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  Coppi did not stay long at Ettore’s. He moved to another butcher’s shop, run by Domenico Merlano at Via Paolo 17 – a single room opening onto the street under a stone lintel in the Roman style, with vast hams and salamis swinging from the door frames and two colossal pigs’ heads hanging from the wall.

  Initially, Faustino stayed the entire week in Novi, but soon he grew homesick and asked his boss to allow him to sleep in Castellania and ride daily to and from his work. And here, it seems, the bike suddenly gained in importance, with a round trip of forty kilometres each day to build his young muscles and the long climb back up to the village from the pianura to develop the heart and lungs that would power him in the future. Angiolina would wake him at six, but Coppi liked to stay in bed as late as he could in the mornings. ‘To avoid the clips round the ear that would be waiting for me, there was only one solution: make up on the road the time I had wasted in bed. And so I ended up sprinting the twenty kilometres to the butcher’s. No one ever timed me, but none of the cyclists I met along the way could hold onto me.’

  The downhill run to Novi would turn into a time trial, with a slap from his boss if he failed to make the cut. He would ‘go lorry hunting’, looking for a vehicle that was moving slowly enough for him to tuck into the slipstream. Sometimes he met local amateurs, and the story goes that, in the style of the best film scripts, one morning he met a string of them, apologised for not riding with them because he was late for work and whizzed away on his heavy bike, to their utter consternation.

  Cash, meanwhile, remained scarce. The Castellania priest would walk with Faustino to catch the bus at a stop outside the village to save half a lira. So it must have been a huge gamble when one day, probably in 1933 when he was thirteen or fourteen, Faustino and Livio took their savings out of the bank in order to buy new bikes. The bank accounts had been opened for the brothers by an uncle, Cico, with ten lire apiece; il comandante Giuseppe Fausto, the sea captain, had gradually filled them up so they had 400 lire each. Livio bought a Maino, Faustino a Girardengo, and they rode them together, always over the climb at Carezzano, unsurfaced like most of the roads, up to one in six at its steepest. Here they would meet local amateurs and professionals; Faustino could leave them all behind. Among his victims was a cyclist named ‘Piass’, who had raced the Giro, and who refused to speak to the youngster after being left behind.

  However, the butcher was less than entirely happy with the scruffy boy who turned up each morning on his bike: Faustino took far too long to do his rounds of the neighbouring villages. Unknown to Merlano, every time he rode out into the countryside he chose a route that took in a village called Gavi, an extra ten or fifteen kilometres, including a long climb. To avoid Merlano’s clips round the ear, he had no choice but to ride the circuit faster and faster. When the butcher did find out, he had trouble believing quite how quickly his delivery boy could ride his bike.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  THE BLIND MAN AND THE BUTCHER’S BOY

  The Museo dei Campionissimi in Novi Ligure is a large, yellow building just outside the town centre, surrounded by cycling sculptures – a final sprint, a cyclist on a mountain – while inside is a celebration of the town’s two cycling greats: paintings, photographs, cuttings from magazines, cartoons, all devoted to Coppi and his predecessor Costante Girardengo, nine times Italian champion and six times winner of the Milan–San Remo Classic after the First World War. Here, cycling roots still run deep. Leave the station and the first thing you see is a statue of Coppi in a small park with tired-looking goldfish in a pool. Coppi spent much of his life in Novi, and his daughter Marina still lives in the town.

  Visit Novi and you can understand why Coppi became a cyclist: the town lived and breathed the sport. This was a centre of the Italian cycle industry, home of the Santamaria and Fiorelli manufacturers; when Coppi came to work here, Girardengo was the town’s most famous inhabitant. Here, in the early 1930s, the campionissimo and the men who raced with him and lived off him were hard to avoid. The baker opposite Merlano’s boasted that he had delivered his brioche to the champion. Gira’ also bought meat from Merlano: on one occasion, Coppi had to take him some salami but the great man showed little interest in the bony youth on the butcher’s bike.

  Domenico Merlano had a number of regular clients who would sit in the shop and put the world to rights over slices of sausage and a glass or two of wine. One of these regulars, a recently blind man named Biagio Cavanna, spent more time there than the others as he came to terms with his disability. With his Ray-Bans and his stick, Cavanna was a distinctive figure in the little town: thickset, heavy jowled, and now weighing 120 kilos due to the loss of physical activity with the onset of blindness. His bad temper was well known. The blind man had worked as a masseur and team manager; he had a dogmatic way about him as they discussed the merits of this cyclist and that footballer.

  There are at least four versions of and several different dates for the first meeting between Cavanna and Faustino Coppi; it is variously said to have been through the butcher or through various cyclists trained by Cavanna who met Coppi on the road and reported back to their master. The masseur and the youth met some time between the end of 1937 and the summer of 1938 and that is all that matters. It was a key moment in Coppi’s story, probably the single most important event.

  Cavanna was Fausto’s cycling father and the most important influence on his cycling career. Cavanna drove the budding champion forwards in his formative years and was behind him in his greatest ones, providing far more than massages. He taught him how to train, how to ride his bike, how to behave as a professional sportsman should. Eventually, he provided him with team-mates, sympathy and magic mixtures to make him go faster.

  Before his blindness struck, Biagio Cavanna had noticed Fausto Coppi as a fifteen-year-old working in Merlano’s shop, a ‘reed-thin lad with joints of meat on his handlebars’. The man who made the champion would never know what his protégé looked like at his peak, would never see the colour of the yellow, pink and rainbow-striped jerseys he won. He would only know Coppi’s voice, and his body: the tone of each muscle, the temperature and texture of his skin. The sound of the young cyclist’s voice was still in the ears of the old man twenty-two years later after Coppi’s death. ‘A bit timid and awkward, the voice of a young boy from the country.’

  Cavanna had started out as a cycle racer of some talent, then turned boxer, where he had a reputation as a clever fighter who could not take punches and was willing to play dead to escape a nasty bout. After his sporting career was over, he had settled for a backroom role. He had looked after Girardengo and had been the confidant of the legendary Learco Guerra, the ‘human locomotive’, world road champion and winner of the Giro d’Italia with ten stages along the way. He had travelled Europe to the indoor cycling tracks of Belgium and Germany and had followed the Giro and Tour de France. This was exotic enough, but there was talk of murkier links. Cavanna had been a close friend of a legendary bandit, Sante Pollastro, who had gone on a Bonnie and Clyde style spree of robbery and killing across Lombardy. There was a story that he and Pollastro communicated by whistles; on one occasion, it was said, Pollastro had whistled while Cavanna was at a Six-Day race in Paris and he had upped and left the track centre. It may or may not have been true but it reflected Cavanna’s larger than life aura.

  It was some time in 1936 when Cavanna first began wearing the sunglasses which would be his trademark. His blindness had been a gradual process over three years, the sight going first in the right eye, then in the left. The precise reason was never clear, but the gossips, inevitably, said it might be syphilis. Cavanna himself claimed it was as a result of getting hot smuts from a steam engine in his eyes when he was on a trip to Brussels. Perhaps understandably for a man who had been deprived of sight, Cavanna liked to be in control of the world around him and the people in it. His wife would read him the papers. He controlled the family’s cash by touch. Through his work he came to manage entire career
s and dictate the pace of men’s lives.

  Traditionally, Cavanna is described as a soigneur – French cycling jargon for a team helper, who gives massages, providing race food and lends a sympathetic ear as he rubs his charges’ legs. The term is no longer officially used, because since the dawn of cycle racing, the soigneur has also been the provider of secret remedies that range from old wives’ tales about training and diet to the latest wonder drugs. But the blind man was more than a leg rubber and witchdoctor.

  One old cyclist of the era, Alfredo Martini, calls him un maestro, which variously translates as a teacher, a master, an expert in his field. He was talent scout, tactician, trainer, team manager. Behind his back Cavanna was called ‘l’umon’ – dialect for l’omone, big man. He had been christened Giuseppe, but this was long forgotten. He was always Biagio, Biasu in the local dialect, Signor Biagio to his pupils. There were other nicknames: the Miracle Maker, the Muscle Wizard. He was an intimidating figure to his protégés, by and large ill-educated young labourers and peasants, who had never been far from their home villages. As one of them said: ‘I wasn’t afraid of God or Fausto [Coppi], but I was scared of Cavanna.’

  Post-war, he ran a legendary cycling ‘college’ at 4 Via Castello, where the courtyard is still recognisable from old photographs, although the frescoes have long since faded and fallen. To the left through the arch was the kitchen, in which il maestro would hold court. The yard, however, was the hub, with its workbench and tools, dismantled bikes, empty petrol cans, sheets, and jerseys and shorts hanging on the washing lines. The dining table would be placed outside the kitchen window, or under the arch when it rained in winter; wheels were hung on hooks on the walls. Rooms were rented above the arch where the riders slept, and there were other rooms about the town, where the riders ‘camped out like gypsies’. Cavanna would never use a massage table; the riders lay on the bed in the room and he went to work. There was a small toilet in one corner of the yard, a thirty-foot-deep well in the opposite one, with a winch formed from a tree trunk for bringing up the water.

  * * *

  To this day, blind masseurs carry particular status within cycling. As recently as the 1990s, the ONCE professional squad set great store by one Angel Rubio, but sixty years ago, among sportsmen who lacked education and experience of the wider world, a soigneur’s market value was based only partly on what he actually knew. Just as important was the mystique these figures carried with them, which added a whole psychological side to their treatment and their remedies. Given the intensity of superstitious belief in rural Europe at the time, they had a ready market. Whatever the degree of his expertise, Cavanna inspired both fear and faith among those he treated.

  Cavanna’s blindness added to the aura created by his connections and his personality. All those treated by him would maintain that his massages were better than others’, because he had il tatto, the healing touch, in both hands. The soigneur was happy to build on the mystique by claiming he had super-natural qualities: ‘My hands can see better than any human eye and my ears can hear sounds inaudible to the normal person. My hands and my ears never lie.’

  Asked further about the blind man’s sense of touch, Alfredo Martini simply grabbed the scruff of my neck. ‘There were points in the physique which let him understand if you were strong, if you were weak,’ he said, and this was one of them. ‘A thin neck is worth nothing’, the blind man would say. Cavanna also claimed that he could assess the strength of a rider’s heart by taking his pulse, then he would move up the arm to check the musculature, to see if the cyclist was willing to do hard physical work. When he got to the neck, the muscles there would tell him if the rider had tried hard in training and could sustain the workload. The muscles of the lower back and buttocks would show the cyclist’s strength and ability to change pace – the ‘cartridge belt’, Cavanna called it.

  His charges also remember the things he said, in the didactic, semi-mystical phrases typical of such eminences grises. One motto was ‘niente fumo, niente donne, niente vino’: no smoking, no women, no wine. Another was ‘Enjoyment of any kind is a cyclist’s worst enemy.’ On sexual activity he subscribed to the view of some modern day team managers, that it is not the act but the hunt that is harmful to the athlete, hence the maxim ‘Don’t fool about with girls, they’ll leave you in bits. It’s better to go to a brothel.’ Most important of all was the call for absolute obedience: ‘If you want to be a cyclist, don’t ever ask questions. Do what I say and remember that others have done the same before you.’

  Cavanna ‘could go inside the mind of the athlete, indicate to each guy how to prepare,’ Martini told me. There was a practical side to his work. He taught his pupils skills such as how to remove gravel from their tyres with the palm of the hand, and invented a primitive kind of tyre saver that skimmed flints off the tyres before they could be driven through the cover, a vital aid on the unmade roads of the time. As well as training, the pupils were taught ‘behaviour with women, with journalists, at table, how to look after the bike’. He had made Girardengo shift baskets of gravel in a riverbed over one winter in order to strengthen his back. He had an obsession with position on the bike and with training in different, usually difficult conditions. His method of assessing whether a cyclist was ready to turn professional was simple. There were two sweet factories nearby; one in Novi, the other in a village called Serravalle, seven kilometres away, and if a rider could travel from one to the other in seven minutes, averaging 60kph over the distance, he was good enough.

  * * *

  Faustino Coppi may have been whizzing ever faster around the Piedmont hills on his butcher’s bike, but as a racing cyclist he was the rawest of recruits. He had begun racing unofficial local events for Spinetta Marengo, the club nearest to Castellania. A photograph of this time shows him on a machine that clearly does not fit, with balloon tyres and floppy brake cables. Coppi’s shorts are baggy around his stick-thin legs but his hair already has the neat side parting that would be his trademark. His uncle remembered one event in particular, in 1936, held at a nearby hamlet, Buffalora, to celebrate the return of troops from one of Mussolini’s African wars. The sixteen-year-old Coppi rode up to the startline from Novi Ligure, won on his own by five minutes and took home fifty lire and a salami. Other records show him riding an event on 1 July 1937, over a course that started and finished in Buffalora, in which he punctured and failed to finish.

  Cavanna initially had his doubts about Coppi but it was nothing to do with his cycling ability. One of his criteria for accepting ‘students’ was that they should be neither well off nor well educated. In his view, only the poverty-stricken had the hunger to make a champion. He liked carters, masons, builders, peasants. He hesitated to take Coppi because he had a job and might be soft, but he changed his mind when he heard that Coppi had worked in the fields at Castellania. Coppi, on the other hand, knew all about Cavanna when the blind man came into the butcher’s shop and asked to meet il Faustino.

  By the late 1940s the diminutive would be gone and Fausto Coppi would be legendary for his perfect pedalling style on the bike and his sartorial elegance off it. A 1938 description by fellow cyclist Luigi Malabrocca underlines the Cinderella-like transformation effected with the support of the blind man. In those days, he said, Coppi was ‘in a right state, only fit for the dustbin. Shoulders hunched as if he was choking, sickly, pallid, twisted to one side, nervous, with feverish eyes, the eyes of a man possessed, and up front a big pointed nose. A shabby jersey and flapping breeches, fixed to his gaiters with clothes pegs. A military haversack around his neck and an old gate of a bike.’

  According to Cavanna’s later accounts, Faustino pedalled with his head in the clouds and his toes pointing at the ground. In spite of the balloon tyres on his heavy bike, he punctured time after time, and Cavanna realised it was because he was not looking where he was going. That habit had to be brow-beaten out of him. It took time, and so did persuading him to give up the wine he had always drunk, as peasants always
did. Instead, he was put on a diet of minestrone made with greens, which he disliked. Faustino was made to sleep as if he was on his bike, lying on his right side with his knee brought up to his body.

  Cavanna’s school had yet to grow to the scale it reached when Coppi’s career, and the blind man’s reputation, were collectively at their zenith, but at the time he had three allievi, pupils. Coppi was put to train with the best, Borlando. It was not an easy life. ‘The principle was: ride your bike. On your bike every day. Even rest days,’ recalled Michele Gismondi, who went through the ‘nursery’ when Coppi was in his prime. Gismondi would have preferred any other life, ‘alive or dead’, it was so hard.

  First thing in the morning, Cavanna would bang on the bedroom door with his stick, thwacking the planks as if he wanted to break it down. Some former pupils have it as early as 4 a.m., others 7 a.m.; presumably it depended on the time of year. Cavanna’s contacts in Novi would have let him know if any of his charges had been seen in a bar, or in female company. They would receive their instructions – ‘andate di qui, di là, di sù, di giù’, here, there, up, down, as one protégé told me, quoting Figaro – and they would be waved off as if it were a race. All Cavanna lacked was a finish flag, said another. Each training circuit had its set time which the riders had to better. One typical circuit was 190 kilometres, westwards over the Apennines to the Mediterranean and back again, partly on unmade roads, to be done in six hours, the riders propelled by bottles of water, caffeine and the stimulant simpamine, a mild form of amphetamine that students took to get them through their exams. ‘It won’t make you campioni, but it will help you concentrate,’ their master would say.