Dear Giulio, you see what condition I find myself in here. I can’t go on. The authorities want me to go race for the prestige of Italy. I am happy that they have chosen me, of course.
But if I lose?
5
Storm at the Summit
(photo credit 5.1)
CROWDS CHEERED AS THE Italian cycling team boarded the train in Turin on the evening of June 29, 1938. The following day, shortly after nine, they arrived in Paris. As they stepped off the train, the team was greeted by French members of the press and a small crowd of Italian immigrants. Many of the Italian cyclists posed for photos and chatted with the press while their luggage and equipment were transferred to a private bus. Gino, however, was more reserved. He was overcome for a moment by the memories of his last trip to the Tour and his disastrous fall. But he shook off his melancholy and decided to focus instead on the days ahead. The past is set, he thought, but the future is still unwritten.
When all their kit had been gathered up, the whole team was whisked off to the luxurious hotel Pavillon Henri IV on the outskirts of Paris. With views of the Seine and Paris, the hotel was a former palace of the Roi Soleil, the Sun King Louis XIV, and the locale where Alexandre Dumas wrote his wildly popular novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. The colorful history of the hotel only seemed to bolster the spirits of the Italian cyclists. They were happy to laugh away their time together, with some lounging around in the jerseys given them by the soccer team while others, including Gino, engaged in playful games of soccer in one of the rooms.
Costante Girardengo, the coach of the Italian cycling team, was not nearly as carefree. Girardengo knew the giddy allure of being a famous rider; he had worn that mantle himself. In the 1920s, he was among the first Italian riders to be dubbed a campionissimo or a “champion of champions.” He won the Giro d’Italia twice, and scores of regional races throughout Italy. At the height of his success, it was even declared that certain trains would stop in his birthplace of Novi Ligure in Piedmont, a sign of respect usually reserved for government officials. But the Tour title had always eluded him. When racing the Tour de France in 1914, Girardengo fell several times, most notably during a stage that ended in the French town of Luchon, compelling him to drop out of the race. World War I would force the Tour into a four-year hiatus; Girardengo never returned to race it again.
Forty-five years old, Girardengo had the bronzed complexion of a man who had spent much of his life in the sun. He was not tall, and his compact frame had grown stocky since retiring—a common occurrence for retired wheelmen, who ate as if they were still riding hundreds of miles per week. In photographs, he occasionally offers a glimpse of his breezy former life as a racer. In one happy picture, he appears wearing radiant white trousers and a pair of white patent leather shoes. But in person, his manner was anything but lighthearted. Stern-faced and severe, his mouth seemed to form a permanent scowl. And getting him to answer a reporter’s question was, as one newspaper diplomatically described it, a “superhuman task.”
Whether due to his anxious gait or his terse manner of speaking, it was obvious that the task of coaching the Italian team in 1938 weighed heavily on Girardengo. Perhaps his biggest challenge was to unite men who were used to racing against one another on different professional teams into one cohesive national team. Gino, who was captain of the team sponsored by Legnano, a major Italian bicycle manufacturer, would have to learn to ride beside racers who had been his fierce rivals in competitions throughout Italy. An inability to cooperate fully would doom the team’s prospects in the Tour.
Beyond these strategic issues, other concerns were decidedly more amusing. One ongoing headache was the team clown, a rider named Aldo Bini. Young and incorrigibly handsome, Bini was a hopeless flirt who had received his first phone call from a female admirer within thirty minutes of arriving at the hotel in Paris. Looking to keep an eye on him, Girardengo put Bini in the room next to his own. He also assigned him a roommate who was older and married—a tactic that did not escape Bini’s notice. True to his nature, Bini could hardly resist the possibilities for romance that France afforded him. When the Tour started, he would be spotted kissing and embracing enthusiastic French girls at the finish lines. And one night he was so successful in charming a pair of women who happened to be staying at the same hotel that Girardengo felt compelled to stand guard for hours outside of his room lest Bini try to sneak out.
Bini and the other Italian riders were all too happy to ham it up for the newspapermen, but Gino often tried to avoid them altogether. Still, the members of the foreign press, many of whom considered Gino a favorite to win the Tour, were eager to size him up. They hounded him with questions and photo requests, but the results left something to be desired. With an average height and wiry build, Gino was hardly an imposing figure when photographed. His prominent Roman nose was slightly crooked because it hadn’t healed properly after he had fractured it four years earlier in an accident at a regional competition in Italy. (The episode also left his nose with a sun-shaped round scar on the tip.) The rest of his body was quite strong, but he was not overly muscular. He appeared “delicate, nervous and … quite fragile,” according to one journalist. His limbs were sinewy, and the most prominent features on the thin arms that stretched out from his woolen jersey were the veins. They “remind you of ivy climbing the trunk of an oak tree,” remarked another writer. But rarely weighing more than 149 pounds, Gino resembled a slender cypress more than an oak. Always sensitive to his slight appearance, Gino himself claimed to be made of harder wood, “like the olive trees in the fields around Siena where my father was born.” No one, however, could deny that his legacy in Italy was imposing, and the fact that he had been deliberately sidelined from the Giro to steel himself for the Tour escaped few in France.
As the start of the race drew near, the anticipation about Gino and all the other racers reached fever pitch. Unfortunately, the first casualty occurred on the opening day of the race. As the ninety-six riders rode from the offices of the Tour organizer, the L’Auto newspaper, to the starting line, they were surrounded by a turbulent current of thousands of cheering Parisians. Many were dressed in dapper suits and rode alongside them on bicycles and motorcycles, and in cars. Amid the chaos, a motorcycle slammed into a French rider and knocked him from his bike. He climbed back on and rode with the others to the starting line. He wouldn’t, however, make it beyond the second stage as a result of the injuries he’d sustained.
The members of the press flirted with danger as they wove among the crowds and the cyclists on motorcycles and in cars. By 1938, newspapers from all over Europe regularly sent dozens of reporters and photographers to cover the Tour. The rush to score the best photos and stories was as competitive as the race itself, with some newspapers even supplying their own private airplanes to shuttle photographs and stories back to editors. Radio broadcasters were no different, with French channels alone offering almost twenty different newscasts in 1938 on any given day of racing.
Some might have thought that all the attention and the jostling detracted from the race, but the truth was that the press was as central to the Tour as the cyclists themselves. At its core, the Tour was a grandiose publicity stunt, and the competitive spirit between reporters stemmed from the very reason it had been created in the first place: the ambition to sell more newspapers.
On a cold day in November 1902, Henri Desgrange, a former cyclist turned magazine editor, ate lunch with a colleague, a sportswriter named Géo Lefèvre, at the Zimmer Madrid Hotel in Paris. Both wore vests and knee-length black frock coats, and both were at loose ends. Their magazine, L’Auto-Vélo, was barely two years old and on the brink of bankruptcy. They needed to improve circulation immediately. As they discussed strategies to remedy the situation, Desgrange and Lefèvre noted how a popular invention—the bicycle—had boosted sales for various other publications for several decades. In 1869, Le Vélocipède Illustré sponsored an eighty-mile race between Paris and Rouen. V�
�loce-Sport followed suit, and promoted a three-hundred-mile race between Bordeaux and Paris in 1891. In the same year, Le Petit Journal bested Véloce-Sport by organizing an even longer event, a 743-mile road race from Paris to Brest and back. All of these competitions had been successful in driving up circulation as spectators along the route and throughout the nation snapped up copies of the newspapers to get the latest updates.
None of this was news to Desgrange, who had stood front and center in the world of early cycling competitions. A former law clerk, he set the first world one-hour record of twenty-two miles in 1893. After he retired from cycling, he continued promoting the sport and even wrote a book about how to become a master cyclist. In 1900, he was hired to lead L’Auto-Vélo, a young newspaper trying to upstage its rival, Le Vélo.
The conversation at lunch on this day kept returning to the topic of races. Whether in France or in the United States, where thousands of breathless fans filled stadiums to watch the famous six-day cycling competitions, there was something universally appealing about them. Mulling it all over, Lefèvre had a novel idea. What about combining the excitement of the road races popularized in France with the hypnotic appeal of the six-day American events? Fleshing his idea out further, he described a multiday race that traveled through various French cities. Desgrange reportedly paused and then replied, “If I understand you, petit Géo, you’re proposing a ‘Tour de France’?”
Notwithstanding a few hiccups along the way (the Tour’s length was reduced from thirty-five days to nineteen because so few people initially signed up), Desgrange’s project came to fruition in the summer of 1903. Sixty riders left Paris on a taxing 1,509-mile stage race moving clockwise around the country. Many stages took over twenty-four hours. The start times were scheduled at indecent hours, like 2:30 a.m. in Lyons or 11:00 p.m. in Bordeaux, but timed to the newspapers’ publication schedules so that the morning headlines would bear the latest updates. The winner was a Frenchman named Maurice Garin, known as the “little chimney sweep” because he stood five feet three inches and had cleaned chimneys before he became a cyclist.
In its second year, overzealous fans almost ended the Tour before it had even returned to Paris. In Nîmes, in southeastern France, they blocked the race route with a barricade, forcing cyclists to dismount and use their bikes as shields as they fought their way through the crowds. Farther south, fiercely loyal supporters of a local cyclist competing in the Tour tried to sabotage the chances of rival riders by littering the road with bottles, stones, and nails. During one stage, Garin himself was attacked by an angry mob, and during another he declared, “If I’m not murdered before Paris, I’ll win the race again.” Surveying all of this, the Tour organizers quickly realized that they would need rules to rein in the spectators as well as the riders if they wanted the race to continue.
Desgrange famously said that his ideal Tour would be so herculean that only one racer would manage to finish it. After the success of the first Tours, he tinkered with the race route constantly, making each year’s race seem more arduous than the last. In 1910, the Tour entered the high mountain ranges of the Pyrenees for the first time. The course was so challenging that the riders nearly revolted. A French racer named Octavio Lapize, who had won various stages in 1909, was forced to get off of his bike several times because the weather conditions were so dreadful and the road gradient so steep. As race officials watched from the stage finish line at the top of the Aubisque, Lapize screamed at them, “Murderers!” By 1919, only eleven riders of sixty-seven, or fewer than twenty percent of those who started, managed to finish what had become the longest Tour to date, fifteen stages totaling nearly 3,500 miles.
That was a challenging year for the Tour, but 1919 also saw the birth of one of its most enduring traditions. After World War I, severe food and manufacturing shortages prevailed throughout France and Europe. Many teams were barely able to scrounge up racing jerseys, let alone dye to color them. As a result, many riders wore some stitching on the shoulders to demarcate different teams wearing otherwise nearly indistinguishable gray jerseys. Halfway through the Tour, one team director suggested the race leader wear a colorful shirt to help spectators identify him. Created from yellow wool to match the color of the pages of the L’Auto newspaper, every leader’s jersey, henceforth le maillot jaune, also bore the initials H.D. in honor of the Tour’s founder.
Such flourishes soon transformed the Tour into a national institution. By the 1920s, it was obvious that Desgrange’s scheme to attract new readers and advertisers had been a successful gamble. Daily circulation of L’Auto (the newspaper’s name was shortened from L’Auto-Vélo in 1903) had more than doubled from 200,000 in July 1914 to 500,000 by July 1924.
The popularity and commercial possibilities of the Tour did not escape the interest of the bicycle manufacturers who sponsored its different teams. Recognizing the value a Tour victory could bring their brands, sponsors contracted supporting riders to help their aces win. Desgrange was outraged by this at first, and denounced these riders as domestiques or “servants.” In time, however, he would come to see their value in making the stars of his race shine even brighter.
Although the role would evolve over time, few tasks were ever really beyond the purview of a domestique, or gregario as they were known in Italy. One of the most important was to ride ahead of their captain to create a windbreak to let their leader draft behind them, allowing him to use as much as thirty percent less energy in his pedaling. They were also expected to chase down opponents and share precious food and drink en route. Some captains demanded even more. One Italian cyclist insisted his domestiques help him as he relieved himself on the bike. (One pair pulled along his bike with him on it, while the other pair found newspapers and water to clean him up afterward.) A French cyclist who lost a toe to sepsis was said to have demanded that his domestique amputate his own toe to better understand his pain. (The captain’s toe reportedly remains on view to this day in a jar of formaldehyde on the counter of a bar in Marseille.)
By the 1930s, when Gino arrived on the scene, Tour organizers were already trying to quash some of the more egregious traditions. In May 1938, newspapers published rules mandating that racers eat team meals together at designated locations, a response to various cases in previous years, in which riders skipped out on meal bills during the Tour. Another rule tried to rein in one of the Tour’s most beloved rituals, la chasse à la canette, in which riders would run into cafés as they were passing through a town and gather as much wine, beer, and other drinks as they could carry, and then run out again without paying. The Tour directors took such misdeeds seriously, and their warnings about breaking these or any of the myriad other Tour rules were comically severe. Fortunately, such interdictions could do little to dampen the spirits of the rambunctious Tour cavalcade.
On July 5, 1938, this caravan left Paris and began its counterclockwise journey around France. The first week of racing was chockablock with the usual jostling as the riders settled into the race. Eight Western European countries had sent teams, but the fans were most interested in the top contenders: the Italians, French, and Belgians. The early stages of the race were largely flat ones, and so the Tour favorites patiently bided their time. Each racer had his reasons for holding back, but for Gino it was a question of following Girardengo’s strategy to save his attacks for the mountains. In 1938, the Tour rules had increased the amount of time bonuses awarded to the racer who reached the top of individual mountain passes first. Given that a time bonus shaved off minutes from a cyclist’s overall time, Girardengo encouraged Gino to accumulate as many of these as possible.
While Gino held back, no other rider emerged to fill the gap. Whether the other riders were consciously following the same strategy as the Italians remains unclear. It’s just as possible that they were simply interested in keeping close to Gino and the other stars. In the end, all the speculation about what tactics the riders were silently mulling mattered little. The mountains now fast approaching would forc
e every rider to reveal his hand.
The stage that Desgrange would call “the most important of the Tour” began in Pau, a village on the northern edge of the Pyrenees. From there the riders would travel 120 miles to Luchon, a mountain town close to the border of Spain, known for its thermal baths. Between these two locales, the riders would travel up and down the Aubisque, the Tourmalet, the Peyresourde, and the Aspin. At 4,885 feet, the lowest of these mountain passes, the Col d’Aspin, was still higher than more than four Eiffel Towers.
But the mountains were about more than just climbs. There were rudimentary roads through desolate uninhabited landscapes, liable to wash away during the first real rainstorm. There were uneven gradients that threw a man off his steady cadence and tired him even more quickly than usual. And, just as night was certain to follow day, the mountain ascents were followed by descents. Bone-shaking rides over gravel and around hairpin turns, descents were the place where a fatigued rider might try to make up time, only to lose control, crash, and “leave meat on the road,” as modern racers describe it. In the 1930s, the French press was even less subtle and described this kind of racing as à tombeau ouvert—or “open grave.” It was hardly a figurative turn of phrase. On a similarly steep descent three years earlier, the Tour had experienced its first racing fatality when a Spanish rider crashed and died.
The mixture of spectacle and danger has an eternal appeal, and so, on July 14, 1938, the crowds came early and they came in record numbers. Buses, cars, and other vehicles stretched for miles up and down the mountains. Many had come from the surrounding areas and nearby cities, but a good number had come from as far away as Paris on a special overnight train arranged for fans to see the stage. One journalist estimated there were up to fifty thousand people gathered in the mountains. “It’s unimaginable,” he wrote, to see so many fans setting up camp in the barren landscape.
Road to Valour Page 8
