Other factors have only made the research about Gino’s wartime work more challenging. As the safety of the network required that Gino minimize his interactions with the recipients of the false identity documents that he was ferrying, or avoid them altogether by working with other trusted intermediaries, he does not appear frequently in the growing body of survivor testimonies gathered by various Holocaust remembrance organizations. Likewise, many of those who did work with him, particularly in the Florence-Umbria network, died without giving a full account of their wartime experiences or what they knew about Gino’s involvement. Gino himself was no help to the cause of research, refusing comment and steadfastly downplaying his role, even in the face of compelling testimony to the contrary from his fellow members.
One exception was Father Pier Damiano at the San Damiano monastery, whom we discovered early on, who had witnessed Gino dropping off documents to Father Niccacci on one occasion during the war. Overwhelmingly, however, after nearly ten years of research, it became clear that we will likely never know the full scope of everything Gino did or the risks he endured to help Cardinal Dalla Costa. But perhaps that is what Gino intended all along. For a man who had lived almost all of his adult life in the unrelenting scrutiny of the public eye, there is something fitting in the fact that he was able to keep some element of his greatest achievement private. As he would tell his son Andrea, “If you’re good at a sport, they attach the medals to your shirts and then they shine in some museum. That which is earned by doing good deeds is attached to the soul and shines elsewhere.”
In the hours following Gino’s critical stage win in the 1948 Tour, there was “an explosion of joy” all over the country, said Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, a former judge and Italian president who was a young politician in Rome at the time. “It was like a wind that swipes away the clouds,” the ninety-one-year-old added, as he waved his hand energetically through the air to illustrate the effect of Gino’s win on Italy after the attempted assassination of Palmiro Togliatti.
To this day Italians debate the question of how close the nation came to a wide-scale uprising at that tense moment in July 1948. Many ordinary Italians who saw the riots and destruction firsthand insist that they had witnessed the early signs of revolution and civil war. It is a characterization that historian Patrick McCarthy partly echoes when he describes an Italy where “Milan, Turin, and Genoa appeared on the brink of insurrection.” Others are more skeptical. The historian Paul Ginsborg surveyed the protests in the north and the relatively muted response in the rural south and argued that the possibility of nationwide revolution was unlikely. He did, however, note that one prominent Communist politician had suggested to him that “insurrection was feasible in the North, but that Italy would have been cut in two.”
The perception of the impact of Gino’s victory in the aftermath of the riots would also evolve over the years. In the immediate days following the victory, the fact that Togliatti had survived the assassination attempt played a critical role in the nation’s enthusiastic response to Gino’s triumph. Had he died, the country would doubtless have been in a very different mood, regardless of how Gino fared at the Tour. In coming months and years, however, overeager bartaliani and hard-line right-wing Italians, looking to score points in the ongoing battle between Communists and Christian Democrats, inflated the importance of Gino’s victory and dropped Togliatti’s recovery out of the story. Gino became the “savior of the Fatherland” who singlehandedly stopped the outbreak of a civil war.
In recent years, national leaders and Italian cultural historians have advanced a more nuanced view of the victory’s significance. Giulio Andreotti, a parliamentary deputy and prime minister, who witnessed the celebrations in the Chamber of Deputies at the news of Gino’s victory, offered his assessment. “To say that civil war was averted by a Tour de France victory is surely excessive,” but it was “undeniable,” he insisted, that Gino “contributed to ease the tensions.” Former president Oscar Scalfaro fleshed out this idea further when we met with him, describing Gino’s triumph as an entertaining distraction, offering a hard-fought success that resonated deeply when the nation was trying to rebuild. At least two Italian historians have echoed this point. For his part, Gino steadfastly downplayed his accomplishment, saying, “I don’t know if I saved the country, but I gave it back its smile.”
Although Gino had spoken seriously about retirement after his 1948 Tour victory, only a few weeks later, he set off for Holland with Fausto Coppi to the World Track Cycling Championships in Valkenburg. With the two of them racing together on one national team, Italy should have had no trouble winning. Tragically, neither star was in any mood to work cooperatively. Jealous of all the radio discussion about Gino’s Tour victory, Coppi only agreed to race so that he might defeat his Tuscan rival. Gino proved himself no better when the race began, refusing to make any significant attacks lest he inadvertently help Coppi. Instead, the two men spent their time pacing each other, oblivious to the other competitors who were pulling out in front of them. Eventually, when both had fallen far behind the pack, they got off their bikes and quit the race while the spectators hissed angrily at them.
In Italy, this disgraceful performance was shocking enough to prompt the Italian Cycling Federation to suspend both men temporarily, adding more fuel to the fire of their rivalry. For several years already, the story of their match-ups had dominated the headlines. A hungry press, looking to sell newspapers, only ratcheted up the antagonism. But there was also some real substance in their battles. Neither man was afraid to speak dismissively about the other’s prospects in public, and both had long since given up referring to the other by name, each preferring instead to call the other “that one.” The fans followed suit, with whole neighborhoods taking sides as coppiani or bartaliani. Those who dared challenge these local allegiances risked confrontation. Men got into fights over whom they supported, and at least one woman was chased across her rural village by screaming young Bartali fans when she admitted she supported Coppi. Ultimately these divisions would even take on a political dimension, when the Communists rallied behind an apolitical Coppi to combat Gino’s allegiance to the Christian Democrats.
The battle reached its zenith in the spring of 1949, when the time came to choose the Italian team for the Tour de France. Coppi had just defeated Gino at the Giro d’Italia, and his professional team, Bianchi, demanded that Gino be held back while Coppi led the effort in France. Gino, however, was the returning Tour champion, and his supporters felt it unconscionable that he be prevented from defending his title just so that Coppi could make his Tour debut. Both arguments had merit, and the debate quickly became a popular one in public circles. A satisfying resolution, however, seemed unlikely. At one point, Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi even weighed in publicly and insisted that Gino and Coppi race together for Italy. In an unusual show of political unity, Palmiro Togliatti, his long-standing opponent, agreed.
As consensus mounted for a unified team, coach Alfredo Binda engineered an alliance between the stars whereby both men agreed to race cooperatively for the first part of the race. When they reached the Alps, each was allowed to race more freely. To the eternal disappointment of the bartaliani, Coppi outshone his rival and carried the yellow jersey into Paris. Though Gino came in second, Coppi overshadowed him by becoming the first cyclist to do what had long been considered impossible: winning the Giro and the Tour in the same year. The symbolic importance of the moment could not be understated. In head-to-head battle through some of Western Europe’s most challenging terrain, Coppi had realized the dream that Gino had held since his earliest years as a cyclist.
Coppi went on to win a second Tour title, and by the end of his career his distinctions included five Giro victories as well. Compared to Gino’s two Tour titles and three Giro wins, some felt the debate about who was the best Italian racer was now over. Others argued that it wasn’t a fair comparison since Gino would likely have won more Tour and Giro titles if his career hadn’t been in
terrupted by the war, which impacted Coppi less because he wasn’t yet in his prime years. To buttress this argument, the bartaliani point to Gino’s enduring Tour record—the ten-year time span between victories. Even as advances in general health and training have allowed current cyclists to extend their careers and win races like the Tour de France at a later age in life, no other racer has stayed at the very top of the sport for that length of time.
To this day, outside of Italy, Coppi remains better known, partly because his victories were more recent and partly because he helped pioneer the modern, scientifically based way of training, in contrast to Gino’s defiantly old-fashioned approach to cycling. Within Italy, however, most contemporary Italians of all ages, when asked about this duo, will feel a multigenerational loyalty to either Bartali or Coppi. With time the bitter edges of the rivalry have worn down and transformed into celebrations of the legacy of each cyclist.
Among the bartaliani, the remembrances have taken many forms. In 2006, a Gino Bartali museum opened in his hometown of Ponte a Ema, showcasing old bikes, photographs, and other Bartali paraphernalia. In 2009, Ivo Faltoni, one of Gino’s former bike mechanics and a lifelong friend, launched an annual ciclopelegrinaggio, or cycling pilgrimage, retracing part of Gino’s routes between Florence and Assisi when he was shuttling documents. For the inaugural year, more than a hundred riders, including young boys, a couple on a tandem bicycle, and several white-haired cyclists, pedaled from Terontola to the main square in Assisi, where they were treated to one of Gino’s favorite training snacks, prosciutto panini. The winners of the first pilgrimage came from a Roman Catholic cycling society in the north of Italy, which had pledged to live according to the values of Gino Bartali.
On October 18, 1953, Gino and a few friends made their way to what would be one of the last races of his career. Thirty-nine years old, he had raced eighty times that season and won only twice, giving the press yet more fodder to poke fun at his age. In the years since his Tour victory, he had gone from being known as Il Vecchio to Il Vecchiaccio—“the Old Geezer” and even Methuselah, the oldest man in the Bible. Gino grudgingly accepted the jibes, and even enjoyed such moments as when he was parodied in an Italian comedy revue by an actor wearing a yellow jersey “and a beard so long it reached his navel.” Gino took it all in stride. “We athletes are not like beautiful women who can hide their years, and what’s more, I have no desire to hide them. If the affectionate mirth that my ‘venerable’ age provokes can be a distraction for the spectators from the chores and annoyances of daily life which aren’t enjoyable for anyone, all the better.”
As they drove that morning to Switzerland, where the race was being held, Gino dozed in the passenger seat. He was ripped from his slumber, however, when he felt the car lurch and heard the thunderous crash of metal. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the “car was turning over and over, as if in a vortex.” The door flew open and he was catapulted out of the vehicle. He hit the ground on the side of the road, and the car continued to flip several times before it finally came to a standstill a few feet from where he lay.
He could see warm blood pouring out of his leg where he had made impact with the pavement, and as he attempted to move, he felt a stab of pain in his back and winced. Soon he became aware of hands stretching out to him, strangers gathered around him, leaning over to help him up.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” Gino groaned, worried that his back would be damaged by further movement. “If you want, cover me, but do not touch me!” Gino tried to yell. “You will lift me only when the ambulance arrives.”
An ambulance soon appeared, and as Gino traveled to the hospital, he kept his eyes closed, murmuring the names of his sons to keep calm. At the hospital, he was surrounded by a great commotion of doctors and nurses. When he was finally settled in a room, he was able to focus his thoughts. He needed to call Adriana. He picked up the phone and dialed.
“Adriana … Adriana!” Gino said feebly when she picked up. “I’m here in Milan,” he said, telling her the name of the hospital.
“What happened to you, Gino?” Adriana asked anxiously.
“I was in a car accident. Come here right away.”
“Is it serious? Tell me, Gino, is it serious?” she continued.
“I don’t know yet. Come to Milan right away. Don’t say anything to the kids. Tell my mom.”
Overcome by the effort of the call, Gino fainted.
Adriana rushed to Milan and found Gino in a terrible state. He had been cut badly, fractured two vertebrae, and damaged his bowels. In the following days, he was operated on, and part of his intestine was removed. Slowly he began to heal.
As he recuperated at the hospital, Alcide De Gasperi, the former prime minister who had called him during the 1948 Tour, visited him. No record of their conversation remains, but a photograph taken of the moment speaks volumes. The soft-spoken, gray-haired politician, now politically past his prime, leans over and tenderly holds the forearm of the aging athlete lying in bed, rendered immobile by his injuries. It is a warm moment between old friends, and a poignant end to an era during which the great characters in sports and politics performed together on the same stage.
De Gasperi would die within a year from a heart attack. Gino recovered enough to briefly race again, but retired formally from the sport in February 1955.
In his retirement, Gino focused full-time on several business ventures that he had started on the side during his final years of cycling. As early as 1949, after years of racing for Legnano, a professional cycling team owned by the second-largest bike brand in Italy, Gino convinced himself that he could earn more money by launching a professional team and his own line of bicycles. It was a decision that he would regret almost from the get-go. The early Bartali bikes were of poor quality, and the cyclist quickly realized how unprepared he was to help run a bicycle factory and business. “It’s one thing to ride on [a bicycle] and push it at high or impossible average speeds in storms and in the battles of a race, it’s another thing to administer its production and sales,” he said. His professional team fared no better. They lacked the money to compete with established teams like Legnano and Bianchi when it came to signing good cyclists, leaving them with a group of third-string racers whom most saw as a joke. Even Gino could find nothing redeeming about the experience, and later regretted it deeply. “If I had remained with the Legnano team, I would have won more races which were lost because of our inferior bikes.”
For all the money and effort wasted, Gino kept trying. He continued to dabble in business, pitching Bartali razor blades and even his own brand of Chianti wine that dubiously promised “eternal youth” to whoever drank it. A few years after his disappointment with Bartali bikes, he started a small department store that sold everything from Bartalibranded motorcycles to Bartali sewing machines and Bartali shaving cream. It was another area of business that Gino knew little about, and though his intentions were good, it wasn’t long before it, too, ran into trouble. “It was the era of paying by installments,” his son Andrea explained. “Papà sold, but then was embarrassed to ask for the missing payments from those who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. And so in time that venture didn’t go so well.”
While Gino struggled with his businesses in the 1950s, a powerful economic boom unfolded across Western Europe as the continent rebuilt and restored its industrial base. Rising consumer incomes enriched manufacturers, and their enduring need to secure effective advertising helped transform cycling into a potent money-maker. Race prizes and appearance fees for winners soon reflected this growing prosperity. In 1952, just four years after Gino’s victory, the Tour winner landed twenty million francs in contracts, or the modern equivalent of approximately $517,000 (nearly three times what Gino took home from the 1948 Tour). In subsequent decades, corporate endorsement deals linked to expanded television coverage would make a victory at the Tour exponentially more lucrative.
Paradoxically, however, this same prosperity would slowly push the spo
rt from its central place in European life. From 1950 onward, bicycle sales in France and Italy began to decline, eclipsed first by mopeds and then later by small cars. As they did so, the connection between everyday cyclists and the professionals slowly withered, and the popular experience and understanding of cycling dissipated. Subsequent technological innovations have only further eroded that connection. Today it is difficult for newcomers to the sport to fully appreciate the majestic endurance of a cyclist riding up the Alps at fifteen miles per hour, when a mass-market car can easily manage the task at twice or even three times the speed. Likewise, the audacity of riding around France in three weeks feels diminished in an era when anyone could do it sleeping on a discount flight in a matter of hours. None of this, of course, can take away from a great cyclist’s achievement, but since bikes have ceased to be a part of daily life for so many, spectators no longer instantly understand the stamina and sheer will required to complete races as grueling as the Tour.
In this changing world, a newly retired Gino struggled to find his place. After his businesses failed and his savings were gutted, Gino worked for a period of time as a sportscaster for RAI, the Italian state channel, and generated some controversy by refusing to follow his producers’ guidelines for his commentary. In later years, he covered the races as a reporter for other media outlets. He also made appearances and signed autographs during promotional events set up by Coca-Cola.
Various figures in the cycling world remember Gino in this era for the sharpness of his tongue, a trait that was memorialized in his most enduring public nickname, Ginettaccio—“Gino the Terrible.” Two-time world champion Gianni Bugno described Gino covering the races “in order to tell us every day what we had done wrong.” Others remember his willingness to be baited into a loud argument. For his part, Gino defended his cantankerous tone as proof of his honesty, and regularly even played it up. He agreed to write a racing column for Italy’s largest sports newspaper during the Giro d’Italia that was called “A Mistake a Day”; he titled one of his autobiographies It’s All Wrong, It All Has to Be Redone, in reference to an infamous episode from his racing days when he had shouted at the mechanics who made a mistake when assembling his bike. There was a certain element of humor in all of this, and yet Gino was also occasionally pigeonholed in this part. Where other retired athletes had segued gracefully to roles as benevolent elder statesmen, he was at times depicted as a caricature of a national curmudgeon.
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