Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  On the day of Gino’s seventeenth birthday, July 18, 1931, something unexpected happened. As the family ate dinner that night, Gino asked whether his brother could take part the following day in a competition that several of Giulio’s classmates had entered in a nearby town. Torello quickly replied that Giulio was too young to race. “If need be, you do it,” he said to Gino. “With this mania in your blood, you won’t even let me sleep.” Maybe his attitude had softened on his son’s birthday, or maybe he was just tired of fighting the inevitable for so long. Worn out by years of pleading from his son, countless townsfolk, and even the Ponte a Ema parish priest, Torello finally relented. “My heart leapt,” Gino wrote afterward. “I took off before the sound of his words, so sweet to my ears, disappeared. It was one of the best presents I had ever gotten in my life.”

  Gino won the race the following day and savored his first taste of victory. It didn’t last long. He was immediately disqualified because the race was for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, and having just turned seventeen, he was no longer eligible. Yet this unfortunate outcome could do nothing to overshadow the larger victory Gino had won.

  He had become a racer.

  3

  The First Test

  Gino Bartali, circa 1936

  (photo credit 3.1)

  TORELLO’S BLESSING WAS HARD won, and Gino didn’t want to let his father down. His first goal was to ease his parents’ financial woes or, at the very least, avoid adding to them. He developed some particularly creative strategies to do so. He started waking up at 4:30 a.m. to fit in his training rides ahead of his day’s work in Casamonti’s shop. Still, his paltry income as a bicycle mechanic barely covered the new expenses of training and racing. During most races, for instance, his bicycle pedals tore up the soles of his shoes. But it quickly became expensive to pay five lire—half his day’s wages—to replace them. So Gino came up with a more economical fix: he had the rubber from old bicycle tires sewn onto the soles.

  Gino’s early triumphs earned him a spot in a local amateur sports club called L’Aquila, or “The Eagle.” He continued to struggle, however, to become financially independent. One of his fellow racers hatched a solution:

  “Listen, Gino, if we arrive together at the finish line, will you let me go first? I have a girlfriend waiting for me and I’ll give you the first prize. What do you say?” he asked.

  “All right,” Gino responded, knowing he could then bring home the first- and second-prize purses. He knew he was bending the rules, but he was getting desperate. “Up until this point I hadn’t brought home a single lira and my father was about to blow,” he said. In the end, the ruse did not last long. The directors of L’Aquila soon caught on that he was ceding wins here and there. When he explained why, they offered to give him a stipend of fifty lire per race, a typical award for a first-place finish.

  Slightly relieved of his financial torments, seventeen-year-old Gino turned his energies elsewhere. Determined to rid himself of all frailty, he adopted a rigorous series of exercises that developed muscular strength. He had always resented being picked on for being small. “Often my classmates jeered at me and teased me because I was the weakest,” he said. “I was scrawny, I didn’t have the physique suited to my age. I prayed to the Lord that he would make me grow strong. But meanwhile I suffered. I suffered in silence, I held everything closed inside of me, for fear that my pain would be the motive for more jokes.”

  Now he had found a method for channeling his pent-up frustration. His training bible was a booklet by a Dutch professor that detailed twenty-four exercises for cyclists that moved through the arms, neck, legs, and the rest of the body’s muscles. He did these calisthenics so religiously that his mother, Giulia, grew to expect the familiar sight of her son exercising at daybreak each morning, soon after the neighbor’s rooster crowed, in front of an open window, even in the dead of winter. Within a year he had increased his chest size by more than three inches.

  His bike offered other opportunities for training. On steep climbs, he worked on slowing down his breathing. He taught himself to make do with less water, tempering his ability to withstand the thirst that would grow over hundreds of miles of riding with just a few drops. He built his endurance on hills around Tuscany, and his speed on any flats he could find. Like an inventor tinkering with a new design, he fastidiously recorded all of his observations and experiments in logbooks, a practice that earned him the nickname “the Accountant” for being so meticulous. In everything, he focused on a cyclist’s most important strength—his tolerance for pain, or what Gino called his “capacity for suffering.”

  Nutrition also became an obsession. Gino experimented with different combinations of foods. Plain pasta and bananas became favorites; tomatoes, a staple of most Italian diets, were abandoned because of their acidity. Aware of the Bartalis’ circumstances, his neighbors pitched in to help fuel their budding champion. One butcher provided him with free steaks before key races, and other villagers shared extra bread when they had it.

  On race days, breakfast began with an espresso or a caffe latte and some bread with jam or Gino’s favorite: honey. Next he ate pasta or rice with a cheese or butter sauce, ideally accompanied by eggs, veal, or steak. For a midday snack, he liked a couple of panini with cheese, marmalade, or salami, sometimes all three at once. During a multiday race, the portions became much larger to account for the increased caloric output. In one such race, Gino was eating almost a dozen raw eggs a day while cycling, breaking their shells on his handlebars before swallowing the yolks. In another, he confessed to eating a whole rabbit and a chicken in one sitting.

  Sports nutritionists now know that eating so much meat, particularly steak, hours ahead of rigorous physical activity is a terrible strategy. So much blood is diverted away from the muscles to the stomach to digest a large quantity of meat that a rider is likely to feel nauseated. Yet in the early years of cycling, eating huge amounts of meat had been part of the accepted nutritional wisdom. In fact, a French physician in 1869 (in what was likely one of the first newspaper columns about nutrition and cycling) advised cyclists competing in a road race to pause every twelve to fifteen miles of the race to consume food and drink, preferably a steak and a couple of glasses of Madeira or sweet white wine. Then, after fifteen minutes’ rest, he suggested the riders walk alongside their bicycles for a few minutes before getting back on. By the 1920s and 1930s, the thinking had evolved and simplified. The goal became to fuel up with enough calories to endure lengthy races, since many cyclists came from families like the Bartalis, where food could be scarce at times. Meat was considered very high-quality food for the task because it contained a lot of protein and calories.

  In all of his training, the only area that seemed impervious to tinkering was Gino’s riding style. Perhaps it couldn’t change because there was no discernible method behind it. Most other racers took whole climbs either standing or sitting, depending on the grade of the hill. If the slope was mild, they would stand on their pedals to get extra power. If the hill was more extreme, they would get off their bike and flip their rear wheel to move their chain onto a lower gear on the other side of the wheel, which made it easier to take more of the climb sitting. They would only need to stand for the steepest moments. Gino, in contrast, bounced up and down out of his seat haphazardly. “Bartali did a climb in bursts, he was jumpy,” said one teammate. His strength meant he could climb both standing and sitting, and could wait longer than most of his rivals before having to flip his wheel. Newspaper reporters chalked it up to an unusual personal style. A rival racer, however, was more candid: “He looked like he was being electrocuted.”

  Defensive cycling had its place, but it was the adrenaline rush of a charge that electrified Gino. Risky, all-or-nothing offensives earned him considerable success as an amateur. As word spread, more and more riders learned to recognize his signature attack. Late in a race, usually during a climb when the peloton was pushing at full tilt, Gino would ride up behind the leader. When
he thought the moment was right, he would charge forward, tempting the leader to follow him. If he did, Gino would soon slow down again and let him catch up. When it looked like the other rider had found his cadence once more, Gino would start his quick charge all over again. “He would burst forward,” explained one teammate. “Then two hundred yards after he had done his burst he’d stop for a moment, for twenty to thirty yards, and then burst forward again.” After four or five of these bursts, he launched a longer attack, well aware that his opponent was now utterly exhausted. By varying his speed so dramatically, Gino broke his adversary’s rhythm and wore him down. “To respond to his attacks was to race to suicide,” explained one of his competitors.

  In a sport where fluid pedaling is vital, Gino’s unorthodox way of riding a bike did offer one unexpected benefit. Other racers were so transfixed by watching him that they didn’t realize he was watching them even more closely. Like a veteran card shark, Gino carefully eyed his competitors, looking for any “tell” or sign that indicated that they were weakening. It could be something as obvious as a quick grimace, or something as insignificant as a minute muscular twitch. When faced with one particularly strong rider, Gino scrutinized him for days, riding so close to him he could have reached out and held on to his rear wheel. On the final day, after seven hours of monitoring this cyclist’s body for change, Gino noticed something unusual. A small vein behind the rider’s knee was swelling up. Soon after, he started slightly faltering in his pedaling. Gino was ecstatic. To celebrate this discovery he launched a blistering attack and left his opponent in his dust. From that time onward, he knew that a crisis was likely to assail his rival when he noted a vein “dancing behind the knee.”

  Later in his career, Gino became even more devious in his attempts to sniff out and study the strategies of rivals. He thought nothing of breaking into his opponents’ rooms after they had left for a race, or when they were out for dinner, to inspect their bathrooms. In an era before drug testing, most riders had a mix of vials and flasks of various liquids, pills, and powders their trainers recommended they use. Many were herbal concoctions, placebos that actually did nothing but provide a psychological boost. Others were more powerful, like the white amphetamines known only as “dynamite” that sped up the heart for a short period. During one such illegal reconnaissance mission, Gino broke into a competitor’s room “like Sherlock Holmes” and used a teammate as a guinea pig, having him imbibe a mysterious green liquid he found there. Little came of it, but his obsessive quest to follow his opponents’ every move continued unabated.

  Relentlessly pushing his opponents in every way he knew how, Gino rose through cycling’s different competitive categories with ease. Only four years after his first race, he turned professional in 1935. He was right where he had dreamed of being, but cycling at this new level took some getting used to. As an amateur, he had been an independent racer and had been responsible to no one but himself. “No one could tell me anything,” he said. “I took off, went forward, stayed back, as many times as I liked. I was free to make my own way. No one helped me in races. Except in rare situations, everyone was on his own. And to get to the end, you really had to give it your all.” To be sure, this also meant that there was no one to come to his rescue in times of need. In one amateur race, he lost a shoe a few miles before the end. “I finished with a bare foot and there was snow on the ground!” he remembered. In another, he did the final sprint with two flat tires, having pierced both of them just before the finish line. “Among the many little misadventures in those days, though,” he said, “there was at least the satisfaction of being free, of not owing anything to anyone.” Now he belonged to a team, and as its newest member, he had to pay his dues as a gregario, a supporting rider whose own race is devoted to ensuring victory for the captain. “I felt degraded. Being the water carrier and the pacesetter for others is not satisfying!” Gino’s older cousin, Armando Sizzi, urged him to be patient. “You could be like Binda, the master of the mountains,” he said, referring to Gino’s childhood idol. Still, Gino was solemnly reprimanded more than once in his first few team competitions for taking off on his own and winning without the captain’s permission, and at his expense.

  Gino chafed in the role of a supporting rider, but the reality was that in the professional world he was little more than another fresh-faced young racer. Such was the extent of his anonymity that when he did start winning those races where he wasn’t obliged to follow someone else’s orders, he caught more than a few journalists off guard. After he took first place in a major race in Spain in 1935, for example, the writers of one of the most prominent Spanish sports journals heralded him in a flashy cover story. He was so unknown, however, that they misidentified him, and mistakenly referred to him throughout the article as “Lino.” In the months that followed, no magazine would forget Gino’s name as he became the most-talked about rookie that season.

  Success upended Gino’s life. He soon became the captain of a professional team and quickly became the wealthiest member of his family. His team contract saw him earn 22,000 lire annually, about five times as much as the average factory worker in Italy, and nearly fifteen times as much as he himself had been earning as a mechanic only a few years earlier. Large as it was, this was just his base salary. The real money was in race purses, which Gino started racking up with wins across the country and around the continent. He was soon able to afford to build a new house for his parents, a two-story home much closer to Florence than the building they shared with various families in Ponte a Ema. It had a dinello, or dining room, a living room, several bedrooms, and even a small garden so his parents, still country people at heart, could keep chickens and grow Tuscan staples such as green beans.

  The greatest reward, however, was not financial. Despite their father’s fretful apprehensions, Gino’s younger brother, Giulio, had followed him into cycling. Gino couldn’t help but be impressed by his riding. Even though he was two years younger, Giulio could keep up with his brother better than could most of Gino’s peers. As young boys they had dreamed of dominating the cycling world. Now the Bartali brothers started envisioning their future life together as professional racers. While Gino was a rookie sensation, Giulio was beginning to emerge as an important racer in his own right. By the first half of the 1936 season he had already won six races, including one that he captured with a jaw-dropping ten-minute lead. As the pair trained side by side, they plotted their rise to the top. “I tried to give him advice,” Gino said. “I talked to him about my experiences and he would listen and then he would tell me how he had won this race or lost that one.… How I liked to hear him talk. Not that he was a chatterbox; he was a closed type, like me. But when we were together we confided everything.” They made a pact to help each other in races and agreed that once they were competing in the same category, they would team up to trounce their rivals. They were young, but their early victories suggested they had every right to dream big.

  All this success, both for himself and then for his brother, introduced its own set of complications into Gino’s life. “I was barely of age and in a couple of years I had become popular like I would never have imagined,” he said. His string of triumphs quickly drew considerable attention from journalists. In a time before the exploits of Hollywood stars had fully captivated Europe, cyclists were the celebrities that everyone spoke about. And so Gino soon found himself eddying in the froth generated by the press. His face became so famous he was obliged to employ a press secretary to handle his correspondence and requests for photographs. Public errands could be handled at what was at best a stuttering pace, as more and more people would interrupt whatever he was doing to ask him for autographs. Even his relations with women had changed. Girls he had only just met gushed over him, and others sent long, impassioned letters. One of these fans’ obsessive love for Gino seemed to speak for them all: “You’re the salt of my life,” she wrote. “Food doesn’t have any taste, bouquets smell, fabrics softness since you installed yoursel
f in my heart.”

  Female fans made him bashful, but the most startling aspect of fame for Gino was how intensely his rivals’ supporters lashed out at him, providing an early taste of the conflicts he would face later in his career. They filled his mailbox with mocking letters, going so far as to send him suggestions for an epitaph to put on his grave. “Here in the dust lies the champion of Ponte a Ema,” wrote one spectator who encouraged fans not to put flowers on Bartali’s grave, but rather to use them to decorate his rival. Gino was crestfallen. His mother saw how the letters saddened him. “It’s better that you don’t read them Gino,” Giulia urged. “They do nothing but rot your blood. I will tell the postman to give them to me so that I can use them to get the fire started.”

  In the end, these were all just comparatively small inconveniences. Gino understood how good he had it. The bike mechanic who had once struggled to get work now walked around Florence in well-cut suits. He had tamed his body, his mind, and even his fate, turning a bleak future into one of limitless possibility. “I was in seventh heaven. I was not yet twenty-two years old and I had arrived.”

  On Sunday, June 14, 1936, Gino was in Turin in the Italian Alps waiting for the rain to ease up enough so that his race could begin. Some three hundred miles south, his younger brother was also competing, in an amateur cycling championship. Nineteen years old, Giulio was racing against impossibly high expectations. Just a week earlier his older brother had won the Giro d’Italia. Despite this, Giulio was faring rather well, and Gino was convinced he was developing into the most talented Bartali on the bike. “Giulio was physically more gifted than me. He was regular in his pace, he beat me on the final sprints, and on ascents he was the one who held my wheel better than a lot of professionals who raced with me at the time. He was the best amateur in Tuscany,” he explained.