Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  When the racers first set out that morning, Gino rode along with the peloton, his blue jersey lost in the sea of national colors. In time, a series of clouds lifted, and the sun bore down on them, promising a sweltering day of racing. “This stage is one of the worst one could imagine,” said Gino. “It is also, in my opinion, the most punishing because it’s the first confrontation with the mountains. They arrive just like that. Without any transition, one must climb.”

  When the gradient of the road increased significantly near the mountain town of Gourette, Gino surprised his fellow riders. “Suddenly, from the small group at the lead, one could see the blue silhouette of Bartali take off magnificently,” wrote one journalist. “It was better than a sprint. It was a type of superhuman flight up the terrifying slope.” No other racer chased after him, each man consumed by his own climb. Only a Tour organizer’s car followed closely behind Gino. It displayed a large banner that admonished “Do Not Push!”—a warning to the drunken spectators who frequently ran onto the road to push straggling racers up the mountains.

  For the crowd watching and the caravan following slightly behind him, it certainly appeared as if Gino would need no such help. His pace up the slope was relentless. “One had the impression,” explained one reporter, that Gino was “launched by an invisible catapult.” Gino was alone when he reached the top of the day’s first four cols, the Aubisque.

  He rode less aggressively on the way down the other side of the mountain, and lost ground. His two chief Belgian rivals chased after him and caught him. As they got up close, they scoffed at Gino’s attempt to break away, chiding him for using the wrong gear. It had been so easy to catch him, they claimed, that they had time to pause and “eat some tender little pigeons” on the mountain road.

  Infuriated, Gino charged up to the second mountain pass, the Tourmalet, determined to shake his rivals. When he was about one mile from the top, he tried to push harder. He succeeded in dropping one Belgian rider, but he couldn’t shake the other. Am I not going to be able to get rid of this leech? Gino asked himself. I push. He rests. At nine hundred meters from the top, he is still there. I take off sprinting. Gino finally shook him off and raced into the descent.

  The battle up the day’s third peak was waged against his own body. Gino stared down the cold face of the mountain ahead of him. He attacked once more, only to be blindsided by fiery pain. “I felt my heart, usually so calm, beating hard and it seemed, looking at my jersey, to have enlarged. My chest was so swollen and my breathing so labored … I felt something inside me tearing. I was overcome by a great fear that I would have to dismount.”

  Nevertheless, Gino kept pushing, trying to maintain his lead. As the climb continued, he felt his mind breaking down, and the battle of voices raging in his head erupted. He began speaking aloud in delirium to the mountain. Like a chant, he started whispering “I can’t go on; I can’t go on. I can’t go on.” Then he focused back on the mountains ahead and called them out for what they were: “difficult, mean and made of rock.” His chant slowly became a series of prayers that matched the rhythm of his pedaling. “Go, go, go!” Then he added other words to shore up his courage, repeating them as he worked his way along the switchbacks: “Up there it’s finished, up there.”

  The race seemed endless; the chaotic gathering of people, trucks, and cars on the mountain roadside resembled a colorful oasis in the desolate landscape well above the tree line. A few braver souls had pitched tents among the bare rocks. Others enjoyed picnics near parked publicity trucks for companies like Montplaisir Beer. Closer to the road, fans were everywhere. Cheering from the roadside or the hoods of cars, this human mirage would disappear as soon as the racers had passed.

  Gino took it all in as he rode by, and only the sharp pains of his body buckling could pierce his dreamlike delirium. His arms and back, hunched now for several hours, ached. His legs were growing weary, and each push of the pedal was painful. The prospect of food and water, which might otherwise have offered some hope, was doubtful. They had long since passed the lunchtime food drop, and any sandwich, banana, or sugar cube that he might have stored in the front pocket of his woolen jersey had already been eaten. He had one small tin water can that offered paltry relief from the climb and the sun. His Italian teammates, who would normally have refilled it at roadside wells, were far behind him in the mountains.

  Yet, as he looked back at the other cyclists behind him, he suddenly found solace, even nourishment, in the sport’s most perverse pleasure—the suffering of others. The two Belgians in black jerseys were buckling. The dual strain of the climb and their attempt to catch up with Gino was simply too exhausting. With renewed vigor, the Tuscan cyclist crossed the day’s third mountain pass, the Peyresourde, first. The yellow jersey was virtually his, and this knowledge powered him on.

  As Gino raced down the other side of the Peyresourde, some spectators appeared out of nowhere and crossed the road. Terrified, Gino clenched his brakes. “I flew off my bike as if I had been on an airplane.” Miraculously, he didn’t break any bones. But his bike was not nearly as lucky. The wheel broke, forcing Gino to wait for a replacement. Abandoned on the mountainside, he paced angrily as the seconds ticked by. Finally, his team car pulled up.

  Gino clambered back on his bike as quickly as he could change the wheel. It wasn’t quick enough. Rattled by his fall, he took the descent more slowly than he had planned. The Belgians passed him. Exhausted, scraped up, and covered in mud after seven hours and sixteen minutes on his bike, Gino pulled into Luchon. He was two minutes and thirty-five seconds behind the race leader.

  Back in Italy, the day was unfolding in an insidious manner for altogether different reasons. The source of all the trouble lay in a distressing new publication, the Manifesto of the Racial Scientists, which appeared the same day as Gino’s resounding performance in the Pyrenees. The Manifesto was described in depth in the popular newspaper Giornale D’Italia and many other publications. Claiming to be a scientific investigation of the Italian race, the document was reportedly written by a group of top Fascist scholars and intellectuals who were temporarily working for Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture. Italy’s foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, would later say that Mussolini “practically wrote it himself.” Through ten points, it argued why the Italian race was “Aryan, Nordic, and heroic” and stated that “Jews do not belong to the Italian race.” And foreshadowing what was to come, it proclaimed, “The time has come for Italians openly to declare themselves racists.”

  With its publication, the Jewish community in Italy, which numbered some 47,000 along with another 10,000 foreign Jews, could see the first clouds of a changing political climate. Since 1933, Germany had started enacting anti-Jewish laws. In Romania, Austria, and Hungary, anti-Jewish legislation instituted in the first half of 1938 had created a similarly pernicious climate. In Italy, the Manifesto was the harbinger of an emerging new era of public and private persecution.

  The Manifesto would affect the Jewish community most directly, but it also affected Fascist relations with other groups in Italy as well. In a more subtle way, the Manifesto represented a significant flare-up in the complex relationship between the Fascists and the Catholic Church. By discounting mixed marriages between Jews and Gentiles and later failing to recognize conversions of Jews to Catholicism, the Fascist regime was violating agreements it had earlier signed with the Church that delineated each other’s realms of power. Clearly displeased by it, Pope Pius XI, the head of the Church, publicly criticized the Manifesto and the ideology that motivated it three times in the two weeks following its publication.

  Perhaps most surprising of all is the fact that the publication of the Manifesto and the emerging Italian racism that it represented even transformed coverage of Gino’s progress during the Tour. Modern sports fans accustomed to newspapers that separate political and sporting news in distinct sections would hardly expect that the events from one arena would affect developments in the other. Yet in 1938, when Mu
ssolini controlled the Italian press, that was precisely what happened. When the Tour began, one prominent magazine wrote that Gino and the Italians had gone across the border to win “in the name of Mussolini.” As the Tour progressed and the Manifesto was published, the language became increasingly belligerent. Gino was no longer just a cyclist, but a warrior who “uses his bicycle as a weapon.” By the end of the competition, the most prominent sports newspaper and sports magazine in Italy would be heralding his performance as proof of the strength of the Italian race.

  The race from Pau to Luchon was followed by a rest day on July 15 that allowed the journalists and fans to digest the performance of the top stars in the Pyrenees. The stage had been so grueling that even a former winner of the Tour de France had to be pushed up a hill by teammates, and then—out of desperation—he grabbed a car to help tow him (an infraction that disqualified him). Though Gino had finished third in the stage, he had improved his overall ranking from eighteenth to second. Most important, many journalists were convinced that they had seen a flash of what was needed to win the Tour. One wrote, “The king of the mountains in the Pyrenees was Bartali.… He was deprived of first place by an unlucky break.” Another journalist gushed, “He is the great and real champion of the mountains. We were speechless before his allure and before the extraordinary ease of his style, which is harmonious and powerful all at once.”

  Yet fifteen stages remained in the Tour. Gino fought to take the lead for the next five stages, but in the flatter terrain the yellow jersey eluded him. As he prepared to tackle the Alps, the extra boost he desperately needed caught him by surprise. He was awakened one morning by a knock on his hotel door. When he opened it, he was greeted by his father, who had made his first trip ever to France to see his son race. Gino was astounded. Torello cried as he embraced his son.

  The next day in the Alps, Gino was ablaze. His attack came early and his rivals never recovered. He pushed so hard that he thought he could hear his heart pounding in his chest; when he spat on the roadside, he saw blood. He stormed up and down the Col d’Allos, the Col du Vars, and the Col d’Izoard, winning three of the most difficult mountain bonuses. At the top of the Izoard, he was welcomed by a hollering chorus of Italian fans. “It was an uproar. A continuous celebratory yell, every shout was an incitement, a push, a whip,” he said. “Every ovation refreshed and cleansed my morale.”

  By the time Gino arrived in Briançon, the king of the mountains had earned his crown. He finished more than five minutes ahead of the second-place rider and some seventeen minutes ahead of the Tour leader. Bystanders realized they had witnessed an epic performance. “It’s true that the sport of cycling has never known such a mountain man, a real phenom, an athlete that comes around once every twenty years, an absolutely unique case,” said one journalist. For Gino the stage victory was more personal. “Think about destiny,” he said, referring to the stage in the 1937 Tour when he crashed into the Colau River, ending his Tour hopes. “On exactly the same streets where I had been defeated a year before, this year I got my win.”

  His commanding stage win in Briançon had given him the yellow jersey. He would keep it all the way to Paris. With the result of the race more or less decided, the French press amused itself with short pieces about Gino’s personality and his life off the bicycle. Inevitably these focused on his religious observance and regular attendance at mass before races, or small details like the fact that he often ate with a small statue of the Madonna watching him. Gino tried to keep his calm, but his appetite for being teased had only diminished since he was a young boy. “Sir, my faith is a personal, private matter. It shouldn’t interest anyone,” he rebuked one reporter. “Judge me on the road, speak about my race, about my gears and my weaknesses. That should suffice.” Gino might have been more sympathetic had he understood the motivation behind the focus on his religious allegiance. Whereas many in France booed the Italian soccer team for their support of Mussolini, Gino’s religious beliefs distanced him from the regime. The French press did not characterize him as a Fascist, as many would try to do in Italy.

  While the newspapers hailed his victory as a foregone conclusion, Gino knew how quickly a cyclist’s fortunes could change. So he remained intensely focused on the race and kept the journalists and fans trying to guess his mood. If he had performed as he hoped, he was gracious and spoke freely with all who approached him. If he was disappointed or nervous, beware. He would ignore journalists’ questions and send photographers away. Inevitably his temper got the better of him. At the starting line of one of the last stages, a group of gushing young girls swarmed Gino as he tinkered with his bike. They wanted his autograph.

  “Niente!”—“No!” he said, swatting them away with his hand. “Leave me alone.” His flirtatious teammate Aldo Bini was only too happy to swoop in and lead the smiling young women away from his captain.

  On the early morning of August 1, 1938, several hundred people lined up outside the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, where the racers would complete their twenty-eight-day odyssey. The gates opened at nine, and three thousand people flooded through. By noon, twenty thousand spectators sat in the arena and cheered on the arrival of the champions. Many racers rode in wearing new jerseys, white socks, and fresh caps. Not Gino. He did not don the fresh yellow silk jersey that he was given for his victory ride into Paris. Instead he wore the same woolen jersey he had raced in, now caked with mud and dried sweat, and a white cap, dirtied by dust.

  For coach Girardengo, the Italian victory was particularly sweet. “I have realized one of the dreams of my life: helping one of my countrymen win the Tour,” he said. Through Gino, Girardengo had lived out his greatest cycling aspiration and provided Italy with its second Tour winner ever—thirteen years after Bottecchia had last won, in 1925. Reflecting on Gino’s triumph a few days after the Tour, Girardengo momentarily relaxed his stern demeanor and waxed nostalgic about the first time he had ever seen Gino race: “Seeing you pedal, Gino, was one of the first signs of aging for me, like a woman who was very beautiful who watches her daughter the night of her first ball.”

  Gino, in turn, thanked Girardengo for motivating him through the most arduous mountain stages. “During a moment when my legs started to become heavy or I felt that burning in my stomach, the contraction which marks a peak effort, I heard your voice telling me simply, at once tender and authoritative, ‘Gino, Gino …’ And then soon enough, I felt myself comforted. My legs became light again and I took off again for the summit. You were my father.”

  In Italy, Gino’s victory sent the Italian press into happy hysterics. The triumph was immediately imbued with political sentiment when it was announced that Mussolini would award Gino a silver medal for “athletic valor.” Predictably, some reporters used Gino’s victory as an attempt to praise Mussolini, with one journalist referring to Gino as “Mussolini’s sports ambassador” and another declaring that Gino had obeyed Mussolini’s command to win. Others went further, deriding France as a land of “democracy and international pigswill” and linking the Italian Tour victory to the racial ideology underlying the Manifesto. According to that interpretation, Gino’s victory in Paris was about more than just an athletic triumph—it was proof of the superior quality of the Italian race. “The ovations were not only directed at the triumphant one of the Tour de France. They had a louder and more significant sound. They were exalting the athletic and moral virtue of an exemplar of our race. Gino Bartali’s victory surpasses the limit of sports events as clamorous as it is.”

  The climax for the propaganda machine should have been the victor’s acceptance speech. Between the tens of thousands watching at the Parc des Princes velodrome, and the millions listening by radio across the continent, it was the perfect opportunity to try to transform an athletic success into a political one. Gino would have been aware that Fascist officials were expecting him to praise and thank them.

  Gino must have wrestled with what to say. After the public squabble about his hesitation to partic
ipate in the Tour a year earlier, Gino had witnessed the power of the regime. And between the news coverage in the French press and his conversations with family and friends in Italy, Gino had heard about the recent dispute between the regime and the Church. As perhaps the most famous member of Catholic Action, he knew that his behavior would be closely studied.

  In the end, Gino spoke as he saw fit. In his address to French radio listeners, he made a completely apolitical statement thanking his fans in France and Italy, his voice at times nearly drowned out by the spectators screaming in the stands. As one modern Italian historian explains it, “In 1938, everyone knew that they had to thank Il Duce. So if Bartali didn’t do it, it was a definite political gesture.”

  His address to Italian radio listeners remains more of a mystery because the recording no longer exists. Il Popolo d’Italia, the regime’s most prominent mouthpiece, claimed that Gino had spoken about his pride in winning the Tour “holding high the colors of Fascist sport.” In a secret report about Gino maintained by the regime’s political police, however, an altogether different account emerged of what he had said. According to the agent writing it, Gino “mumbled” instead of praising the regime. Moreover, the report noted that Gino would not have reacted well to Fascist praise because he considered himself a member of “Catholic Action and not Fascism.”

  If anyone had any lingering questions about where Gino’s loyalties lay, his activities the next day might have helped answer them. With reporters and magazine photographers watching him, he went to mass at Our Lady of Victory church in Paris in the early morning. This time he cleaned up and wore a gray suit, a black shirt, and a light-colored tie. He even slicked his hair back. After saying a short prayer, he placed his Tour de France victory bouquet at the feet of a statue of the Madonna. Nearby, a group of schoolchildren had assembled to catch a glimpse of the champion. The church’s curate, who had been chatting with Gino, introduced the cyclist to the group: “I present to you Bartali, winner of the Tour de France, who came to thank the Virgin who allowed him to win.”