From the hospital where Togliatti lay, word traveled that he was slowly recuperating. The one-two punch of good news knocked Italy into a state of total euphoria. Outside, people rushed out of cafés and bars into the capital’s great squares in a spontaneous and spectacular celebration.
Giorgina Rietti, an Italian Jew who had spent the war years hidden in Assisi and Perugia, was outside walking in the outskirts of Padua, passing through an alley, when she overheard a radio announcer declaring that Gino had won the mountain stage. Instead of protesting and fighting, people around her started cheering and toasting each other. Gino’s victory changed their mood completely, Rietti recalls. “Italians who thought they were going to hurt each other ended up drinking together.”
Similar scenes unfolded in cities and towns across the country, leaving citizens and journalists alike astounded by the speed of the change in the country’s mood. The Le Monde correspondent stationed in Italy captured the sentiment of many Italians as he wrote, “No event in the world could have been as important as Bartali’s victory. This was clearly apparent on July 15 when the news of his exploits transformed the highly dramatic atmosphere into which Italy had been plunged following the attack on Togliatti.”
As had been the case ten years earlier, Gino’s performance quickly took on a political value that was much larger than one man. To the cheering crowds across postwar Italy, he soon personified the whole country and all its emotions—angry, bruised, indomitable, and triumphant. No athletic victory had ever tasted as sweet for so many.
In Briançon, the organizers at the finish line feted Gino’s victory by playing an operatic aria from Puccini’s Tosca: “I lived for art, I lived for love” floated out from the loudspeakers. Yet after ten hours, nine minutes, and twenty-eight seconds in the saddle, Gino was too tired to acknowledge the music or even just to lift his hand. Caked from head to toe in mud, he was shivering until Binda wrapped him in a trench coat. As he started to walk toward the team car, a few reporters swarmed him and asked him how he felt. Anyone expecting a florid victory speech, however, was left disappointed. Gino, his face slightly green and distorted from the day’s exertions, barked out only one sentence: “Ho fame”—“I’m hungry.” As was the custom after each stage, the Tour hostess, typically a pretty young girl from the local area, presented the victor with a bouquet of flowers. Gino, however, pushed them right back into her arms and told her to take them to the nearest church. With that, he got into the team car with Binda and left.
Eighteen minutes after Gino, Louis Bobet crossed the finish line. Utterly defeated, his face was covered in mud, except for the tiny furrows where tears had fallen down his cheeks. When he got off his bike, he had to be held up by a second person to keep from falling to the ground. Although immediate rest would have been most sensible, the cheering of the crowds clouded Bobet’s judgment, and he soon allowed himself to be talked into a victory lap that was entirely unearned. Robic made it across the finish line six minutes after Bobet. Dangerously fatigued, he had fallen off his bike on the Izoard and might not have finished the race at all had several spectators not hoisted him back on so that a supporting rider could help push him to Briançon. At the finish line, he grabbed the rider and begged not to be left alone. Ronconi was the last of the great stars to cross the finish line, after a humiliating final climb that had seen him literally pushed up the Izoard by his teammates. In three days he would drop out of the Tour altogether.
At the hotel, the excitement among the Italians was palpable. Teammates, who earlier in the day had been preparing themselves for a premature return to Italy, now dared to imagine the final victory in Paris. Gino, however, peeled off his muddy jersey and lit a cigarette. The next day he would have to do it all again, except this time he would have to climb five mountain passes instead of three. Fearing the onset of a chill, he collapsed into a hot bath.
In Rome, the man at the center of the political tempest in Italy lay unconscious as he recovered from his operation. By all accounts, his room in the hospital was spartan. There was nothing more to it than an iron bed painted white, and a little cupboard on which were placed several bottles of mineral water, along with a small basket of fruit and some sweets. It was only outside the room, where a security team kept a close eye over any visitors who appeared to gaze upon Togliatti through the window, that one could understand the importance of the patient who lay within.
When his eyes finally fluttered open, his family and friends must have wondered what he would ask. Italy had changed so dramatically in the last few days, and Togliatti, whose last memory was hearing Pallante’s gunshots, was still completely oblivious to it all. As it turned out, however, it wasn’t the country he wanted to focus on, or the whereabouts of the gunman. It wasn’t even his own health that worried him. Instead, he whispered but two simple questions:
“What happened at the Tour? How did Bartali do?”
14
The Road Home
Gino Bartali rides his victory lap after winning the 1948 Tour de France.
(photo credit 14.1)
DURING THE EVENING THAT followed Gino’s resounding triumph, Italian journalists filed long, adoring articles. Gino had gone from a twenty-one-and-a-half-minute deficit to just sixty-six seconds away from the lead, thanks to his stage victory and the time bonus earned for summiting the Izoard first. Several French journalists, however, were more incredulous and speculated that Bobet might still keep the yellow jersey. Most of these skeptics were acting out of little more than economic self-interest. If they suggested that the Tour’s winner had been definitively identified, readers might be less inclined to purchase newspapers and follow its progress. Yet a few of them, like so many other Frenchmen, genuinely believed in Bobet’s prospects. Charmed by his earlier performances and his dashing persona, they clung to the prospect of a French victory in Paris. Bobet, soaring after his undeserved victory lap in Briançon, embraced this feeling in post-race interviews. He belittled Gino’s success and offered a few defiant words that would soon haunt him. “Bartali doesn’t have my yellow jersey yet!”
A little more than twelve hours after they had crossed the finish line, the men gathered again at the starting line and prepared to leave Briançon and its charming town walls behind. After the poor weather, the waterlogged roads, and the various mechanical and physical breakdowns, most riders probably wished to forget the previous day’s stage. On this day, the weather at the start line was clear, with even a rainbow visible, giving credence to the hope that everything that had happened the day before was just a freak of nature. It would take but two hours to snuff out that illusion.
The first mountain pass of the day, the Galibier, was the Tour’s highest, at 8,386 feet. As they began the ascent, the sky turned gray, the air started to get much colder, and flakes of snow began to fall. “It was horribly cold,” said Gino. “The intense cold cut through your muscles, and I hadn’t brought my raincoat.” The racers climbed farther and were enveloped by a snowstorm. They were shrouded in darkness, save for the light that shone out from the headlights of the cars that followed them. In a telling sign of their fierce national loyalty, the French fans who had gathered in the mountains offered warm drinks to the French riders, leaving all the other competitors to shiver in the chill. Luckily, Gino got a few sips of coffee from one of the French racers who admired him. It was better than nothing, but he would have been happier with a glass of cognac, as he said later.
The pace of the snowfall slowed down but the weather remained miserable for the rest of the day as the cyclists pedaled toward Aix-les-Bains. The roads quickly became almost impossible to traverse. At least one press car saw its transmission break down completely under the pressure of a tough climb over ice and impenetrable mud. Riders who had gone blue in the cold found themselves with the unenviable task of trying to navigate 150 miles of climbing. Some invented wild hallucinations to survive the struggle, like one rider who imagined that his young son was starving on a distant mountain peak, just so
he could muster the energy to ride up it. Another lost his saddle and was forced to ride many miles without a seat until his coach brought him a replacement bicycle. Others got off their bikes altogether, flapping their arms like hapless birds in a desperate attempt to regain feeling in their extremities. Still other racers had given up even on that, and so, like one Belgian racer, they were left to change their punctured tires with their teeth because their hands had frozen and their cramped fingers were completely unresponsive. The unluckiest of all had to be literally carried out by their teammates. A photographer captured this impossible feat. With an injured teammate draped over his shoulder, a racer pedals precariously, one hand on his own bike and the other hand holding his teammate’s handlebars.
Robic crumpled under the weight of the pitiless weather, already utterly defeated by the previous day’s stage. In a cruel twist, he discovered that many of the French spectators had turned on him. Barely a day after fans had crowded on the mountain passes to cheer him on, they now loudly second-guessed his every move. Some even mocked him with the kind of cowardice that only a spectator in a warm jacket or a heated trailer could know. At one point, Robic was so overcome by fury that he got off his bicycle and chased after an obnoxious fan who was sitting in a car. Ultimately he grew too weary to fight even these petty battles. Numb from the cold, Robic could do nothing as an angry fan screamed out at him, “What are you doing, you lazy bum?” Unable to muster a rebuttal, he simply broke down and started crying.
Bobet fared better at first, attacking aggressively early on in the race. Perhaps he thought Gino would struggle on the first mountains, mistakenly thinking, as one journalist humorously put it, that Gino, “like all elderly people, isn’t very quick to throw his legs out of bed.” Or perhaps he was just trying to emulate the success of the Italian team’s attack on the previous day. Whatever his motives, Bobet’s strategy failed. Like Robic before him, he would soon watch helplessly as Gino sped by him.
In this stage, as in the Cannes-to-Briançon stage, Gino rode like a man possessed. As Goddet noted, “A world of difference was created between the Florentine and the men who, for a moment, still passed as his adversaries.” Gino endured all the usual insults from the French fans and even an occasional snowball, barreling up muddy mountain ascents at speeds that were often double those of his competitors. “He was,” Goddet continued, “overheated by an interior flame that has consumed him for ten years, and nothing could extinguish the fire that had set his heart ablaze.” Goddet was right. Gino’s burning determination had only increased in the past decade, fueled in ways not even he fully understood by all the tumult and suffering he had witnessed as war tore apart his homeland.
As Gino crossed the finish line first, the crowds that had gathered in Aix-les-Bains booed him. He was undaunted, and reveled in the strength he had shown in the mountains. I feel like a lion, he thought. His victory in this stage had confirmed the precedent set by his previous day’s performance. Henceforth, the yellow jersey was his to lose. As time would soon show, it would never leave his shoulders again.
It took a little while for the spectators who had gathered at the finish line to absorb the impact of what Gino already knew. For some, that moment arrived after just sixty-six seconds—the remaining gap of time between Gino and Bobet in the general classification. For everyone else, it arrived in the eerily quiet minutes that followed. With every passing second that other riders failed to appear, Gino’s lead grew. For Bobet, it took a little longer to accept. And yet when he finally acknowledged it, the truth of Gino’s victory was impossible to deny. Bobet’s dream of winning the Tour was over. It had died, as he would later acknowledge, on the road from Cannes to Briançon.
At the hotel in Aix-les-Bains, Gino received a surprise visitor, a Christian Democrat deputy who brought with him the good wishes of Prime Minister De Gasperi. In the two days that had passed since the phone call, Gino had far exceeded his promise to the prime minister. He had “defeated everyone and everything, nature and man,” as one journalist declared, and emerged as a near shoo-in to win the Tour. By the next stage, it became apparent that the prime minister was not the only leader who wanted to pass on good wishes. An emissary from the Pope also appeared and gave Gino a special medal, telling him that “His Holiness wishes that you win the Tour, as a loyal and athletic champion.”
Sitting with Gino in his room, surrounded by various floral bouquets and congratulatory telegrams, Coach Binda was stunned into silence by it all. Finally he managed to stammer a few words.
“My God, you nearly killed me, my champion.”
“You did not always call me that. You, as well, did not have faith in me,” said Gino with a smile.
“You’re right, who would have thought … at your age,” Binda replied, embarrassed.
Gino laughed it off and announced that he would write a telegram to his six-year-old son, Andrea. His message was but one sentence long: “Your father is a champion again.”
In Italy, the celebrations that had started the previous night continued, gathering steam as Gino moved closer to Paris. There was a “feeling of resurrection,” said one former Italian president who was in Rome at the time. In another part of the capital, it was reported that a union meeting ended abruptly when a car with loudspeakers drove by to inform the crowds of Gino’s victory. The crowd dispersed to seek out a full update and a celebratory drink at nearby cafés. Near Gino’s home in Florence, people cheered “Long Live Bartali” in the streets. Several even rang the doorbell of his home in celebration. Farther north, a young priest put a radio on the altar, its speaker barely audible, as his congregation gathered for evening prayers. When he heard the familiar timbre of Gino’s voice, he interrupted the service and turned up the volume so that the whole church could listen to the cyclist being interviewed.
Elsewhere in Europe, Italian migrant workers and emigrants were enthralled by their countryman’s performance. On a stage that crossed into Belgium, seven spectators wearing bright yellow shirts each held up signs with letters that spelled out Bartali’s name. In Liège, the Belgian city where the Tour stopped overnight, ten thousand Italians gathered in the town square where Gino’s hotel was located at 10:00 p.m. and cheered loudly until nearly 2:00 a.m. Some danced and threw their hats in the air; others embraced each other and cried tears of happiness. The celebrations only ended when the police cleared the square so that Gino and the other people living nearby could rest. The local Belgian newspapers, reflecting the sentiment in many countries where Italian workers lived, arrogantly dismissed it all as an example of “southern temperament.” A French reporter, however, was more sympathetic to the Italians’ enthusiasm. “Their unbridled praise does not make us laugh. We would also like to have our own Bartali and acclaim him like a god, express our admiration and cover him with flowers.”
Other members of the press were similarly fervent when it came to their coverage of Gino’s victories. Although at least one journalist tried to pretend that he had not written an article doubting the Italian’s chances, most were more honest. One Italian journalist described the scope of Gino’s triumph, “Bartali wrote in these last two days—if one can write with pedal strokes and drops of sweat—perhaps the most beautiful page of his career.… Today it is enough to remember that forty-eight hours ago in Cannes, Bartali was marked as a man already largely beaten and perhaps on the eve of his withdrawal.”
The Tour director, who had also doubted Gino, offered his own poetic account of all that had passed. “From snowstorm, water, and ice, Bartali arose like a mud-covered angel, wearing under his soaked tunic the precious soul of an exceptional champion.”
In New York, the bomb threat at St. Patrick’s Cathedral never materialized. In Italy, the incendiary political situation was slowly being extinguished. After the strike ended at noon on July 16, businesses and private citizens set themselves to the task of repairs and cleaning up. Taxis began running again, and buses and trains resumed their regular schedules of operation. Gino cal
led home to his parents and asked them about the mood in Florence and its reaction to his victory. His parents responded with typical brevity: “Calm and enthusiastic.”
Nevertheless, several aftershocks of angry protest continued to reverberate throughout the country. There were still outbursts of violence in several cities, even though 55,000 members of the navy and air force were mobilized alongside the 250,000 members of the army and police that had already been engaged. A skirmish in a remote region of Tuscany between the army and a renegade group of partisans continued for several days. In the Chamber of Deputies, angry recriminations were hurled about as politicians debated who was most to blame for everything that had unfolded.
All told, the human and financial costs of the riots were significant. Over the course of a few days, fourteen people were killed and another two hundred were seriously injured, many of them police. It was further estimated that the country had suffered some seventy billion lire of damages from the strike, which amounted to over ten percent of the country’s GDP in 1948. Those costs were added to the enormous expense that the nation already faced with its rebuilding efforts after the war.
At the hospital, Togliatti continued to recover. He had a brief brush with pneumonia, but the infection was contained with a heavy dose of penicillin that had been manufactured in the United States. (Some critics noted the irony, given the acrimony between Communists and Americans.) At one point he asked his son to read him the newspapers to learn what had happened since he was shot. His doctors, however, advised against it. They were concerned that the news might adversely affect his health, given his weakened state. As a compromise, it was decided that his son should read only the sports news. Togliatti was very pleased by all of Gino’s successes.
Road to Valour Page 24
