Authors: William Fotheringham
The couple were not helped by a nasty moment on the second day, when the prosecution revealed that Coppi and Giulia had shared a hotel room (room 12, the hotel is not named) in Milan over the weekend between hearings and before Milan–Turin. ‘They might at least have waited,’ said the prosecuting magistrate, acidly. Coppi’s lawyer termed it ‘persecution’, which seems reasonable enough. On the grounds that the couple had flouted the law even while their trial was in progress, the prosecutor called for three months in prison for Giulia, two for Coppi. This reflected a general feeling – widely held to this day – that guilt lay more with the White Lady than with Coppi, as the cyclist had ‘been chosen, led on by the White Lady, who was much more cunning and astute’. ‘There was no serious reason for either Coppi or Occhini to leave their homes. The decision of both parties was illicit and unjust.’ The outcome was a compromise: sentences upheld but prison suspended. Coppi did not comment, but later made it known that the only consolation he could find was in the fact that no one ever saw him and Giulia together in the dock.
Coppi was not a man who was given to expressing his feelings in public. That lends an extra strength to the diatribe about the hypocrisy of Italy and the Italians that he produced for Rino Negri in his book
Parla Coppi
. ‘In Italy, appearances are what count. In Italy, you have to know how to lie. In Italy, you have to be able to keep your mouth shut even if you don’t like something. In Italy, there is envy of anyone who has come from nothing to make something of himself even if he has made huge sacrifices. In Italy they don’t hesitate to throw you in the mud if you make a mistake that any man could make. When I needed understanding, I found doors closed in my face.’
‘For guys like you and me, life means riding a bike’ – Gino Bartali to Fausto Coppi, 1950
In early April, Coppi responded to the trial verdict with one of his last great solo victories, in the Giro della Campania, with Magni more than five minutes behind. He was now allowed to travel abroad again, which meant he could ride Paris–Roubaix, where he managed second place to Bobet. Giulia’s passport was returned to her on 22 March; her destination was another continent. She flew to Argentina with the wife of Pinella di Grande, Coppi’s faithful mechanic at Bianchi, to give moral support as she prepared for the birth of her child. In Argentina at least, the baby could be registered as the legal son of unmarried parents. That meant that he would be viewed as her and Fausto’s child; however, it did not mean that Dr Locatelli would necessarily renounce his claim to paternity, as the child’s conception clearly pre-dated the legal separation. In theory Locatelli could be the father.
Giulia booked her return journey on the steamer
Giulio Cesare,
one of the finest transatlantic liners of the era, and had the birth induced so that she could board on time. Faustino was born on 13 May 1955, while Coppi was riding the Giro d’Italia, and Giulia sent Coppi a telegram with the words, ‘Daddy, I’m waiting for my first pink jersey. Fausto.’ A few days later a photograph came through the post: Coppi showed it first to Gino Bartali, recently retired and following the Giro as a summariser for Italian television. For a few kilometres,
as the peloton rode along, Coppi waved the picture at all and sundry, saying, ‘Look, it’s Faustino, the son of Fausto.’ This personal triumph probably made up for the fact that, when the race visited Rome, Pius XII made an unprecedented move. As if to remind the world that Coppi was
persona non grata
, the Pontiff refused to bless the peloton as before, because it included a ‘public sinner’.
Even though he was in his thirty-sixth year Coppi could still have won that Giro. Instead, the race went to Fiorenzo Magni, who made an epic attack on the penultimate day between Trento and San Pellegrino. The young climber Gastone Nencini had not managed to take an insurmountable lead in the Dolomites, although he emerged in the pink jersey. Early in the San Pellegrino stage, however, the race went along a stretch of
strada bianca
, one of the particularly rough, unsurfaced roads frequently encountered by cyclists. The weather was poor and the result was a spate of punctures: ninety-six in total in the four miles. Magni told me that he knew about the
strada bianca
, because such dangers were marked in the race guide. He had put on heavier tyres, as had Coppi. When Nencini, inevitably, punctured, the two older men surged ahead, and a dramatic four-hour pursuit ensued, at the end of which Coppi won the stage and Magni took the Giro, a mere thirteen seconds ahead of his old rival.
The return of Faustino and his mother from Argentina was dramatic, too, in a different way. The
Giulio Cesare
docked in Cannes, where the White Lady cut a glamorous figure as she came down the gangway in a blue outfit, wearing sunglasses; the infant was hidden in a large holdall held by a member of the crew. The crowd of press photographers was so large that it took a few well-aimed punches from Pinella di Grande before Giulia and Faustino were able to get to the Citroën Traction Avant Fausto had been lent by a friend, ‘with all the precision and lightning speed of a gangster getaway’,
as one paper put it. The getaway included driving the wrong way up a one-way street (thanks, no doubt, to the gendarme in the front seat), with carloads of journalists and photographers in pursuit. If Giulia had aspired to join the ranks of the Lorens and Lollobrigidas in the news magazines, that ambition had been achieved.
Fausto had got what he wanted: a son. To ensure their privacy, he rented an entire hotel for Giulia and Faustino on their first night back in Europe. As Giulia told it later, he kissed her, then took his son in his arms, carried him to his room, put him on a rug and knelt down to look at him. He stayed there for a long time. A large new car – a Lancia Aurelia – was waiting for her on her return, and a ring worth, she said, 42 million lire. He was not present when she received the gifts – ‘as usual so that I wouldn’t thank him’. But inevitably Coppi headed for Rome almost immediately to race on the track.
As with his previous family, his life consisted of ‘racing, winning and earning money’: lots of it, in a highly lucrative series of exhibition events around France that summer. Coppi estimated that, compared with his heyday, his strength had diminished by a third, but he still managed one final challenge: winning the Italian national championship, run on points over a series of five one-day races throughout 1955. He clinched the title with victories in the Giro dell’Apennino, three days after his thirty-sixth birthday, and the Tre Valli Varesine (run, uniquely, as a time trial). That was the event where, eight years and a few months earlier, he had first set eyes on his new love. The season was capped with a third successive win in the Baracchi Trophy with Filippi.
In spite of his success on the road, however, it was not a peaceful existence. There were threatening phone calls and anonymous letters attacking Fausto and Giulia and calling Faustino ‘
bastardo
’. Coppi was still receiving abuse from the
roadsides, shouts of ‘Go back to Bruna’, and ‘Down with the White Lady’. He told
Tempo
magazine at the end of that year: ‘I have wanted at times, so much, to put my brakes on and tell the people who are whistling or shouting insults why I’m not at the front. But they wouldn’t understand.’ The pressure told on them both: one evening Giulia told Fausto she was leaving, he gave her ‘a violent slap’, she ran away and, together with Ettore Milano, he had to restrain her.
* * *
The Giro di Lombardia is aptly nicknamed ‘the race of the falling leaves’. It threads its way around Lake Como and through the mists of the north Italian flatlands as the dead leaves gently drop off the trees on the lakeside hills. While Milan–San Remo exudes the burgeoning optimism of spring, the Giro di Lombardia is the harbinger of winter. It is the classic most indelibly associated with the
campionissimo
: Fausto Coppi won the race five times, and suffered one famous defeat, in the 1956 edition.
Half a century on, Fiorenzo Magni still remembers that particular race with some embarrassment. ‘I don’t know if what I did was decisive,’ he told me, but the consensus is that Magni played the key role in chasing Coppi down when his victory looked to be assured. The fading champion had escaped, as he so often had in the past, on the climb that led to the chapel of the Madonna del Ghisallo, high above the lake. On the run-in to the finish in Milan he and a young Italian named Diego Ronchini were riding ahead of a chasing group which included Magni and the other big names. The pair had a lead that looked healthy enough to keep them in front until they reached the Vigorelli velodrome.
That is, until the intervention of the White Lady. Although Magni had remained on good terms with Coppi, he and his
wife had always been friendly with Coppi’s wife Bruna; to this day, although he can understand Coppi’s decision to leave her, he cannot condone it. As the car carrying Giulia Occhini over-took the line of cyclists she saw Magni in the chasing group and could not resist the temptation to point out that her man had put one over the Giro winner. Today, Magni is diplomacy itself. ‘A few words out of turn,’ he says, when asked what Giulia yelled at him out of the car window: ‘Eh, Fiorenzo, my Fausto has got you!’ He does not mention the gesture she made, but Sandrino Carrea recalls the episode: ‘When she came near Magni she went like this’ – and at this point he wallops his bicep with his hand as he mimics her obscene gesture; one raised fist, the other hand clenching the muscle – ‘and Magni chased fit to kill himself.’ The ‘Lion of Flanders’ is reported to have said that he would have chased Coppi down after that even if he had had to bust a gut all the way to Novi Ligure. Later he would say that the blow to his pride was a bigger spur than amphetamine: ‘I sunk my teeth into the handlebars to the point where I lost any awareness of being alive.’
The result was inevitable, as the other riders in the group joined Magni in the chase: Coppi and Ronchini were swept up as the race entered Milan. The old champion, now thirty-seven, had one final ace up his sleeve: he knew the Vigorelli velodrome like the back of his hand, and as he sped down from the final banking the finish sprint looked to be his. That is, until a fast-moving, blond Frenchman named André Darrigade inched past in the final twenty metres to snatch the win by a tyre’s width. Coppi was last seen weeping in a corner of the track, and left by a side door as the crowd chanted his name. What they had just seen amounted to his swansong.
He had trained like a man possessed for that race, his last chance to salvage something tangible from a disastrous season. It had begun with an attack of typhus fever, which had cost
him his place with his former employers, Bianchi. The illness had meant he could not race early in the year, leaving him in breach of contract, and Bianchi were not inclined to make allowances for the man who had caused a national scandal the year before. While he was ill, he had been sacked. He had bounced back by finding a new sponsor, the Carpano aperitif company, and setting up his own team, riding Fausto Coppi bikes. But at the Giro he had crashed, dislocating his back: two more months off the bike followed. He was still good enough to be selected for the Italian team at the world championship, taking fifteenth, and followed that with victory in the GP Campari time trial at Lugano. But this was small beer compared to that lost win in Lombardy, where, to add salt to the wound, the winner, Darrigade, was a rider he had hired himself to race for Bianchi, to support him in Italian events. Ronchini, his companion in the escape, was a Bianchi rider, a former team-mate. It was Coppi’s old mechanic, Pinella di Grande, who had no choice but to tell Ronchini to stop collaborating in the break.
* * *
The final three seasons of Coppi’s life, 1957–9, saw the inevitable decline. He remained a living legend, but it was a half-life: he won minor appearance races and his physical strength diminished with each year. The 1957 season saw his last disastrous crash, in Sardinia in early March. That left him with a broken femur, and was followed by five months off the bike before his last win in the Baracchi Trophy, when he went through all the agonies of hell to keep up with his young partner, Ercole Baldini. The slow fade-out was marked by a sprinkling of wins in such uninspiring venues as Calvisano on the Lombardy plains, Namur in Wallonia, and a six-day track race in Buenos Aires.
He still rode huge numbers of appearance events. His teammate Michele Gismondi recalls riding three track meetings a day with Coppi when logistics permitted. Gismondi would deal with the bikes, Coppi with the cash. In between, there were ignominious outings in major events. At the 1958 Giro Coppi finished only thirty-second and was heard to ask the field to slow down on a relatively innocuous climb. He fought desperately merely to finish forty-fourth in the 1959 Paris–Roubaix, and made a disastrous start in the 1959 Vuelta a España, where he lasted only fifteen stages, finishing well behind the stage winner each time the going got tough. Not wanting to show him up by actually being seen to push him, the
gregari
would pretend to lean on his back.
The demands were high and he had his ways of dealing with them, as his friend Nino Defilippis told me in the most chilling of terms. ‘We were at the Vél d’Hiv in Paris with Darrigade, Bobet, Anquetil, for a ten-day track meeting. He said, “Nino, will you inject me?” I said, “No problem” because I knew how to do injections, he didn’t. He gave me the little flask, which probably had two pills of stenamina or simpamine in it. I said, “Fausto, why are you doing something like this for a track meeting?” He said, “Most of the people have come here to see me. I can’t allow myself to look bad.” My answer was, “Well, if I’m going to have to keep up with you, I’d better have some, too.”’ Coppi only had one needle, so they shared it, two-thirds of the flask for the young pretender and a third for the man who had been the greatest cyclist in the world, now reduced to charging up to save face.
The fading champion retained his glamour among the syringes and sacks of lire. The British professional cyclist Tony Hewson described meeting Coppi at a criterium in France in the late 1950s. ‘An unassuming black car edged its way into the square and two men got out … Suddenly there was a groundswell of sound like a rustling prayer –
"Il campionissimo"
and people hurried from everywhere. I didn’t know what to expect: something fabulous, justifying his fame: a luxury sports car, police escort, army of minders, fanfare, choir of angels! There was nothing, just these two men and a modest black car with the crowd swarming around them. Yet so powerful was the Coppi mystique that this humble presentation seemed merely to enhance his glamour.’