Fallen Angel (9 page)

The point of transition is the Turchino Pass, the crossing of the Apennines. Today, this is a wide main road, sweeping up a valley in a succession of gentle hairpins to a short tunnel. The summit is only 500 metres above sea level, no major obstacle for a professional cyclist of the twenty-first century. It is nowhere near the scale of the Alps, but in the early years of Milan–San Remo, before the road acquired a proper tarmac surface, it was a climb to be feared, and it was a key strategic point in the race. On 19 March 1946, when the first post-war edition of the Classic went over the pass, the road was still unmade and there were no lights in the tunnel: electricity had yet to be restored after the conflict.

The tunnel itself had only just been reopened, connecting Piedmont to Liguria again. For
L’Equipe
’s writer Pierre Chany, the symbolism was too good to miss. ‘The Turchino tunnel is small, only 50 metres long, but on 19 March it took on exceptional proportions in the eyes of the world. It was six years in length.’ For Chany, the darkness of the tunnel stood for the darkness that had engulfed Europe between 1939 and 1945. It also represented the suspension of international cycle racing during the war years. Milan–San Remo itself had particular significance: it was the first major international cycle race after the conflict. It was, said an editorial in the organising newspaper
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, evidence that Italy was coming back to life.

Milan–San Remo had particular significance for Fausto Coppi as well. The early part of the race ran right through his homeland, the Piedmont plains below Castellania, where his friends and family would be watching. That morning, his young cousin Piero and one of his uncles had come down from Castellania with two apples in their pockets to hand up to Faustino, as they still called him: apples from the trees in the village, carefully preserved through the winter. As he sped past, Coppi recognised their call, because no one else called him by his diminutive. He grabbed one apple, but dropped the other.

By the time Coppi reached the roads around Novi, he was already in the lead, to everyone’s surprise. The Turchino had yet to be climbed and descended; there were still 200 kilometres to the finish on the Riviera. It was unheard of for a favourite to chance his arm so far from the finish, but Coppi needed to take this race particularly seriously. Much had changed in his life since he had ridden up the hill to Castellania at the end of the long road home from Rome through the shell-holes and minefields: he had a wife and a new home. On 22 November 1945, he and Bruna had married. There was
no money to deck the church with flowers, so Bartali, like the good Christian he was, had overlooked their rivalry and rigged a win for Coppi in a criterium so he could take home a bouquet or two. A cook had come in from Novi to help Mamma Angiolina prepare the chickens; she had too much to do simply making the mountains of
agnolotti
. After their wedding, the couple had moved to Sestri Ponente, just outside Genoa, to a little apartment above a stairwell.

Another wedding had taken place three months earlier, on 26 September 1945, in Rimini, on the other side of Italy, again with the disruption of war as a backdrop. An Italian army doctor, Enrico Locatelli, met and fell rapidly in love with a dark-haired Neapolitan girl of spectacular beauty, aged just twenty. Giulia Occhini had been educated in a convent, and had come north to stay with an aunt during the war; she desperately wanted to escape her relation and was engaged to a local boy who worked in a baker’s in Ancona. Locatelli was seventeen years older but good-looking, nicknamed ‘
il bel Valentino
’; ‘on the beach, all the girls were fighting over him,’ recalled Giulia. Locatelli was not keen to marry, but Giulia was insistent. ‘What if we ran away together?’ he suggested. Two weeks later – during which time she continued to write loving notes to her previous fiancé – they were married; they eventually settled near Varese, north of Milan.

All over Italy, people were beginning new lives. Coppi had changed employers. When he started that Milan–San Remo, on his jersey was the name Bianchi, the bike manufacturer that would become inextricably linked with the
campionissimo
. At Legnano, Pavesi still doubted whether he had the staying power of Bartali in the long term, and was sticking with the older man, so Coppi had accepted a generous offer – a million lire plus performance bonuses – from the car,
motorbike and cycle maker. Bianchi had already approached him before the outbreak of war; they had a distinguished history, and not just in cycling. Tazio Nuvolari and Alberto Ascari, both of whom would become notable Grand Prix drivers, had ridden the company’s motorbikes.

The deal included the car he had dreamt of on his way home from the war; more importantly, he took with him the mechanic from Legnano, Pinella di Grande, the man they called
pinza d’oro
, golden pliers. Coppi’s relationship with Cavanna, part trainer, part confidant, part masseur, now spanned eight years, and he had long known the importance of having the right man to look after his bikes in the same way that Cavanna looked after his body. Given the state of the roads after the Germans and the Allies had done their worst, it was doubly important now. And with Bianchi, there was the chance of a place in the team for Serse, who had taken out an amateur licence early in the war, then had raced with his elder brother on the post-war circuit. Late in 1945, Fausto engineered a victory for Serse in one of the first road races, Milan–Varzi, and that was enough to persuade Bianchi that he was more than their leader’s little brother.

The preparation Fausto had put in under Cavanna’s guidance was enough to instil confidence in anyone. A strict diet had got rid of the stomach ulcer that had affected him after he left prison camp. He had also recovered from an attack of malaria that hit him after transfer to a camp in Blida, Algeria, late in 1944. The disease had lingered. His tent-mate of the time later testified that he had still not recovered when he returned to Italy in February 1945, and he had a relapse late that year.

Since the start of 1946, he had ridden 7,000 kilometres in training, sometimes using a fixed wheel to increase his pedalling speed. There had been three weeks of light work before he had begun to lengthen the training rides, eventually
getting up to 250 kilometres per outing. Finally, in the two weeks before
La Primavera
, there were the dress rehearsals, in which he would ride alone for 150 kilometres, at a brisk pace but without hurting himself. With those kilometres already in his legs, he would meet Cavanna’s amateurs 100 kilometres from home. They were under orders to simulate a race, attacking one by one to make life as hard as possible for him. For the time, this was unprecedentedly systematic, targeted training.

The night before the race, Coppi, Cavanna and the manager of the Bianchi team, Giovanni Tragella, had laid their plans well. They knew that after such a long gap in competition, the serious contenders in the field might well lack confidence, and might be unwilling to chase an early escapee. They also suspected that Bartali was not at his best, due to a dispute over his salary with Legnano. So Coppi was to make an early move, following the track racers who had raced the winter circuit and so had plenty of speed but little stamina; they tended to break away early to pick up intermediate prizes before fading later on.

On the Turchino, the last of the early escapees to remain with Coppi, the Frenchman Lucien Teisseire, dropped his head for a second to change gear. When he lifted his eyes, he had been left behind and Coppi was alone in the lead. His emergence from the tunnel prompted Chany to paint a vignette that perfectly sums up post-war bike racing: clouds of dust that stung the eyes and drifted through clothing like desert sand through canvas; a stream of cars amid the dust;
carabinieri
standing in open-top jeeps frenetically waving batons, green on one side, red on the other. Weaving in and out of the cars like children at a grown-up party were the leather-clad motorcyclists whose goggles made them look like frogs. The organiser, Giuseppe Ambrosini, came by in his car, waving his arms for the road to be cleared; an announcer’s
dusty, grinning face hung out of the back of the vehicle, yelling the words the crowd had come to the mountain pass to hear:
Arriva Coppi!
The words went down to the valley, bouncing off the rocks, leaving the car far behind. ‘
Arriva Coppi, Arriva Coppi
went the noise.’

Finally Coppi burst into the light, and Chany described the man who would dominate cycling for the next seven years: ‘He had slim legs, disproportionately long, a short torso, his head slumped into his shoulders, round eyes and his mouth gulping in air; the parts making a paradoxically harmonious whole. A heron in an Italian jersey, perched on an invisible saddle, with the race scattered behind him. His face, fixed in indifference, betraying boredom rather than effort, more resignation than enthusiasm. He disappeared around a shoulder of the mountain.’

Coppi remained alone in the lead all the way to San Remo, for 147 kilometres of the 290-odd that make up the race. This was the biggest winning margin of his career in a single-day event: a gaping fourteen minutes over the next man, Teisseire. Bartali was twenty-four minutes behind. These were massive time gaps, the more striking because there had been no racing for so long and the performance could not be put in any kind of context. It was a one-off. As publicity for Bianchi, his new boss Aldo Zambrini said, it was worth six months’ bike production in the factory. The victory was a colossal statement of intent from Coppi himself, setting the tone for the coming years. Here was a man renewed, with huge ambitions. The margin of the win and its crushing style were guaranteed to excite the nation.

As Chany saw it, the cry
Arriva Coppi
would become ‘the rallying call and the victory yell for all sporting Italy’. The words were to be the rallying call for a generation of cycling fans, but came to represent much more. The phrase also embodied a new, renascent Italy, in which, briefly, the bicycle
and the men who rode it enjoyed huge significance. There was inspiration to be drawn from butchers’ boys, masons’ sons, farmers’ lads earning a living through graft and sweat, but there was more. The Vespa and the Fiat 500 were not yet off the drawing board; Italy was reliant on its bikes. There were three million of them in use, compared to just under 150,000 cars. Post-war, said one writer, the bike was ‘sold as a necessity of the first order, on the same level as bread, oil, sugar, coffee, chocolate, petrol, clothes and shoes’.

The vital importance of the bike is shown in the classic film
Ladri di Biciclette
(
Bicycle Thieves
), which depicts an impoverished worker’s desperate search after the theft of the bike he so desperately needs to earn his crust. Eventually he resorts to theft as well; he is caught and nearly lynched. It is not merely a fanciful plot: an actual lynching of a bike thief in 1948 near Milan is recorded. The symbolism of a cyclist escaping the pack and riding alone to victory was the perfect metaphor for a country pulling itself up by its bootstraps. An entire country was getting on its collective bike.

* * *

A single image encapsulates the post-war Italy through which Coppi rode to victory on that March day. The photograph shows a vast sea of empty tin cans and three women scavenging among them for something to eat. The caption does not say where it was: it could have been anywhere. The Italian economy was devastated, its output a third of what it had been before the war. Wages could not keep pace with inflation that had pushed prices to fifty times the pre-war average, meaning people simply could not afford most goods. Food rationing had pushed consumption back to nineteenth-century levels, the black market was rampant, and food shortages were so acute that in Naples, post-liberation, women and girls would sell
themselves for a packet of biscuits. Police would raid restaurants and inspect the diners’ plates to see if the proprietor was adding anything beyond the ration. The country’s infra-structure was in ruins, with half the country’s road network unusable and people living in tents and railway carriages.

Coppi’s fellow cyclists had all played their part in the war. Coppi’s future
gregario
Ettore Milano, who did not start racing until after the war, was a youthful partisan fighting in the Apennines. He still has the marks to prove it, including shrapnel scars on his fingers and his back, and he managed a cycling career in spite of having one leg shorter than the other after injuring his back. One of Coppi’s most faithful team-mates, Sandrino Carrea, spent part of the war in captivity in Buchenwald concentration camp and survived two death marches. Another of that era, Alfredo Martini, used his bike to ferry rucksacks full of Molotov cocktails to the partisans. On the potholed, gravelly roads, that was dicing with death.

Coppi’s former team leader, Bartali, never fought, but it later emerged that he had been part of a network based in Pisa, founded by a Jewish accountant, Giorgio Nissim, which assisted refugees. The champion cyclist was one of their ‘postmen’; he could get through the checkpoints on the pretext that he was training over the 370-kilometre round trip to Pisa from his home in Florence. Hidden on his bike as he went between the convents used as hiding places were the documents used to make false identity papers. It is estimated that eight hundred lives were saved by the network. More controversially, the third great Italian cyclist of the time, Fiorenzo Magni, was tried after the war on a charge of collaboration, but was cleared.

Two wars had been fought on Italian soil simultaneously between 1943 and 1945. The Allies had made their painfully slow and hotly contested advance northwards through the succession of German defence lines, a highly visible conflict
that had seen the levelling of towns such as Cassino and Cisterna in the Anzio landing zone, saturation bombing of the front lines, and the destruction of infrastructure such as rail-ways, bridges and roads as the Germans retreated gradually up the peninsula. The other war was the hidden but dirty civil war, Italian against Italian. Together with German troops, the fascist militia and the thousands of Italians who joined Hitler’s SS tried to root out the partisans, many of whom were former socialist opponents of Mussolini’s regime. In this conflict there was no distinction drawn between combatants and civilians, with mass executions of villagers who harboured and aided partisans, house burnings and torture as the militia and the Germans hunted down the fighters.