* * *
Coppi was chasing more than his old form when he set off to race in 1958 in a new Bianchi jersey. He was in search of the happy little world that had cocooned him in the five years before Serse’s death. Bianchi had taken him back in 1958, after an agreement was reached at the end of 1957 giving the bike manufacturer the right to make machines bearing the name Coppi. But this Bianchi team bore little resemblance to that of his heyday. When Coppi left to form Carpano-Coppi the team had split, some gregari remaining with their leader, others remaining with the team, others quitting altogether. He would return to his own team on his own bikes in 1959, when he raced for Tricofilina-Coppi.
His relationship with Giulia had done more than tear his family apart; it had wrecked his ‘second family’, the close-knit inner circle within his team. Briefly, he fell out with Biagio Cavanna, but they resumed working together in his final season, 1959. Sandrino Carrea and other team-mates wanted nothing to do with the White Lady (‘There was a point when I just said, “enough is enough”’) but it was more than that. ‘The White Lady said we were just trying to take things from him, so we got angry and didn’t see him any more,’ says the wife of one former team-mate. ‘What can you say? When you come to my house, I don’t say you are going to steal something.’ In the glory days of Bianchi, they had all lived in each other’s houses, coming and going as they wished. ‘She eliminated his old companions, although I was allowed to visit, because I was a foreigner,’ says Raphael Geminiani. Masons and peasants were probably a little too sweaty for the world Giulia was building; and anyone who had been close to her Fausto amounted to competition.
Bruna had been unobtrusive but the presence of Giulia at Coppi’s side at bike races led to friction. Alfredo Binda’s and Fiorenzo Magni’s disputes with her were not isolated instances. La Dama or La Damazza, the riders nicknamed her. The first has overtones of ‘a fine lady’, the second is simply offensive. Predictably, she did not get on with Cavanna, although equally predictably she persuaded him to massage her. She threatened to shoot him during one of their arguments; he responded that if he didn’t have dark glasses on, he would rip her head off before she lifted the pistol. Michele Gismondi also had words with her on several occasions – the only incident he will speak of is on one occasion in Naples when she wanted him to take little Faustino home and he refused. Another Bianchi rider, Guido de Santi, recalled that he was training with Coppi for the Giro di Campania in Naples when Giulia came alongside in a team car and accused him of talking about Fausto behind his back. He replied with ‘rude words’, adding that ‘Fausto, next to me, said nothing.’
Raphael Geminiani feels that Coppi continued racing because he was isolated. ‘Champions’ lives are built on personal success to such an extent that they lose touch with the outside world. They need to be kept in touch by having a band of close friends around them. They need an entourage.’ There was no one to advise Coppi against racing, or at least no one he trusted. His closest confidant, Serse, was long dead; his gregari were banished. Ironically, the person he was closest to, Giulia, most probably did not want him to go on racing. Letters she published in 1980 in the magazine Occhio indicate that his absences made her insecure: she accused him of infidelity and of not bothering to write.
The letters, written while Coppi was on a lengthy racing trip to South America in early 1958, reveal more about Giulia than they do about him, although clearly he is ‘racing and earning’ as ever, even if he is winning less. She makes constant declarations of love, pleads for attention, details her ill health. He appears distant; she sounds desperate. The letters suggest that there was a cooling in the relationship, at least on Coppi’s side, after the initial heat due to the pleasure of mutual discovery, the shared feeling that the world was against them. There are only hints of this elsewhere; Louison Bobet, for one, was shocked when he heard the way Giulia addressed Fausto at a race in 1959. There are persistent stories of arguments between the couple, often over money, according to Italian biographers. At times their squabbles could be overheard in the factory next door to Villa Coppi.
One reason for the lack of stability was the issue of the children. Giulia had given up access to Lolli and Maurizio, under conditions that stated she was permitted to see them every three months, at a religious school, with a nun in attendance so that she would not corrupt them. Faustino, on the other hand, had been registered as Dr Locatelli’s son immediately he was brought back to Italy, because in Argentina his mother had had to acknowledge that she was still Locatelli’s wife; according to Italian law, unless he formally gave up the child, Faustino was his. The doctor, not one to smooth his wife’s exit from the marriage, refused and his claim to paternity was to remain ongoing until well into 1960, several months after Fausto had died. Faustino did not bear the name Coppi, legally, until 1978, when the doctor was dead. When we discussed the issue a quarter of a century on, he did not once utter the name ‘Locatelli’.
* * *
Rumours that Coppi and the White Lady were going to part company first emerged in the Italian papers in October 1959. Those close to him are divided on the issue: some say he planned a quiet life on his own without her, others that he could never have left Faustino. That seems certain, given his love for his son, who was pictured in magazines surrounded with toys such as the massive pedal car he received on his first birthday, or waving at his father when the 1958 Giro d’Italia passed in front of the Villa. Coppi, it was said, persuaded a friend with an aeroplane to fly over the villa on Faustino’s fourth birthday, dropping flowers from the sky.
Faustino, naturally, is adamant today that there is no chance his father would have ended the relationship with Giulia. However, this is not the view of two men who knew his father well. Raphael Geminiani recalls a conversation with Coppi not long before his death, in which he told the Frenchman of his desire for a quiet, simple life, with his family and his old domestiques, some of whom, such as Carrea, he had not seen for years.
‘I was his confidant. He said, “Raphael, I’d like to go back to my little bit of land, somewhere among the vines, make wine, go hunting, have a small meal with friends and I’ll be happy. I’ll end my life as I began it.” He realised that he had made a mistake. He had fallen in love with the White Lady, discovered a whole new world, and had had a horrible time.’ Coppi told Geminiani: ‘In the evening after Carosello [a popular television programme] I want to lie down in my big old bed.’ He was longing for a simple life.
Nino Defilippis says similar things: ‘He had a problem with the White Lady. He wanted to go and live in Milan and he wanted to go on his own. They were going to split up because they didn’t get on any more. In the beginning there was love, Coppi only saw himself and the White Lady. That passed with the years. He told me when we were away racing together in France in his final season that he was moving out. He said he didn’t have the same feelings for the White Lady, that he felt distanced from her.’
In her only interview after Coppi’s departure from her house, Bruna Coppi described clandestine meetings with Fausto, carried out as if she, not the White Lady, was his mistress: ‘I never said anything because I hoped he would come back to me, and it wasn’t just the hope of a woman in love who won’t admit defeat. I met my husband, even when he wasn’t living with me. Sometimes, at night, furtively, like at the time of our first meetings, with a feeling of embarrassment in our minds, our eyes lowered. But when we shook hands, there was the same tenderness between us that there always had been.’
Together the witnesses suggest that Coppi was now not quite sure what he wanted, torn between his two families. Perhaps, having drifted into the relationship with Giulia, only to find her a tougher proposition than he expected, he was now wondering whether he had made the right decision after all. If that were indeed the situation, his persistent attempts to race at his old level slot neatly into place: amid the chaos – even the son he had so wanted could not bear his name – what could be more natural than his reliance on the one t
hing he knew he had been able to control in the past?
At the end of 1959, a year after Pope Pius’s death, the Catholic Church was involved in an attempt to reconcile Fausto with Bruna. The intermediary was a young priest, Don Piero Carnelli, who was close to Bartali, and who had known Fausto since 1947. Bartali was also involved. The upshot was a two-hour meeting in Milan in October 1959, between Coppi and the priest, news of which was leaked to the press.
Carnelli did not suggest an immediate return to the estranged wife, but a period of reflection. When the priest read the parable of the Prodigal Son, Coppi broke down. He spoke of his love of his children, of his fear of what the world might do to Giulia if he abandoned her, of his mother’s daily walk to the church to light candles on his behalf. The priest recalled later: ‘He was worried above all about the way Marina was distancing herself from him. He seemed a man exhausted, completely disillusioned, a man who could not take any more.’
CHAPTER 15
* * *
GIVE ME AIR
‘What else can I do? They look after me, they pay me. This is my world. My life is the bike’ – Coppi to Giancarlo Astrua, before leaving for Africa
For elevenses, Raphael Geminiani opens a bottle of champagne. Outside, the April morning sun shines on the green cones of the Puys, the chain of extinct volcanoes that rears up into the sky outside the French town of Clermont Ferrand. Inside Geminiani’s disorderly bachelor home, with its paintings of Coppi and other cycling stars, we discuss disease, adultery and death.
Clermont is best known as the home of Michelin tyres, but it has produced one famous cycling son: Geminiani, a volatile, charismatic man of Italian extraction. Gem’, also known as ‘le Grand Fusil’, the ‘Big Gun’, raced at a level just below the greats, coming close to winning the 1956 Tour. He remains one of French cycling’s larger than life figures, having managed stars as diverse as Jacques Anquetil and Stephen Roche in a lengthy career. But he has another role in cycling history: unknowingly, he was the man who took Fausto Coppi to his death.
Geminiani left Bianchi after Coppi’s triumphant 1952 season, but they remained close friends and he looked on as Coppi’s powers slowly ebbed. ‘With Coppi it was le vélo, le vélo, le vélo – he met la Dame Blanche in 1953, won the Giro, then had his swansong at the world championship in Lugano – it was the final mountain he climbed. The world championship, which had always escaped him before and the change in his lifestyle… you could say that he had realised his ambitions. He rode on, for money, but wasn’t the unstoppable cyclist of 1949–52. He was not the same rider.’
When Geminiani telephoned Coppi in November 1959, Coppi was preparing for one more season of racing before retirement. He had already discussed with Cavanna how he would prepare for Milan–San Remo the following spring. His hotel on the Italian Riviera was booked for that February’s training camp. He had interests in two teams for 1960: at San Pellegrino, sponsored by the mineral water company, he would be senior pro, guiding the younger riders. Bartali was to be team manager; much was made of the fact that the two great rivals were to be reunited in the same colours. Coppi was also involved in setting up a squad of younger riders. Coppi-Espressmatic would ride his own bikes, and had a French sponsor. Geminiani was advising him about talented young French cyclists for the team.
Now, Geminiani offered his old friend a place on a trip he and a group of fellow French professionals – Jacques Anquetil, the world pursuit champion Roger Rivière, the national champion Henri Anglade, the comedian of the cycling circuit Roger Hassenforder – were due to make in mid-December to the Republic of Upper Volta. It was a jaunt that would combine sightseeing and big-game hunting with a couple of easy criteriums to celebrate the first anniversary of the foundation of the republic (which became Burkina Faso in 1984). Coppi was not one of the first choices; Louison Bobet had dropped out owing to illness so Geminiani had to find a stand-in. It was, Gem’ says now, la fatalité – pure fate. The Frenchman emphasises that Coppi did not make the trip for money, but because he loved travel. The bike racing was essentially an excuse to see a new place and indulge his passion for hunting. ‘Coppi was not meant to come on that trip but Bobet pulled out. I called Coppi and he said, “I’ll come.” The chain of events starts there.’
* * *
It was an exotic voyage in novel surroundings, with the feel of a school outing. Anquetil and Rivière had brought their wives. The cyclists ate cobra, buffalo, and a gazelle shot by Rivière. There is a celebrated photograph from the trip of Coppi using his hunting skills to stalk a crocodile. On another occasion, he and the other riders watched children luring the giant reptiles with a dead chicken on a string. He collected two elephant tusks to take home, took his big Rolleiflex cine camera everywhere, and told Anquetil, ‘I’ve seen a lion; I can die happily now.’ The riders posed with bare-breasted local women and with the antelope they had bagged lying in the back of a pick-up truck. Amid a lengthy series of receptions, they were presented to the president of the young republic, Maurice Yamegoo, and to the French High Commissioner.
For the races, held on a flat circuit around the presidential palace in the capital Ouagadougou, in 42-degree heat, Coppi was billed as ‘the greatest cyclist of all time’. He took the events as seriously as any other, giving his assistant Adriano Laiolo elaborate instructions about where and how his bottles of water were to be handed up. He sprinted in second to Anquetil in the first race; in the second he allowed a local amateur, Sanu Moussa, to win the sprint, because Moussa had been promised a brand new Citroën by a sponsor if he won.
The day after the races, 14 December, the president made two planes available to the party, and they flew 250 kilometres south-west to Fada n’Gourma, capital of the central area of the republic and the jumping-off point for the best hunting grounds, further south towards Togo and Benin. As they flew, the planes swooped low to watch herds of zebra and elephant. Coppi and Geminiani stayed with one Signore Bonanza, an expatriate Italian builder. At the evening’s reception L’Equipe journalist Maurice Maurel spotted Coppi ‘with what seemed an immense lassitude weighing him down. In the crude electric light, his face was no longer the same … it looked heavy, with bags under the eyes, pale cheeks and expressed a manifest desire to be somewhere else.’
That night, Coppi shared a room with Geminiani, Laiolo and the third Italian in the party, a vice president of FC Torino named Cillario. ‘We were woken up by the mosquitoes,’ recalls Geminiani. ‘I remember Fausto swearing in Italian, “Porca miseria, bim, bam, boum”. I’d had a bit to drink, some Scotch, and said, “Just leave it alone”, but he kept going “bim bam boum”. We had a disastrous night – there were no mosquito nets which was a mistake by the organisation … When we woke up we had mosquito bites all over, but it wasn’t the first time we had woken up like that. You never imagine it can kill you.’
After one day’s hunting, Geminiani and Coppi decided that they had had enough of Africa and re-arranged their flights so that they could return early. Giulia Occhini had been against the enterprise from the start, which may well have influenced Coppi’s decision to cut the trip short. He returned home on 18 December, via Paris. His plane was diverted from Turin to Milan because of fog, so he got a lift with a young cyclist of his acquaintance, Romeo Venturelli. He was desperate to get home; Giulia was outraged that he had not been in touch while he was away. He did not receive a warm welcome: ‘Oh, here you are. Couldn’t you have stayed in Africa?’
What followed was routine: Coppi gave little Faustino his presents, a collection of miniature aeroplanes. He went to see Genoa play Alessandria in a local derby on 20 December. He met a journalist from La Gazzetta dello Sport, Cesare Facetti, for an interview, in which he spoke of his plans for the following year: in 1960 he was to ride the Tour of Flanders for the first time, as well as the usual major races such as Milan–San Remo, Paris–Roubaix and the Giro.
With those targets in mind, he set off on 23 December with a young local rider named Walter Almaviva for what wou
ld be his last training ride. Coppi was in high spirits, and the pair were sprinting behind lorries. Coppi still had the enthusiasm of a young rider even though he was three months past his fortieth birthday. They took on a Shell tanker – and the driver lowered his window and raised his cap.
On Christmas Eve, Fausto, Giulia and Faustino carried out the annual ritual of releasing helium-filled balloons into the air from the garden of the villa. Each bore a copy of Faustino’s Christmas present list addressed to St Nicholas. On Christmas Day, Father Christmas duly appeared, in the person of Ettore Milano, wearing the red suit with the white beard. The little boy received new cars and a large toy monkey. Coppi’s mother had come down from Castellania for the day, and Fausto presented her with a large purse, full of money. Aunt Albina and Uncle Giuseppe were there, too. After lunch, they went to the cinema.
The first of Coppi’s companions from Africa to fall ill was Laiolo, who spent Christmas Day in hospital. Coppi, however, was well enough on Boxing Day to drive with Giulia to Nice, where he met a potential sponsor to finalise plans for his new team. He loaded up his Lancia Aurelia with champagne. Giulia remembered him driving home singing ‘L’amore è una cosa meravigliosa’ – love is a wonderful thing. However, at some point around this time, he was in touch with Raphael Geminiani, who recalls: ‘I said to him “I’m tired, I don’t feel well.” He said, “I’m not good either. I’ve got a fever. I’m not well. I’m not well.”’ That night, at his home in Clermont, Geminiani woke up with a sore throat, violent shivering, vomiting and heavy sweating. The next morning he had a temperature of over 40 degrees.
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