Road to Valour

by Aili McConnon

  Across the city at Regina Coeli prison, Antonio Pallante, who was being held in isolation in a makeshift cell that the guards had crafted by outfitting the prison chaplain’s office with bars, only learned about Gino’s victory several days later. Listening to the guards’ account of what had happened in France, he was overwhelmed by what he described as a “great national pride” that united him for a brief instant with his countrymen.

  As the Tour neared its final stage, the organizers had much to celebrate. While they would have no doubt preferred a Frenchman to carry the yellow jersey into Paris, if only for the greater number of newspapers that could be sold, Gino’s dramatic comeback made for great newspaper copy. Underdogs and sports upsets always create headlines, and Gino’s performance had injected a palpable sense of suspense into a race that had only a few days earlier been criticized as lacking the excitement of earlier years.

  Spectators embraced the 1948 Tour to an extent that now seems extraordinary. In part, it was the dramatic tension of the race. More important, however, was that the Tour provided a welcome distraction from the struggles of postwar life. Fifteen million people in France, or nearly thirty-eight percent of the country’s population, had stood on roadsides to see the race in person. If an event were to boast a similar national turnout in the United States today, it would require more than 115 million to appear. As it stands, the most popular multiday sporting event, in terms of attendance, in American history was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. With an estimated attendance of just 5.8 million, or 2.5 percent of the U.S. population, it paled in comparison.

  These live attendance figures, large as they were, represented just a fraction of the audience that followed the Tour. Millions among the rest of the population read coverage in their newspapers, heard Tour radio broadcasts, or watched the newsreel updates at cinemas. Millions more followed the Tour in other European countries and around the world.

  The 1948 Tour was more popular than anyone could have expected, but lucrative it was not. Gino would win a little over a million francs in prize money from the Tour, and had commitments for short races that would take place after the Tour, worth nearly 3.5 million francs. The total winnings would today be worth about $187,000, and Gino had agreed to split it all with his ten teammates. The other famous racers earned less. Bobet earned 486,400 francs, or what would be just over $20,000 today, and Robic earned 261,700 francs, or the modern equivalent of about $11,000. Compared to current earnings for Tour victors or even sports stars in general, these figures seem terribly small. Still, after years of reduced or totally diminished income, the racers were happy to get whatever they could. And in postwar Italy, the money could be stretched. One of Gino’s youngest teammates got enough money from the Tour to marry his sweetheart, make a down payment on a house, and furnish it with all the latest appliances.

  Every prize and even the mere chance to compete for one, however, came at a high price. After three weeks of hard racing that exposed them to the extremes of weather and terrain, no one could deny that the Tour wreaked a terrible toll on its participants. Of the 120 men who started the race, just forty-four completed it. The rate of attrition for the old guard—those like Gino who had raced before the war—was equally sobering. Only four of ten would cross the finish line in Paris, though three of those four placed in the top ten. This was an obvious testament to their abilities as racers, but also to the nature of the race. Between the elements and the great distances covered, the Tour demanded the kind of endurance and “capacity for suffering,” as Gino called it, that many younger riders still hadn’t yet cultivated.

  The Tour had even transformed Gino, the one man who had endured its tests better than anyone else. The change wasn’t immediately discernible in his physique or his general manner. On the surface, Gino was in excellent physical shape and he remained as irascible as ever, even punching an admiring armed French police officer who inexplicably tried to pat his face at a stage finish line. And yet there was an indelible sadness that began to mount during the final stages that Gino would only fully understand when he reached Paris.

  The last day of the Tour opened with a light drizzle, curiously appropriate for an odyssey that had been forged by the ravages of the elements. The rain would make the roads that led to Paris more slippery, but it could do little to douse the enthusiasm of the crowds who had turned out this day to see the crowning of the Tour champion. Officially, the final stage of the Tour is still a race, but its results have only ever mattered where the standings in the general classification are close, something that could not have been further from the case in 1948. With a twenty-six-minute lead over the next racer, there was no question that this was anything less than an extended victory parade for Gino.

  The celebrations started early as the Tour riders snaked lazily through the streets of Roubaix as part of a pre-race show that lasted some forty-five minutes. By 10:00 a.m., they had begun the 178-mile journey into Paris. It was not long before they saw one of the first Italian flags that would be waved that day. It stood outside of an industrial workshop on the outskirts of Paris, where it had been placed by one of the many Italian workers now cheering on the Italian team from the side of the road. A simple but heartfelt message had been written across its green, white, and red fabric: Viva Gino Bartali!

  As the crowds grew larger, it was obvious from the words of support shouted in French that many of the French fans had thawed in their attitudes toward Gino and the Italians. They had pelted him with snowballs, booed him at finish lines, and one spectator had even sent an anonymous death threat (Binda chose not to tell Gino about this letter). By Paris, however, Gino had finally earned a modicum of their respect. The French press had come around much more quickly. Though their own government was in a state of flux with the role of prime minister changing hands, they would dedicate front cover pages to long, baroque tributes to Gino’s triumph. As one journalist wryly noted, “Gino Bartali, after having beaten his adversaries, defeated the prime minister.”

  By the time the Tour caravan reached the outskirts of Paris, the weather had improved and the cyclists began to enjoy some of the scenes of spontaneous ebullience that had greeted their arrival throughout so much of France. A pilot brought his plane down from the sky and flew it right beside them, its wings so close to the ground that they might have clipped a tree. Happy, screaming crowds of people lined up ten and twenty deep on the roadside to see the riders race by. And for the first time ever in Tour history, there were a few television cameras filming the race’s finish. Few could appreciate their significance at the time, but with their help the Tour would grow into a truly global event.

  Elsewhere, automobile traffic came to a complete standstill when cheering fans filled the streets as they made their way to the Parc des Princes velodrome where forty thousand of them would watch the end of the race. Still, in this sea of streamers and tanned faces that engulfed the Tour cyclists as they made their way into Paris, no one ever lost sight of the man of the hour. “Bartali stood out in his yellow jersey in the clear and overheated sky like the legionnaire’s bugle call in the solitary desert,” wrote one French journalist.

  As Gino focused on safeguarding his overall victory, the Tour’s lesser luminaries fought over the final stage. It was a feat of poetic beauty, then, when Giovanni Corrieri, Gino’s roommate and lieutenant, rocketed through the tunnel and was the first to appear on the track of the velodrome to win the day’s race. After riding for three weeks in Gino’s service and in his shadow, the “Sicilian Arrow” could enjoy a triumph of his own.

  Forty thousand voices roared as one when Gino burst through the tunnel into the velodrome a couple of minutes later. His dark tan glistened from beneath his yellow woolen jersey, and every ounce of him pulsed with swashbuckling vigor as he sped along the faded pink concrete track. His victory assured, he raced to the finish line where his teammates awaited him.

  Just like that, it was all over. After almost 150 hours in the saddle, the race ended. Ten years aft
er his first triumph, Gino Bartali had won the Tour de France once again and set a new record—the longest time span between victories—that remains undefeated to this day.

  After he had dismounted from his bike, Gino headed for the lawn in the middle of the track. As he stood there chatting with Corrieri and the others who had finished, waiting for the rest of the racers to arrive, he caught sight of a French rider, the other thirty-four-year-old member of the old guard, crying by himself. Gino walked over and embraced him, recognizing that he was contemplating the diminishing prospects of his own career, one that had seen him come maddeningly close to winning the Tour three times. Putting a hand on his shoulder as he held him, Gino tried to console him. “The war ruined us old men. It made us lose our best years and many victories that we will never recover.” The French rider, with red eyes and a bristly, unshaved face, could only nod in agreement.

  While the sting of the lost years would never completely disappear for Gino, as he spoke with the press that day, he showed the first signs that he had stopped fighting the weight of history. By any measure, he had defied the odds (only three winners in over a hundred years of Tour history have been older than Gino). When he thanked his teammates and his fans, he exuded gratitude for his improbable journey, a sentiment that he would most eloquently articulate only later: “Everyone in their life has his own particular way of expressing life’s purpose—the lawyer his eloquence, the painter his palette, and the man of letters his pen from which the quick words of his story flow. I have my bicycle.”

  After some twenty minutes had passed, the last racer crossed the finish line and the awards ceremony began. Photographs and newsreels provided generations to come with an enduring record of those final moments of the 1948 Tour. In those images, Gino walks up to the podium where several officials congratulate him and hang a large sash bearing the title “Tour de France 1948” across his chest. The Tour hostess, a beautiful blond actress named Line Renaud, gives him a large bouquet of flowers and kisses him on the cheek. Gino smiles bashfully and wipes her red lipstick off his face. The crowd jumps to its feet in a standing ovation, and for a moment Gino is overcome. “I have won the most beautiful race in the world. With this, I will enter into history,” he would later say. In the newsreels, he just smiles widely and waves back to his fans. Then he slowly makes his way down from the podium and mounts his bike.

  As Gino begins his victory lap, it is a scene of bitter triumph as only the ancients could have written it. Winning the Tour fulfills a quest that motivated Gino for the better part of ten years. Yet by scaling the largest summit cycling had to offer, he is finally forced to accept the superiority of the one rival he could never hope to defeat: time. Riding in the yellow jersey at the age of thirty-four, he is coming to the end of a journey that he would never again repeat.

  Alone on the track, a flicker of sadness crosses Gino’s face. But it passes quickly and only heightens his ability to savor this one perfect moment. For as he heads into the home stretch, the happiness he radiates is as clear as day—it is the carefree pleasure of a boy on a bike, gliding effortlessly through the air, resplendent in the afternoon sun.

  Epilogue

  Alcide De Gasperi visits Gino Bartali in the hospital in 1953.

  (photo credit epl.1)

  ON AN OVERCAST AFTERNOON in January 2011, we met with Giorgio Goldenberg in his home near Tel Aviv. With wavy silver hair and a jovial manner, Giorgio is now a seventy-nine-year-old grandfather. He speaks English confidently and with only a slight accent, a remarkable feat for a man who has never lived for an extended time in an English-speaking country. As we sipped espressos in his living room, he told us about how he arrived in Israel. In the months following the liberation of Florence in 1944, his parents made plans to evacuate him from Europe, fearful of a German counterattack. They secured a place for him on a British boat taking Jewish children to what was then Palestine. When he arrived, a Jewish relief group arranged for Giorgio and other children without family nearby to live on different kibbutzim, the large agricultural collectives that were being established around the country. Giorgio was sent to a kibbutz near Hadera. It was there that he first began to learn Hebrew and use his Hebrew name, Shlomo Pas. His parents and sister migrated to Israel three years later, in 1948. None of the Goldenbergs would ever see Gino Bartali again.

  We had originally started talking with Giorgio by phone in the fall of 2010, after tracking him down through various Italian Jews who had all gone to elementary school together in Florence a half century earlier, and were now located in Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. After our first conversations with Giorgio, an Italian Jewish journalist found him as well, which spurred a whirlwind tour of interviews. Several Italian newspapers carried articles about his story, and they were quickly cross-linked and translated into other languages in various forums around the web. RAI, the national Italian broadcaster, filmed an interview segment that was aired as part of the Italian commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2011.

  Nearly seven decades later, Giorgio’s memory of his wartime experience still felt close and raw. Giorgio admitted as much himself, noting how for nearly half a century he had never spoken with anyone about Gino Bartali or anything else that had happened to him or his family during the war. Like many Holocaust survivors, he had felt the memories of relatives and friends who had perished were too painful, the darkness of the era too difficult to speak about with anyone, even his own children. It was only in recent years, on the suggestion of his wife, that he had begun to unburden himself and tell his story.

  We talked for several hours and the conversation slowly drifted to the present. Giorgio grew more lighthearted again, beaming as he spoke proudly about being a father and grandfather. As we neared the end of our time together, Giorgio became reflective once more and took the measure of his wartime experience and how his family was saved. Time and geography may have kept him from meeting Gino again while he still lived, but Giorgio insisted on acknowledging his family’s debt to the cyclist. “There is no doubt whatsoever for me that he saved our lives. He not only saved our lives but he helped save the lives of hundreds of people. He put his own life and his family’s in danger in order to do so,” Giorgio said, his voice cracking with emotion. “In my opinion, he was a hero and he is entitled to be called a hero of the Italian people during the Second World War.”

  Like Giorgio, Gino avoided discussing what had happened during the war for much of his life. Although word about his involvement in Cardinal Dalla Costa’s secret network spread through pockets of the Jewish community in Florence soon after the war ended, it would be decades before the nation learned the details about it. Many of Gino’s countrymen were also reticent to speak about their wartime experiences and this silence was not unique to Italy. After years of occupation and war, citizens of several countries in Western Europe opted to willfully ignore the difficulties of the recent past, choosing to focus entirely in those first years on rebuilding for the future.

  In 1978, a Polish Jewish journalist and filmmaker named Alexander Ramati published a book he had written with Father Rufino Niccacci about the work of the religious clergy in Assisi during the German occupation. (Ramati, an Allied war correspondent during the war, had first met Niccacci and Luigi Brizi on the day the Allied soldiers liberated Assisi in June 1944.) Seven years later, he followed up with a feature film based on the book. Although both were framed around Niccacci’s first-person perspective of events, they revealed a good amount about Cardinal Dalla Costa, the Brizis, and Gino. The Italian press covered this story with great interest, and lavished praise on all the protagonists named in the counterfeiting network.

  Gino reacted to the coverage with anger, and privately threatened to sue an Italian television channel when it announced that it would air Ramati’s film. His son Andrea, however, argued against such measures, noting how closely Ramati had worked with Niccacci, Trento Brizi, and others. Gino slowly calmed down and came around to ag
reeing with his son, but he would remain tight-lipped with the press about his wartime activities for most of his life. The root of his reticence was a deeply felt concern that his celebrity as a cyclist would aggrandize his role in the network and overshadow the other participants’ contributions, ordinary Italians and Catholic clergy who took extraordinary risks to save others. Speaking in an Italian documentary made later in his life, Gino justified his silence as a matter of respect for those who had suffered more than he had during the war: “I don’t want to appear to be a hero. Heroes are those who died, who were injured, who spent many months in prison.”

  Gino’s modesty, coupled with the broader need for absolute secrecy about the clandestine network during the war, has left only a thin paper trail about his wartime activities. In recent years it has come to light that Gino may have helped ferry documents to an even wider area in Tuscany and Umbria than was previously known. In 2006, the president of Italy, Carlo Ciampi, posthumously awarded Gino and four priests a gold medal for civil merit for their efforts in an underground network that helped Jewish refugees hidden in Lucca, in northern Tuscany. Very little is known about Gino’s work for this particular network. Despite repeated calls, the government ministry responsible for the award would not share the file they compiled for Gino because, they said, the selection process for this award was not public. The two surviving members of this network in Lucca who also received awards told us that they did not meet with Gino during the war. They were quick to suggest that their deceased colleagues might have interacted with the cyclist, but that any record of such contact was lost. As they explained, it was most common not to know with whom their fellow priests were working. It was each member’s commitment to secrecy and willful ignorance about his fellow members’ dealings that protected these networks from detection and allowed them to save so many lives. Unfortunately, this same secrecy has also rendered these networks much more impenetrable to the light of historical investigation.