Authors: William Fotheringham
Buzzati produced his most effusive piece yet, reflecting that here, surely, the older champion, Bartali – twelve minutes behind and almost twenty-four minutes back in the overall standings – had been killed off by his younger rival. Buzzati observed the muddied face of the ‘iron man’, his open lips, his expression of suffering and wrote: ‘Thirty years ago I learned [at school] that Achilles killed Hector. Is this too glorious, too solemn a comparison? No. What would be the point in calling these “classical studies” if the fragments that remain in our minds were not an integral part of our lives? Fausto Coppi does not have Achilles’ glacial cruelty … but Bartali is living through the same drama as Hector: the tragedy of a man vanquished by the Gods. Bartali has fought a superhuman power and he could only lose: his opponent is the malevolent power of old age.’
Less elaborate, but a better illustration of the massive time gaps Coppi opened up on that stage, was a tale told by the French journalist Pierre Chany. He described following Coppi before deciding to stop for lunch. As Coppi disappeared up the road, he and his colleagues had a starter, a main course and coffee. Bartali came past as they left the restaurant. It seems unlikely, unless the waiter was extraordinarily quick on his feet, but it makes the point.
* * *
Coppi’s dominance in the Giro left the Italian national cycling federation and the trainer of the national team, Alfredo Binda, with a nasty conundrum. The consensus reached at Chiavari broke down after Coppi’s victory in the Giro. Coppi’s backers, underpinned by the financial muscle of Bianchi, demanded that Bartali remain at home. Speaking to
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, Coppi made his case: he had always felt his rival was not a team man, that he did not play by
the rules, and that they should not race together. The prospect of Bartali leading another team in the Tour, the mix and match ‘international’ squad, was raised, but quickly dropped. The national standing of the pair was such that the Italian president Alcide De Gasperi was moved to declare publicly that they had to unite on behalf of Italy. This was hardly surprising given his friendship with Bartali; more remarkably, the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti said publicly that he agreed with De Gasperi.
Binda, Coppi and Bartali met again in the central Italian town of Osimo that June, and Binda laid down the law. If the pair left the room without coming to an agreement, he told them, Italy would never forgive them and their images would be mud. He proposed the following deal: they would each take their own
gregari
with them and would agree to help each other until the Tour reached the mountains, at which point they could ride their own races and it would become clear which was the stronger.
The Italian team manager had a gut feeling that neither man wanted a repeat of the Valkenburg farce, because they feared what it would do to their reputations. However, he made sure that he retained control of the team. He would have the power he needed to restrain either man if he started to put self-interest above the common weal. He had the ultimate right to select the team, while allowing Bartali and Coppi to bring some of their own team-mates. He kept the power to throw anyone off the race if they disobeyed his orders, and he established that he would be the one who told the
gregari
what to do. The written agreement was finally signed at the Hotel Andreola in Milan, just two weeks before the Tour started on 30 June in Paris.
* * *
After Bartali had won the 1948 Tour, taking seven stage wins along the way, Coppi had told his
gregario
Ettore Milano that if he didn’t win the 1949 Tour he would give up – he was sick, he said, of hearing people talking about Bartali’s win on the radio. In the event, he came within an ace of ignominious failure. Just five days after the race began, he was standing by a roadside in the depths of Normandy, holding a broken bike and asking plaintively if he could go home. It was the greatest crisis of his career, with his vulnerable side brutally exposed.
Coppi had begun his Tour with a tour of his own, a trip around the sights of Paris on his bike. By stage five, which ran over 293 kilometres from Rouen to St Malo in blazing heat, the Italians were not showing well; both Coppi and Bartali were eighteen minutes behind the race leader, the Frenchman Jacques Marinelli. But on that day, Binda ordered his Italians to go on the attack, and Coppi worked his way into what looked like the stage-winning escape. Best of all, he left Bartali well behind him, in a tactical fix: the older man could not set up a chase, because he could not ride against his own team-mate.
As the race passed through the village of Mouen, with 160 kilometres remaining to the finish and the lead over the peloton already ten minutes, disaster struck. Marinelli reached for a bottle that was being held out to him by a spectator, wobbled and fell, taking Coppi with him and entangling their bikes. The Italian’s machine was a broken wreck: forks twisted, tyre forced off the back wheel, front wheel broken, the chain in the spokes. That should have mattered little: showing considerable foresight, Binda had asked the Tour organisers to allow him a second team car to provide service in the event of his riders having mechanical problems, on the grounds that he had two leaders, who might be in different places on the road.
So there was a car behind Coppi, and in it was his Bianchi
directeur sportif
, Tragella, who was on the Tour as Binda’s assistant. But Binda’s foresight counted for nothing: the only spare bike Tragella had was too small. Coppi’s spare was with Binda, who had stopped at the feeding zone in order to ensure Bartali got his lunch. No less than seven minutes had passed by the time Binda caught up, to find Coppi and Tragella standing by the roadside, looking, as he put it, ‘like two dogs that have been beaten with sticks’. Coppi was certain that his race was over.
It was down to Binda and the other Italians to keep Coppi going. But merely getting him started again required Binda to use all his persuasive powers. Initially he tried compulsion, warning Coppi that if he stopped without permission, he would be fined. That failed and the manager resorted to white lies, telling Coppi that he himself had retired from races in this kind of situation, and had always regretted it. This was fantasy, but the situation was desperate: Coppi would not respond. Eventually, like a parent negotiating with a toddler, Binda told him that if he rode as far as the finish, he could go home the following morning, if he still wanted to.
Binda’s next step was to make Bartali wait; he knew that Coppi would be stimulated by the idea that Bartali might win if he went home. Initially Bartali pedalled alongside, ‘alternating persuasion and insults’, he recalled. ‘It was like talking to a wall. Then I got angry. “I’m going home”, Fausto said. And I replied, “My fine boy, how are you going to look to your fans? You’re giving up. Goodbye glory, goodbye cash, no one will take you seriously any more. You wanted me to stay at home for this Tour and what do you do, you give up on the fifth stage?"’
There were a total of eighteen Italians in the race, split into two teams: the national team itself (who wore jerseys in the red, green and white of Italy rather than the sky blue of today) and the
cadetti
, a team of younger riders. One of the
latter, Alfredo Martini, remembers the afternoon well. He told me that once Coppi was with the bunch again, he told the Italians not to bother chasing the leaders, although they tried several times. The race, Coppi said, was over as far as he was concerned. ‘He said’ – and Martini suddenly lapses into the throaty Ligurian patois, half French, half Italian – ‘I might as well be at home under an umbrella with a cold beer.’
Coppi was not even willing to stick with the peloton, and when he drifted off the back Binda asked another Italian, Mario Ricci, to wait and escort him to the finish. There was more psychology here. Ricci was an old friend of Coppi’s from his Legnano days and was also the best-placed Italian overall. Asking him to give up his own chances was a way of making Coppi aware that his status in the team was not being challenged. But even as he rode, Coppi continued to repeat that the Tour was a madhouse, and he was going home. At the finish on the St Malo outdoor cycling track, he had the body language of a man defeated: drooping shoulders, ponderous footsteps. He was almost nineteen minutes behind the stage winner, Ferdi Kübler, and a massive thirty-seven behind Marinelli, and the Italian team’s next job was to persuade him to stay in the race overnight.
It took a concerted effort, led by Binda. The manager’s memoirs,
La Testa e I Garun
, include a photograph from that evening: Binda is standing next to Coppi’s bed, in his white cap with an Italian tricolour on the side, goggles around his neck (the team cars are open-top jeeps, the roads are very dusty), his arms spread out in a gesture of supplication. Coppi lies on the bed with his arms spread like a wounded bird, his mind clearly elsewhere. Fiorenzo Magni was among those who did not believe Coppi now stood a chance. It was, says Ettore Milano, a chaotic evening in the team hotel just outside St Malo: some of the team in tears, pleas and curses flying through the air.
Milano told me: ‘We said to him, “Look, mate, we are at war here, we will go on to the end. We don’t want to be disrespectful, [pulling out] is not just like being cheated on by your wife, it’s like having your balls cut off.” What could we do but joke? We all made him go on. We got round him and made him continue in the race.’ Milano also pointed out to Coppi that he was marrying shortly – Cavanna’s daughter – and needed money. If Coppi went home, he would have no wedding. Binda again played his man well, persuading Coppi to postpone his departure for a few days: he knew that the next day’s stage was relatively easy, the day after that was a rest day, and that in turn was followed by a time trial which ‘he, the king of racing against the watch, was capable of winning on one leg’. It was a familiar picture: Coppi needing to be influenced by stronger minds at a turning point.
With hindsight, the
campionissimo
acknowledged that his behaviour was not rational. To his critics, he said, ‘You try, just once, sitting on the roadside with an unusable bike, with the impression of being terribly alone, and with the knowledge that your rivals are all against you.’ There was, inevitably, intense speculation over the reasons for his crisis of confidence. Partly, it was put down to the rivalry with Bartali. Coppi told team-mates that in his view Binda and Bartali were in league and the reason his bike was not on the van was because Binda wanted Bartali to win. Binda, ironically, said later that Bartali never forgave him for persuading Coppi to remain in the race, because it deprived him of a second Tour win.
There was another explanation: Coppi had trouble adapting to the Tour. This was not the schematised, controlled racing of Italy, where the
gregari
looked after things until the
campioni
took over. ‘Coppi’s morale fell to bits because he realised that the Tour wasn’t like the Giro,’ says Raphael Geminiani, a friend and rival, and later a team-mate. ‘In the Giro there was a kind of arrangement between the riders that you wouldn’t
really race until the feeding station, whereas in France we would attack as soon as the start flag was dropped. Controlling the race was much harder, because everyone went from the gun, everyone was a danger, breaks could get a huge amount of time; it was more chaotic.’
For foreigners like the Italian team in France, there was also massive uncertainty involved in racing away from home terrain. The route would be unknown territory, as maps were in short supply and the break in racing because of the war meant that the riders had little experience to draw on. Given the importance of gearing for climbs, pacing yourself and knowing where the roads were bad, this was a serious handicap to riders from abroad. There was also Coppi’s innate need for reassurance, the background of potential double-dealing involving Bartali, and the sudden transition from dominance – ten minutes ahead of the great rival on the road, a massive statement being made – to complete powerlessness.
The crisis en route to St Malo looks bizarre on the face of it, but it is actually understandable given the circumstances and Coppi’s character. Indeed, it could be argued that it marked a turning point. Beforehand, Coppi had finished first in only one major road race outside Italy, the previous year’s Het Volk Classic, where the judges disqualified him for being given a wheel by a fellow competitor – another example of the difficulty of racing abroad. The dominant victories that followed, in the next couple of weeks and the next five years, suggested that getting back into the 1949 Tour in fact made him a more formidable competitor.
* * *
What came after St Malo was stage racing at its finest: a dramatic comeback as Coppi ate into that thirty-seven-minute deficit, against a background of constant intrigue, gossip and
speculation about double-dealing. As Binda expected, Coppi won the time trial, down France’s west coast from Les Sables d’Olonne to La Rochelle. He regained eight minutes, inspiring the Tour de France organiser, Jacques Goddet, to write a eulogy in
L’Equipe
in which he compared the purity of Coppi’s pedalling style to the lucidity of Dante’s Italian in
The Divine Comedy
. The sniping with Bartali remained constant, however. After the stage to San Sebastian, Coppi accused the older man of a treacherous attempt to get away from the field, and Binda had to intervene. In the Pyrenees it was Bartali who claimed he had been betrayed when Coppi attacked after he crashed on the climb of the Col de l’Aubisque. That one was defused when Coppi explained that he had not been aware that Bartali had a problem. Neither trusted the other; both were waiting to find out just who was the best.
With the Pyrenees behind him, Coppi had reduced the deficit on Marinelli to just over thirteen minutes. The two days’ racing through the Alps were to decide the winner. The epic stage from Cannes to Briançon, over the snowy Col d’Izoard, began with a 4 a.m. start, before which Bartali went to Mass, and closed with
il pio
in the yellow jersey. Along the way, the stage saw a major imbroglio when Tragella was not in evidence at a feed station when he was supposed to be giving Bartali his bag of rations. According to most accounts, Tragella simply hid, because he could not bear to help Bartali; ironically, it was his protégé Coppi who realised this was unacceptable behaviour and gave his rival his bag.