Unlike their counterparts in Turin, the organizers of the amateur championship chose to start their race. The rain did not let up. On a particularly muddy stretch, Giulio fell behind and then launched an impressive uphill attack to catch the two leaders. On the descent, the three drafted closely together. Behind them a car that had either missed or ignored signs about the race veered dangerously toward them. The first two cyclists swerved to avoid it. Giulio didn’t stand a chance. He hit the vehicle with full force, his clavicle slamming against the door handle as his body crumpled to the ground. He was rushed to the hospital.
Gino took the train home after his own race was canceled, completely unaware of what had happened to his brother. In Florence, a close friend waited for him in the station. Before the friend even had a chance to say anything, his face betrayed him. Gino sputtered instinctively, “Has something happened to Giulio?” At the hospital, the brothers were able to talk briefly. “These things happen,” Giulio told him weakly, braving a smile. He had already received several blood transfusions, but Gino donated his own blood, too. Giulio underwent an operation the following day, and Gino passed the hours praying in a nearby chapel. The procedure did not go well; Giulio emerged too weak even to speak. Suffering from massive internal bleeding, his condition deteriorated quickly. He died squeezing his older brother’s hand.
“The deepest sadness fell on us like lead,” said Gino. “We went from the greatest joy to the most terrible pain.”
Torello, who had never wanted his children to race in the first place, got angry with Gino. “You see now that my fears were justified?”
All Gino could muster in reply was, “It’s destiny, Babbo.”
His mother forbade any discussion about cycling, and begged Gino to reconsider his career. Wrestling with his own sense of guilt, he needed no further encouragement. He quit racing and exiled himself to a small cabin by the sea.
As he wandered restlessly along the water’s edge, Gino’s way of seeing himself and the world transformed dramatically. He began to think of his brother’s death as not just an accident but also as a divine warning against the excesses of his earlier life. He had let himself be intoxicated by success; the road to sobriety required that he anchor his life to something larger than himself. Already a practicing Catholic, he devoted himself further to the Church, and turned to his faith to ground him in the world. The lay group Catholic Action, of which Gino had been a member since he was ten, became even more important to him. Formed in 1867, this group organized a wide range of religious and social activities for young boys and men, ranging from prayer meetings and Bible classes to summer camps and athletic associations. By 1928 the group claimed to have 600,000 young members throughout Italy. After Giulio’s death, Gino assumed a more visible role, speaking frequently to young boys at Catholic Action meetings, explaining the role of his faith in his success.
In their family home, Gino built a small chapel and dedicated it to Giulio. It stood barely eight feet wide but it was large enough for an altar with a statue of the Madonna holding the cross, several candles, and a kneeler for quiet prayer. Gino had become painfully aware of the attention he drew at the local church, where his presence distracted other parishioners from the service. In the family chapel, the Bartalis would have a private place to offer daily prayers for the repose of Giulio’s soul. Soon after its construction, the space would be blessed by the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, a figure who was emerging as an important friend to Gino. Bishop Placido Nicolini of Assisi, another friend, would provide a chalice to be used by visiting priests who said mass.
In time, the darkness of Gino’s grief lifted slightly. Giulio, his brother and best friend, was gone, but Gino knew he had to move forward somehow. The problem was determining what he might do outside of cycling. His options, he realized, remained as limited as they had been before. He was twenty-two years old, but he had barely managed to get a sixth-grade education. Factory work was a possibility in Milan or Turin, but that would mean leaving behind friends and family and abandoning Tuscany altogether. He could return to being a bike mechanic, but the pay that had seemed pitiful to him as a thirteen-year-old would have appeared minuscule at twenty-two. The only other alternative, working around Florence as a day laborer, would mean a descent into his father’s grinding poverty.
As Gino weighed his options, his isolation from the outside world came to an end. Friends from home began visiting again. Teammates implored him to return to lead them. Former stars gently explained that accidents were as much a part of the sport as they were of life itself. Hundreds of fan letters began pouring in. His press secretary who had earlier handled all his fan mail wrote him a moving letter of his own. His sister Anita brought him his bike.
No amount of pleading, however, could lessen Gino’s feelings of guilt. “Giulio is gone. My Giulio, my brother. Do you understand?” he told his friends in moments of despair. Giulio’s death was a wound that cut him to the core, leaving him with deep misgivings about his life’s passion. Cycling had given him everything, but it had also stolen the one person who was dearest to him. Ultimately he would carry his grief over his brother’s death to the grave. Until the moment he was too frail to travel at all, Gino rarely missed a chance to stop by his brother’s tomb in Ponte a Ema whenever he left or returned to Florence.
In that summer of 1936, however, Gino was intent on figuring out how he would spend his remaining days. It would take the advice of a bewitching newcomer to help him make the choice. She told Gino not to let Giulio’s tragic death become his final memory of cycling. He had to race to honor his brother’s memory. Gino listened and made the difficult decision to get back in the saddle.
Her name was Adriana Bani, and Gino had spent the better part of 1935 trying to muster the courage to speak to her. She was just shy of sixteen years old, slim-figured, with mahogany curls. From the moment he saw her, Gino was smitten. Adriana came from a conservative family who lived on the northeast edge of Florence. Her father had served in the artillery in World War I and now worked as a railway administrator. Her mother was a housewife. When Gino first set eyes on Adriana, she was working in downtown Florence near Palazzo Vecchio in a shop called 48, a type of early department store that sold all kinds of fabric for forty-eight centesimi. Her sister had worked there, and when she married, her job opened up. The timing suited Adriana, who had just finished up school and wanted to help her parents by getting a job.
At first Gino simply watched Adriana while she worked. A friend of his ran a pasticceria, a pastry and chocolate shop, across the cobbled street from 48. Already a lover of chocolate and sweets, Gino needed no further excuse to visit his friend. A colleague of Adriana’s soon noticed Gino lurking across the road. Adriana, however, didn’t follow sports and had never heard of the famous cyclist.
After several days of fretting, Gino finally gathered his nerve to speak to Adriana. He ventured into the store, hoping to engage her casually in conversation. But his confidence failed him. He quickly retreated after fumbling haplessly about as only a man in a women’s fabric store can. After that, he returned to watch her from his post in the pastry shop. Adriana pretended not to notice. Most of the time. Sometimes she did steal glances at her mysterious mute suitor. “With these looks we came to understand each other a bit,” she explained. As she left the shop one day, Gino finally decided to make his move. Swallowing his trepidation as best he could, he walked over to her and awkwardly asked whether he could accompany her to the tram she took home at night. She told him she already had an escort, her brother-in-law, but agreed to let Gino tag along. He did—with his eyes fixed on the pavement and in total silence all the way to the stop. Amused and touched by his shyness, Adriana finally asked him, “Shouldn’t you say something?”
The cyclist’s anxieties slowly disappeared as he began walking her home once in a while, with Adriana’s brother-in-law always hovering behind them. Adriana was certainly attractive, but it was her intelligence and modesty
that captivated Gino. Though he was famous across the country, she was unfazed by his celebrity status. Adriana in turn was attracted to Gino’s sincerity. “He was so embarrassed and funny in his shyness that it was sweet. And I fell in love with that, his purity of soul and his ingenuousness in everyday life,” she explained. The two were lovestruck. They shared their first kiss in a piazza in Florence on a day when Adriana’s brother-in-law escort was bedridden with a fever.
In time Adriana told her mother a young man had caught her eye. Her mother was skeptical.
“A racer? But what does he do? What does he earn?” she said.
“He rides a bicycle,” Adriana replied.
“But how is he able to make a living on a bicycle?” her mother countered.
“He’s good. He’s starting to be a champion,” said Adriana.
“Well, then, introduce him to me,” her mother replied, unconvinced.
Adriana suggested to Gino that he meet her parents.
“Let’s wait a little. I think it’s a bit soon,” he said. Given all the media attention he was garnering, Gino was worried about the scrutiny a new girlfriend would receive. “If I lose, the blame will fall immediately on you.” The young pair agreed to keep their relationship secret.
After a year, Gino finally met Adriana’s parents. He joined them for a meal and asked permission to court their daughter. They reluctantly agreed. Strict and traditional, Adriana’s family forbade her from spending time with Gino alone. Luckily for them, his training and racing schedule was so busy that he could not stop by very often. When he did find time to visit her, the sitting-room door was to remain open at all times. Sometimes Adriana would wave to Gino from the window as he left at the end of the evening. Her mother did not approve. “Too familiar,” she scolded. In public, they could only be together when accompanied by friends. Most often they spent time getting to know each other at the pastry shop across from 48. Once in a while Gino even convinced her to play hooky from work and sneak out with him. “Sometimes we would go to the movies, but it was on the sly because I didn’t have permission to go,” she explained.
Adriana had an endearing independent streak. She worked, drove, and smoked in an era when it was uncommon for most Italian women to do so. But she hesitated about Gino and his career. By its very nature, cycling was an unpredictable way to make a living. The difference of only a few minutes, even seconds, at the finish line had a dramatic effect on how much a cyclist earned. Winners did well, but most others just scraped by. As she weighed the prospect of marrying Gino, Adriana couldn’t help wondering whether this was a stable foundation on which to build a family.
Gino realized as much himself. He could envision the future he wanted to have with Adriana. “We would have kids and I would try to win as much as possible, so that they would have a good example. Then we would have grandchildren, our children’s children, and I would tell them my stories when I got old. I liked to imagine my future life and I imagined it like that,” he said. But racing history was littered with would-have-beens and should-have-beens, hopeful young things whose rise to prominence had been outpaced only by their fall into obscurity. Gino had been a professional for a little less than two years, but was already one of Italy’s top racers. The fans knew his name; the journalists argued about how to pronounce it; his fellow competitors had learned to fear it. And yet all of them were asking the same question about his track record: Was this just another flash in the pan, or the start of something bigger?
The answer lay in the Tour de France. Even for wheelmen a generation older than Gino, no other competition was more prominent or lucrative. The race itself was a perpetually fertile field for outlandish headlines; every aspect of it that could be writ large was writ still larger to ensure that it was the most talked-about event in the sport. The length of the course was outrageously long—several thousand miles around France—and it was designed so that the competitors would have to ride over the summits of several of France’s highest mountain passes.
Yet for all its shimmering promise, it remained utterly unattainable for the cyclists of Italy. Despite a nearly endless run of attempts, only one Italian, Ottavio Bottecchia, had ever won the race. In the years that followed, the appeal of a Tour victory never faded. The prize money was part of the allure. Successful racers could hope to buy villas in the countryside or cabins by the sea, or to purchase a farm or launch a small business that would support them for the rest of their lives.
Gino, however, was interested in more than mere treasure; the scope of his ambition was decidedly larger. Achieving something that another Italian had already accomplished wasn’t enough. He wanted to set a record that had never been attained by any man from any country: Gino wanted to win both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France—in the same year.
The idea had been raised before by other cyclists, but most experts had dismissed it as dangerous, foolhardy, and perhaps even physically impossible. It was easy to see why. To even attempt to pull it off, a cyclist would be forced to ride more than five thousand miles around Italy and France. To put that into perspective, this would be the equivalent of a cyclist racing against the best riders in Italy from Chicago to Seattle and then racing back from Seattle to New York, but facing a fresh group of international stars. True, there would be a four-week break between the two events. Yet with the schedule of short races, the cyclist’s other obligation as a professional, it could hardly be called a time of rest.
The Giro and the Tour. Few men had ever dared to fully contemplate the weight of this challenge; none of them wanted it more than Gino. Still, dreaming about an impossible record could only take a man so far. In 1937, Gino decided to get on his bike and set it.
4
“Italy’s Number One Sportsman”
Benito Mussolini rides a bicycle, circa 1928.
(photo credit 4.1)
AS GINO ROLLED ONTO the national stage as a twenty-one-year-old sensation, he found a country obsessed with sport. It wasn’t just the stars and the national champions who dominated the zeitgeist. Across the country, sports had permeated everything and had become such an integral part of everyday life by the 1930s that it was easy to forget that few Italians had practiced them before Gino’s birth.
There was of course a small class of professional cyclists. And many Italians used bicycles as their main mode of transport. But the field of ordinary citizens playing sports for the sake of sports was much more limited and had been largely restricted to the well-heeled. All this started to change with World War I, which began days after Gino was born. Military conscription and the medical checkups required to enter the armed forces obliged Italian government officials to recognize the poor health and physical weakness of many of their citizens. Members of the lower classes were found to be the most wanting, plagued by ailments like tuberculosis and malaria and weakened by malnourishment. In the years that followed the war, Mussolini and his Fascist party fixated on this sense of national illness. As they rose to power in the 1920s, they latched on to sports as one of their central propaganda tools for creating a new Italy ruled by a healthy, athletic, and virile “warrior people.”
Everyday life would soon reflect this fixation. Physical education became one of the most important components of the school curriculum, with students like Gino taking part in it daily in many parts of the country. Their teachers became “biological engineers and builders of the human machine,” and new academies were opened to increase their numbers. The Fascist regime was so adamant about controlling children’s athletic training that they even forbade other groups from being involved in this endeavor. The YMCA and various Catholic sports clubs were closed in 1927; the Boy Scouts were denounced as a “grotesque foreign imitation” and shut down in 1928.
Adults were strongly encouraged to dedicate their leisure time to a government-sponsored network of national sports and recreation clubs. Millions of Italians joined, and in just seven years the number of sports complexes in the country grew tenfold. Women
began to practice different sports like gymnastics under the auspices of special fitness groups. Men competed in amateur cycling races or joined boxing clubs. A maxim of Mussolini’s printed in large letters on the wall of a boxing club in Florence said it all: “I don’t want a population of mandolin players, I want a population of fighters.”
Even when they weren’t playing sports, Italians were bombarded by advertisements and campaigns promising to make the country stronger and more rugged. One popular brand of cigarettes marketed itself as “The Cigarette of Great Athletes.” Elsewhere in the country, a moral crusade was launched against the consumption of pasta, which was denigrated for causing “skepticism, sloth, and pessimism.” High-ranking government officials weren’t immune to the athletic demands of these campaigns, either. At one meeting of Fascist leaders in Rome, Achille Starace, the party secretary, demanded that they all dive from a springboard and swim fifty meters. On another occasion he demonstrated his own athletic prowess as he leaped over a wall of bayoneted rifles.
However newsworthy these activities were, none of them could hold a candle to Mussolini’s performances. Playing tennis, driving sports cars, or riding his majestic white horse, he presented himself as an indefatigable sportsman for all to admire. He was all too happy to be photographed baring his chest, whether harvesting grain in the fields or skiing topless in the mountains. It was suggested that he did all of this on an ascetic diet—an improbable claim, given his fleshy frame. (Mussolini was said to forswear coffee, alcohol, and tobacco and survive on just a glass of milk for breakfast, a modest lunch, and another glass of milk and a piece of fruit for dinner.)
Road to Valour Page 5
