Authors: William Fotheringham
With Magni and Bartali sworn to act in Coppi’s interests, and limited opposition compared, for example, to that year’s Giro, the Italian team was dominant. First Magni, then Sandrino Carrea, briefly pulled on the yellow jersey as ‘care-takers’. Carrea’s day of glory came in Lausanne just as the Tour entered the Alps. He had had so few expectations that he was back in his hotel by the time it was discovered that he had become race leader. The police had to be sent to fetch him. Coppi immediately relieved him of the yellow jersey on the climb to l’Alpe d’Huez. On this first ascent of what has become the Tour’s most celebrated summit finish, only one rider could hold him for a while: the Frenchman Jean Robic, winner of the 1947 Tour. With four miles left to the top of the Alpe, Coppi was ‘inexorable and unequalled in his mechanical suppleness’, wrote the Tour director, Jacques Goddet. He raised the pace once, then, without turning round, Coppi sensed the little Frenchman was at his limit and accelerated again, creating a definitive gap.
Later he said he knew Robic had gone; he could no longer
hear him breathing. Nowadays, on the Alpe, that would be unimaginable. Since the 1970s, this has become the Tour’s most popular stage finish, with hundreds of thousands of fans of every nationality flocking to line the twenty-one hairpins three and four deep. It is also, now, a thrusting hub of the French ski industry, hundreds of chalets perched on a ridge high above the Romanche valley. Before 1952, summit finishes were a rarity in the Tour – the 1952 race introduced the idea with three stages ending on mountain tops – and the Alpe’s hairpins had barely a fan on them, let alone the throngs of today, while the resort consisted of a single building. Coppi chose a room at the back of the one hotel, the Christina, to avoid the noise that he knew the
tifosi
would make outside as they celebrated.
With Carrea lying second and Magni third, the Italians had a stranglehold on the race. After a rest day at the Alpe, they returned briefly to home soil, to a second mountain-top stage finish, at the Sestriere ski resort, over four major passes including the Croix de Fer and, most significantly, the Galibier, at 2,645 metres the highest and hardest
col
regularly climbed by the Tour. This was where Coppi clinched the Tour, escaping alone yet again. The next rider, the Spaniard Bernardo Ruiz, was seven minutes adrift.
Orio Vergani described the delirious scenes in
Corriere della Sera
: ‘From the Montgenèvre customs post to here, for about twenty kilometres, there was not even a thin gap in the sea of people. On the climb to Sestriere, the shoulders of the hills were turned into limitless stands as in a natural amphitheatre. [At the finish] Coppi had more trouble getting away from the crowd than he had had escaping his adversaries on today’s climbs. Fifty
carabinieri
were barely enough to get him out of this bedlam. Crazy women offer him packets of sweets, unknown people kiss, hug, shake and squeeze their Fausto. It’s not a triumph. It’s an orgy. The Tour de France is becoming a personal exhibition for one phenomenal talent.’
Any talk of Bartali stabbing Coppi in the back was long gone. He had finished ten minutes behind in Sestriere and confirmation that
il vecchio
knew his place came on the stage to Monaco, when he and Coppi were the only Italians in a lead group of forty. Coppi punctured; his old rival gave up his wheel. When the race climbed Mont Ventoux, high above Avignon, Coppi punctured again, and again Bartali stopped to help. In Perpignan came the ultimate tribute to Coppi’s dominance: the organisers increased the prize money for second and third places by 500,000 and 250,000 old francs respectively. This was recognition that the Tour was as good as over, with eight stages still to be covered, and such a tribute has never been paid to any Tour winner since.
Two wonderful drawings by the French cartoonist Pellos illustrate Coppi’s dominance in that Tour. One is entitled
’Tout est consommé’
– Coppi is at a table, his stomach bulging, with all his rivals looking hungry in one corner of the room, as Carrea, Magni and Bartali, dressed as servants, queue up behind the champion. The other,
’Ce qu’il faudrait pour qu’il ne gagne pas‘
, shows, with Hanna-Barbera-esque cruelty, what it would take to stop the
campionissimo
: he is run over by a steamroller, seated on a mine, the road is strewn with tacks and mantraps, he is served arsenic, hit with a hammer by a grinning image of the Puy-de-Dôme, has vitriol poured over him and his
gregari
are tied to a tree.
The puncture put paid to Coppi’s chances of increasing his lead on the Ventoux, but in the Pyrenees he was rampant again. Geminiani won the first stage – one suspects with Coppi’s approval as they were team-mates at Bianchi – but the next day the
campionissimo
led alone over two passes, the Aubisque and the Tourmalet. He waited for the ‘opposition’ on the first, escaped on the second, waited again for what was left of the field, then finally broke away again a few kilometres from the stage finish in Pau. At the final summit finish
of the race, the extinct volcano of the Puy-de-Dôme in the Massif Central, he was again unstoppable, overtaking the Dutchman Jan Nolten in the final 300 metres. At the finish in Paris the second-placed cyclist, Stan Ockers of Belgium, was twenty-eight minutes and seventeen seconds behind. No Tour has been won by a greater margin in the post-war years.
Coppi was still not confident in spite of his total control of the race and that massive lead. His room-mate Ettore Milano remembers a brief exchange before the penultimate stage of the Tour. ‘The yellow jersey was on the bed and he said to me, “Will I wear it to Paris?” He had almost half an hour’s lead but was still afraid something might happen, a dog might run out in front of him or something. He would not believe he had won until he crossed the line. He was always like that after Serse died.’
Coppi’s doubts belied the reality of his second double. There could be no stronger statement of his continuing power after the disastrous season and a half that had preceded the Tour and Giro wins. As he acknowledged, he had come back from oblivion. ‘Without saying it to my face I know that even my sincerest friends imagined that my various accidents had lessened my strength and that I didn’t have the same physical means as in the past. At times, it was as if people were coming into my hospital room and saying, “What a shame your career has to end like this.” They believed I was finished, but I knew nothing was wrong.’
* * *
At Sestriere, Bruna Coppi visited the Tour. Suitably made up and glamorously dressed, she was photographed in her husband’s hotel room helping to apply cold compresses to his sunburnt forehead. The picture of marital bliss was not all it seemed, however, as Felix Lévitan testified in that year’s
Miroir
du Tour
magazine.
L’Equipe
photographer Armand Pilon spotted Bruna Coppi ‘sitting timidly a little way away from the bed where her husband was lying and receiving homage from his friends’. Pilon asked to take her picture and was refused. ‘Mrs Coppi hates photographs, and quite possibly, photographers,’ wrote Levitan, before adding: ‘Coppi got involved. One word gave way to another. A rather lively phrase gave way to a more curt one. All in Italian, but enough for Pilon to realise that he had been the cause of a domestic row. Mrs Coppi took out her handkerchief and Pilon fled, distraught at having reduced her to tears by insisting on the picture.’ He apologised to Coppi the following morning; the
campionissimo
blamed his wife.
Not long after the Tour, Bruna’s fears about the dangers of Coppi’s profession were realised: her husband crashed again, at a track meeting in Perpignan. The diagnosis was a broken shoulder blade and a cracked collarbone; the doctors’ verdict, forty days’ rest. Once back on his bike, he kept racing late into the autumn, winning a ten-day stage race, the Grand Prix of the Mediterranean, which finished on 17 November.
That winter, Coppi made further visits to the Locatellis’ house near Varese. ‘I made three visits, no more, you can’t say I was a friend [of the doctor’s],’ said Coppi later, adding that he came only to see Giulia. Later, she would publish photographs of them together at the house, the sort of pictures any fan might take to record the visit of a star.
Coppi also invited the doctor and his wife to accompany him to Milan to watch the Harlem Globetrotters in an exhibition basketball match. Being Coppi, he had free tickets. The doctor, as it happened, was busy that evening. Giulia and Fausto were accompanied by one of his colleagues and his fiancée; Dr Locatelli was to meet them at the end of the show. During the evening, they managed to extricate themselves from their chaperones. Quite what they talked about
Giulia was unable to remember later on, although she remembered Fausto as ‘gauche and emotional’.
The start of 1953 was quiet: Coppi managed only a ninth place in Milan–San Remo, won for the second year running by Loretto Petrucci, who found, however, all of a sudden, that he was no longer flavour of the month at Bianchi. The young Tuscan had been hired to win races, but only when it suited his master. Coppi felt threatened by his second win; Bianchi’s
gregari
raced against Petrucci. So too did other teams, under orders from the boss of the bunch. Suddenly, Petrucci had up to thirty men racing against him. He found he had no exhibition race contracts, and he quit cycling at just twenty-five.
Coppi’s last great stage race victory was forged on the Stelvio Pass in the north-east corner of Italy, where it meets western Austria and eastern Switzerland. ‘Scenically the finest of all the Alpine passes, a marvel of engineering skill,’ wrote one Alpine motoring guidebook, which describes the forty-eight hairpins on the north side between Trafoi and the 2,758-metre high summit as probably the most imposing continuous hairpin sector in the Alps. From a distance, it looks as if a child has drawn a series of zigzags across the nearly vertical scree slopes. It seems hardly possible that a road can cling to the vertiginous mountainside. The eight-mile long pass has featured in the Giro several times since 1953, but it remains Coppi’s climb: the site of his last great lone escape to win a major Tour, even as his love affair with Giulia gradually gained momentum.
Hugo Koblet, the Brylcreemed
pédaleur de charme
, was in the race lead, his victory seemingly assured at aposCoppi’s expense in spite of a heavy crash on stage four, when he ran into a little girl at a feed zone and fell heavily on his head. He was briefly out cold, and rode the rest of the stage in a daze, clearly concussed. When a race leader is in such a state,
cycling etiquette dictates that he is supported by his rivals: Coppi and Louison Bobet marshalled their teams at the front of the bunch to enable the Swiss to get to the finish. Koblet recovered to win the time trial four days later and arrived at the Dolomites with almost two minutes’ lead on Coppi. The ageing champion had won a team time trial with the help of his domestiques, but, to counter that, Koblet had escaped on a descent to win the stage to Auronzo.
Coppi looked to have played his last card on the stage from Auronzo to Bolzano, over the classic Dolomite triptych of the Falzarego, Pordoi and Sella passes, swathed in thick, chilly fog. Koblet attacked on the Pordoi, gaining two minutes’ lead, only for Coppi to overtake him on the Sella, the last mountain of the stage. By the summit, over 2,200 metres high, Coppi had left the Swiss behind, but Koblet, perhaps the most daring descender of the time, caught up again on the hairpinned drop to Bolzano, where he let Coppi take the stage win. It was, it seemed, the classic bargain: the race leader lets his challenger have a compensatory victory. Indeed, Koblet later claimed that Coppi had ceded him overall victory at the finish. There remained only the stage over the Stelvio to Bormio before the final run to the finish in Milan.
The intrigue and gamesmanship began even before the start flag was dropped. Firstly, Cavanna asked Milano to check on Koblet as he registered for the stage. The masseur wanted to know if the Swiss had ‘drunk a lot’, in other words if he had overdone the amphetamines. ‘
La bomba
gave you an influx of strength in the race, but after the race it prevented you from recovering completely, often forcing you to spend the night without sleep. So my job was to work out from Koblet’s eyes if he slept or had just turned over and over all night. The problem was that Hugo wore dark glasses.’
Milano had to think of something quickly, and he persuaded a photographer to ask Koblet if he would take his glasses off
for a picture. ‘To my immense pleasure, I noticed that Koblet had eyes that would scare you. At once I went to Fausto and said to him, “Look, Koblet has ‘drunk’ – his eyes are in the back of his head.” ‘Mine are too,’ said Fausto, clearly not convinced. Milano also kept an eye on Koblet during the early part of the stage. ‘Look how Koblet’s sweating,’ he said to his leader, only for Coppi to reply, ‘I’m sweating too.’ Another domestique was assigned to see if Koblet was swigging water – amphetamines make you thirsty – and indeed he was.
‘It was the first time the Giro had been up the Stelvio,’ recalled Nino Defilippis, who assisted Coppi even though he was riding for Legnano, Gino Bartali’s squad. ‘The mechanics hadn’t been able to check out the climb, because of the snow; the road was only opened that night. About four or five kilometres up the climb, there were just me, Coppi, Koblet, Fornara, Carrea and Bartali left in the group. Coppi shouted to Carrea, “
Pappagallo
[parrot], what are you doing, don’t go so hard.”’ This was the code for Carrea to put the hammer down. Soon afterwards, Defilippis asked a fan on the road-side how far it was to the top. The answer was two opened hands: ten kilometres. ‘After Carrea was dropped, Coppi came to me and said, “
Cid
[kid – Defilippis turned pro at twenty], can you shake up the group?” I attacked and got 100 metres’ lead, Koblet chased to get me back, which was an error, as he got to within fifty metres of me and couldn’t go any harder. Then Coppi came past us both like a motorbike. Koblet made a mistake, as all he needed to do during the stage was stay with Coppi. Coppi thanked me afterwards, but Koblet wouldn’t talk to me again.’