The result was inevitable, as the other riders in the group joined Magni in the chase: Coppi and Ronchini were swept up as the race entered Milan. The old champion, now thirty-seven, had one final ace up his sleeve: he knew the Vigorelli velodrome like the back of his hand, and as he sped down from the final banking the finish sprint looked to be his. That is, until a fast-moving, blond Frenchman named André Darrigade inched past in the final twenty metres to snatch the win by a tyre’s width. Coppi was last seen weeping in a corner of the track, and left by a side door as the crowd chanted his name. What they had just seen amounted to his swansong.
He had trained like a man possessed for that race, his last chance to salvage something tangible from a disastrous season. It had begun with an attack of typhus fever, which had cost him his place with his former employers, Bianchi. The illness had meant he could not race early in the year, leaving him in breach of contract, and Bianchi were not inclined to make allowances for the man who had caused a national scandal the year before. While he was ill, he had been sacked. He had bounced back by finding a new sponsor, the Carpano aperitif company, and setting up his own team, riding Fausto Coppi bikes. But at the Giro he had crashed, dislocating his back: two more months off the bike followed. He was still good enough to be selected for the Italian team at the world championship, taking fifteenth, and followed that with victory in the GP Campari time trial at Lugano. But this was small beer compared to that lost win in Lombardy, where, to add salt to the wound, the winner, Darrigade, was a rider he had hired himself to race for Bianchi, to support him in Italian events. Ronchini, his companion in the escape, was a Bianchi rider, a former team-mate. It was Coppi’s old mechanic, Pinella di Grande, who had no choice but to tell Ronchini to stop collaborating in the break.
* * *
The final three seasons of Coppi’s life, 1957–9, saw the inevitable decline. He remained a living legend, but it was a half-life: he won minor appearance races and his physical strength diminished with each year. The 1957 season saw his last disastrous crash, in Sardinia in early March. That left him with a broken femur, and was followed by five months off the bike before his last win in the Baracchi Trophy, when he went through all the agonies of hell to keep up with his young partner, Ercole Baldini. The slow fade-out was marked by a sprinkling of wins in such uninspiring venues as Calvisano on the Lombardy plains, Namur in Wallonia, and a six-day track race in Buenos Aires.
He still rode huge numbers of appearance events. His teammate Michele Gismondi recalls riding three track meetings a day with Coppi when logistics permitted. Gismondi would deal with the bikes, Coppi with the cash. In between, there were ignominious outings in major events. At the 1958 Giro Coppi finished only thirty-second and was heard to ask the field to slow down on a relatively innocuous climb. He fought desperately merely to finish forty-fourth in the 1959 Paris–Roubaix, and made a disastrous start in the 1
959 Vuelta a España, where he lasted only fifteen stages, finishing well behind the stage winner each time the going got tough. Not wanting to show him up by actually being seen to push him, the gregari would pretend to lean on his back.
The demands were high and he had his ways of dealing with them, as his friend Nino Defilippis told me in the most chilling of terms. ‘We were at the Vél d’Hiv in Paris with Darrigade, Bobet, Anquetil, for a ten-day track meeting. He said, “Nino, will you inject me?” I said, “No problem” because I knew how to do injections, he didn’t. He gave me the little flask, which probably had two pills of stenamina or simpamine in it. I said, “Fausto, why are you doing something like this for a track meeting?” He said, “Most of the people have come here to see me. I can’t allow myself to look bad.” My answer was, “Well, if I’m going to have to keep up with you, I’d better have some, too.”’ Coppi only had one needle, so they shared it, two-thirds of the flask for the young pretender and a third for the man who had been the greatest cyclist in the world, now reduced to charging up to save face.
The fading champion retained his glamour among the syringes and sacks of lire. The British professional cyclist Tony Hewson described meeting Coppi at a criterium in France in the late 1950s. ‘An unassuming black car edged its way into the square and two men got out … Suddenly there was a groundswell of sound like a rustling prayer – "Il campionissimo" and people hurried from everywhere. I didn’t know what to expect: something fabulous, justifying his fame: a luxury sports car, police escort, army of minders, fanfare, choir of angels! There was nothing, just these two men and a modest black car with the crowd swarming around them. Yet so powerful was the Coppi mystique that this humble presentation seemed merely to enhance his glamour.’
It was during these years of decline that Coppi made two legendary appearances in London, racing at the Herne Hill velodrome in what are still called simply ‘the Fausto Coppi meetings’ by fans of a certain age. For the first meeting, on 14 September, 1958, Coppi was paid £300 – half his usual fee – and the 12,000 crowd paid £1 10s each, twelve times the usual entry price. The great concrete bowl has not been full since. The afternoon’s entertainment, with an Italy v England format, began with a Catholic cardinal blessing the crowd, and included a ‘tea break’ in which the professionals rode slowly around the track, stopping to sign autographs.
Herne Hill came shortly after a rare high point for Coppi: the 1958 world road race championship, held in the French city of Reims. He had to fight hard merely to qualify for the Italian team, led by Ercole Baldini, his partner in the Baracchi time trial the previous autumn. Baldini had succeeded Anquetil as the holder of the hour record, once held by Coppi himself, and Baldini took the world title that day, with the support of the older man. It was Coppi who advised Baldini to infiltrate an early escape – although there were malicious whispers later that he had done so in an attempt to make the young man burn himself out – and he managed seventh, a considerable feat at almost thirty-nine years old.
In one sense Coppi’s ‘slow sporting suicide’, as Jean-Paul Ollivier terms it, was not that remarkable. It was not uncommon in the post-war years for cyclists to continue racing up to and beyond the age of forty. Bartali was the most celebrated example; he rode his last race in November 1954, four months after his fortieth birthday. Other stars of the period such as Brik Schotte, Rik Van Steenbergen and Jean Robic also continued until they were over forty. What was surprising about Coppi’s final years was how poorly he raced in major events, when he could bring himself to start them. In contrast, Bartali rode one poor Giro, 1954, when he was thirteenth, and retired the following winter.
Journalists of the time, who had followed Coppi in his glory days, clearly could not fathom why he now kept going. One commentator, Indro Montanelli, wrote after Coppi’s death that there was a kind of glory in his stubborn refusal to accept reality. In his prime, Montanelli felt, it had taken only Bartali’s shadow to sap Coppi’s willpower; now, he refused to surrender in the face of impossible odds. ‘At forty, he had found the grit he lacked at the age of twenty or thirty.’
Biagio Cavanna, for one, appears to have believed that physically Coppi was still capable of victories in major races: in 1953 he had told a magazine that his protégé would go on winning past the age of forty and he continued to supply advice and massage until Coppi’s death. However, Cavanna had a vested interest in the campionissimo continuing to race: he was receiving a percentage of his winnings until shortly before Coppi died. Even for 1959, his share was 740,000 lire.
Those close to Coppi have various explanations for the slow, depressing coda to his career. Most say that he could not contemplate life without competing. ‘He asked me, “What will I do if I stop racing?"’ recalls Michele Gismondi. ‘You imagine it: you are used to being constantly on the move, travelling to races, training, you are always in cars and trains, everything imaginable, and suddenly you are sitting looking at the walls. He loved the bike too much.’ Perhaps he went on racing in the same way that his father worked the fields in Castellania. It is the oldest principle in farming: if the weather is good when the crops are coming in you keep going because it might rain overnight. There was no reason for Coppi to stop, as long as the race organisers still wanted him and he could still earn more in an afternoon than a manual worker earned in a month.
That did not make it any less painful. During the disastrous Vuelta a España of 1959, after one particularly poor performance a French journalist asked Coppi if he understood that he was risking his reputation. He replied that he understood what was at stake: ‘I have signed contracts and I have to honour them. If I had understood how hard the Vuelta was, I would not have agreed to ride. Up to now, I have been privileged as a cyclist. Everything came easily to me. I did not know what suffering was.’ He added that Giulia was calling him every day asking him to stop racing.
Nino Defilippis, for one, does not believe that Coppi tarnished his reputation by continuing in this way: ‘Perhaps he didn’t actually need the money. The bike was his life. He had come from obscurity; stopping racing would have meant going back to the past, being forgotten, leaving that world behind. He raced for the people, the public, and they respected that. He went to the races as Coppi [rather than as a competitor]. People knew he wasn’t winning, and we [the other riders] knew that as well. It wasn’t a question of his looking bad, even when he had to plead with other riders to slow down. The people didn’t look at who won, didn’t go to them for autographs. They only wanted Coppi.’
* * *
Inevitably, the White Lady was castigated for Coppi’s decline. It was easy to blame her for emasculating the champion. His son Faustino dismisses this. ‘His decline was in the normal order of things, because he was old and had other interests. My mother would certainly have preferred him to stop earlier, but it was his life, his work.’
Speculation about the corrosive effect that Giulia Occhini had on Coppi goes further than this. Some claim that he had to keep racing to earn the cash to subsidise her extravagant lifestyle, while paying money both to Bruna and Dr Locatelli. Others suggest that he raced for small contracts in order not to spend time at home with her, which seems far less likely. Raphael Geminiani is adamant: ‘He was ruined financially – he had to pay off the doctor and Bruna, assure the future of his children, and the White Lady was expensive, and what’s more at the end of his career he earned less money.’ He had settled 50 million lire on Bruna; the attempts to get his and Giulia’s marriages annulled via the Holy See cannot have come cheap.
Life with his White Lady bore little resemblance to his old existences, either the peasant childhood in Castellania or the gentle routine of Sestri with Bruna and little Marina. Visits to two former team-mates on successive days fifty years on showed how that new life was viewed. On the first day, I was told that at the Villa Coppi there were silver plates on the table. The following morning’s interviewee remembered the under-dishes being gold. Perhaps there were both in the cupboard, i
f Coppi adopted the same belt and braces policy as he did with his cars, of which he had four: two distinctively curved, powerful Lancia Aurelias (as driven by Formula One drivers Mike Hawthorn and Juan-Manuel Fangio), a Fiat Seicento and a Millecento, which he used as a support car in races.
‘Fausto was a simple man, with uncomplicated tastes, but he was discovering another world,’ says Raphael Geminiani. ‘Giulia transformed him completely. Everything changed! Fausto used to dress elegantly, soberly, but now – check suits, cravats. I remember going to dinner there, there was a maître d’hôtel with white gloves. I said, “Fausto, this is not where you should be,” and he shook his head like a man who has no power. But he liked it because he was discovering new things.’ Another team-mate is more succinct: ‘She polished him up and at home she acted the fine lady.’
A former team-mate and his wife clearly felt the Villa Coppi was scandalously lavish by the standards of the post-war years; there were five servants, the bed linen was changed every day. When the cyclist asked for water a servant boy brought a large silver jug, inadequately filled. Giulia shouted at the lad, and he explained that the jug was so heavy that he had thought it was full. Her response was, ‘Fausto, you must sack him tomorrow.’ And they claim Fausto did just that.
Just how far Coppi had come from his natural element – wandering the hills around Castellania with his dog and his gun – was shown by a curious television appearance, on the variety slot Il Musichiere, where he sang ‘Nel blu, dipinto di blu’, the song that had won the San Remo Music Festival Prize in 1958. Coppi is ill at ease, appears strangely diminished (those who knew him say that he usually seemed taller than might have been expected), and his slightly hoarse voice sounds infinitely unhappy as he sings the words, the tale of a man who paints his hands and face blue and is whisked away by the wind. He is truly a man alone.
Fallen Angel Page 23
