Fallen Angel Read online

  Whatever the extent of Bartali’s assistance, it was a remarkable achievement in a race of such complexity and distance. Usually, stage races favour the older rider: winning such an event at twenty is truly rare. Suddenly Coppi was thrust into the limelight, as he recognised in his memoirs Le Drame de Ma Vie, published in 1950. ‘It’s a curious thing, becoming a star. In one day, a hundred new friends turn up whom you didn’t know the day before; the cinema, press and radio take you over. Your legend is born in such a different form compared to the reality that it astounds you. Another Fausto Coppi came into the world, who bore no resemblance to the Fausto Coppi I felt I had quite a few good reasons to know.’

  It was also the first act in what would become Italy’s greatest sporting rivalry. Bartali clearly resented playing second fiddle to his young team-mate. ‘You can rest but don’t have too many illusions: give it a year and I’ll put things back how they should be,’ he told Coppi. Instead, they had to wait six years for the Giro to be run again.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  ‘A VERY REGRETTABLE PHENOMENON’

  Two days after shocking Italy with his Giro d’Italia win, Coppi was called up. The transformation from obscurity to overnight celebrity to infantryman No. 7375 in a couple of weeks must have been bewildering, but this was in keeping with the times. Italy had declared war on France and Britain the previous day, on 10 June 1940. Mussolini was about to perform his ‘stab in the back’, the attempt to conquer France through the Riviera. Invasions of Greece and North Africa were shortly to follow.

  Incongruous as it is to think of sport continuing in a relatively normal way at such a time, the formative years of Coppi’s career had coincided with Europe’s descent into war. In Italy, the fascist regime had always taken a close interest in cycling. ‘A sport of poets’, Mussolini called it. Stages of the Giro were run down newly opened autostradas, and ministers put pressure on Gino Bartali to race, and win, the Tour de France, in order to enhance Italy’s prestige on the international stage. The coming conflict had had little impact on the sheltered world of two wheels, in Italy at least. In summer 1939, the world track championship had been cancelled after the French, Belgian and Dutch Federations pulled their riders out. In autumn that year, the Giro di Lombardia had gone ahead with only one car in the caravan due to fuel shortages.

  But as Coppi was learning the art of cycling with Cavanna in 1938, Italy was coming to terms with Mussolini’s anti-semitic laws, which placed Jews on the same footing as in Nazi Germany. The newspapers that described his first victories in the late summer of 1939 had Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Britain’s entry into the war on their front pages. In May and June 1940, even as Coppi and Bartali scrapped in the Dolomites, Hitler’s armies were marching on Paris. Italy had its mind elsewhere in those weeks: when would Mussolini take his country to war?

  Italy entered the conflict on 10 June, the day after Coppi had returned to Castellania in triumph and given his young cousin Piero a new bike. La Gazzetta dello Sport had summed up his win in martial terms: ‘Fausto is the conscript who has broken with tradition and won the Giro on his debut … this Giro was won by a little soldier with permission to take his leave.’ This was actually more than a standard metaphor for a team worker who had won with the approval of his leader; Coppi’s military service had been postponed by a month to enable him to ride that Giro. Soon, however, he was a conscript for real.

  Coppi said later that the notion of having to kill another man revolted him, but he did not see action for two and a half years. Initially he was posted to Limone Piemonte, near the Alpine front; when the brief French ‘campaign’ was over, he was sent to Tortona, just up the road from Novi Ligure. His commanding officers were sympathetic, so his life barely altered, even though he was now in barracks: he kept his bike in a workshop behind the barracks, continued training and racing and went to Cavanna’s almost daily for massage. By his own admission, he was not a good soldier: something was always missing when his kit was inspected, and ‘four or five times a day’, he said, he had trouble with his puttees.

  There was another significant change, but it occurred more gradually. In late August 1940, a shy, brown-haired girl named Bruna Ciampolini came to ask the star for his autograph at a race. He promised her a signed postcard, but never delivered; eventually she wrote to him at Castellania, addressing her postcard simply to Corridore Ciclista Fausto Coppi, politely asking if he could provide the card. Bruna was a couple of years younger than Fausto and came from a suburb of Genoa called Sestri Ponente, where her parents had a grocer’s shop. For the duration of the war, to avoid the bomber raids that were expected over Genoa, she had been sent to stay with her aunt at Villalvernia, a village between Castellania and Novi.

  They were both shy individuals, and the relationship developed slowly. This was a small world, though, and there were connections. Bruna and Coppi would happen to meet as they both rode their bikes down the road between Novi and Tortona; they went to the same bike shop, Rossi’s, in Tortona. One of Bruna’s friends was related to a team-mate of Coppi’s. They were photographed in a courtyard, among apple blossom and budding vines, the kind of image that must have been reproduced in hundreds of thousands of photograph albums across the world in those years. The young soldier is in his fatigues, leaning casually next to his girl; Bruna wears a striped skirt and plain jumper. By the time he left for the front in March 1943, they were engaged to be married, according to one version because it was the only way they could get permission from her old-fashioned father to go to the cinema together.

  Life in Italy remained relatively normal in those early years of conflict. There was limited rationing – and, being Italy, ways were found to get round it – cinemas and theatres continued to open, and the calcio (football) championship continued. As in much of Europe, cycle racing never quite came to a complete halt. The Giro d’Italia stopped with the outbreak of war, although in 1942 and 1943 the authorities arranged for a circuit of eight one-day events that carried the name. Criteriums – circuit races on a short course run for a paying public – continued, but professionals were made to compete for free as their contribution to the war effort. Following the example set by Nazi Germany, the Italian Federation took upon itself to scrutinise those amateurs who applied for professional licences, to filter out ‘undesirable’ cyclists.

  Nicknamed the ‘rocket express’ by his fellow conscripts, Coppi was allowed to train three days a week as long as he was back in barracks for curfew, and he was allowed to race, though only to boost the prestige of his regiment rather than to fill his own pocket. Wrapped up as he was in his own sporting world, he cannot have been the only Italian to have felt, as he put it, that the conflict did not really concern him at this time. The war, he said, was ‘a very regrettable phenomenon, but one which happily had only a moderate effect on my personal life and my cycling career. I paid a sort of tax, by being in barracks four days a week, and that was all I had to do.’

  The rivalry with Bartali became intense, even though the two cyclists were still competing together in the colours of Legnano, and Bartali was nominally his leader. In the autumn following his Giro d’Italia win Coppi was close to matching the older man in the Giro di Lombardia. He escaped from an early break on the climb leading to the chapel at Madonna del Ghisallo, only for his stomach to play up – a recurring weakness – enabling Bartali to overtake him 300 metres from the top. In 1941, however, Coppi scored a string of wins in the other provincial single-day events that are the mainstay of the Italian calendar: Giro dell’Emilia, Giro del Veneto, Tre Valli Varesine, Giro della Provincia di Milano. He was still working with Cavanna, with the blind man on a percentage of his prize money. Within Legnano, he had recruited at least one team-mate, Mario Ricci, to work for him rather than Bartali, who had, he said, begun to try to sabotage him by making him eat more than his fragile stomach could stand before a race.

  Most significantly, and most bitterly for Bartali, Coppi opened his 1941 season by win
ning the Giro della Toscana: this event was in the Italian No.1’s backyard, in front of his home crowd. Coppi rode the final forty miles ahead of the field to finish three minutes ahead of Bartali, in spite of heavy, chilly rain that turned the roads on the main climb, the Colle Saltino, into heavy mud and made the gravelly descent highly dangerous. The fourth rider was twenty-four minutes behind. Coppi, already, was showing the ability to judge a solo effort and the smooth pedalling style that would be his hallmark. In victory, he was opening up huge margins, and the implication was that the young upstart, in only his second season as a professional, was about to overtake his master.

  During 1941 it became clear that Bartali and his young team-mate were ahead of all the opposition, although La Gazzetta dello Sport felt that Coppi was ‘the strongest cyclist of the season in Italy’. In 1942 Coppi edged ahead in the stakes by beating Bartali once more, in the national road race championship. He did so after it seemed a puncture had put him totally out of the running, and he recalled Bartali’s shock when he finished and found out who had relieved him of the title. ‘He went as grey as ash. He shook, as if the news weighed more heavily on his legs than the kilometres he had just ridden. His soigneurs hurried to support him.’ Bartali, on the other hand, took the first ‘Giro di Guerra’, the regime-backed circuit of eight events that had replaced the three-week Giro.

  In one area, however, Coppi was in a class of his own. His ability to judge his pace translated well to one discipline on the track: pursuiting, in which two riders start on opposite sides of a velodrome and ‘pursue’ each other over a given distance, in those days 5,000 metres for professionals. Pursuits would draw the paying crowds because the stars of the road racing world – a Giro winner, a Classics specialist – could be hired to ride: the stars were visible for the whole six minutes or so that a pursuit lasted, it was easy to work out who was winning and the confrontation could be hyped up even if the stars were just there for the fee.

  In a pursuit, Coppi was so superior to the other riders that he would usually close the half-lap gap on his opponent, ending the race early. Three weeks after winning the Giro he took the Italian national pursuit championship, at an average speed verging on 50kph, precociously fast for a twenty-year-old. His fame spread, within the bounds of a Europe at war; he was invited to race in Berlin, and on the Oerlikon track in Zurich in a contest against the rising Swiss star Ferdi Kübler. These were Coppi’s first trips abroad and it showed: en route to Switzerland he was not permitted to change money, on arriving he could not find a taxi, so he had to walk the four miles to the stadium, asking the way as he went. At the stadium, the guard had no idea who he was, did not speak Italian and would not let him in until an angry crowd had gathered insisting this was indeed Fausto Coppi and not an imposter. In front of a home crowd numbering 10,000, Kübler was overtaken after less than four kilometres.

  Coppi rode twenty pursuits during 1940, 1941 and 1942; both invitation events and the Italian championships in each year. He remained unbeaten in the discipline, a feat which is rarely remarked upon, mainly because events elsewhere made sport largely irrelevant. The war had yet to reach its crisis in Italy but, elsewhere, France had fallen, Dunkirk had been evacuated and Britain had been defended by ‘the Few’. Russia was close to collapse; the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height and Italians were fighting in North Africa. In Italy, however, cycle racing continued up to the moment that the government took the side of the Allies in 1943, and Italy was not unique: occupied France, for example, also had a racing calendar right through the war. Apart from bombing raids, the conflict had not yet been unleashed on Italian soil. The campaigns were all abroad, and although they were not going well it was still possible for life to continue in a relatively normal way.

  Coppi’s cycling career was gaining momentum within the confines imposed by the war, but it stuttered at the end of 1941, with the first in the sequence of premature deaths that would eventually lead to talk of a ‘curse of the Coppis’. As soon as the telegram was handed to him in his barracks, Coppi must have felt something was wrong: his family only communicated deaths and births in this way. His father, Domenico, had died on 29 December, from the after-effects of an accident in which he had been crushed while yoking a pair of oxen. He was not yet fifty. His final act had been to ask that his window be opened, so that he could see the land where he had toiled twelve hours a day for so many years.

  ‘I loved my father, because he more than anyone else had convinced my mother to let me race. For weeks, destroyed by the event, I could do nothing. I was completely lost,’ recalled Coppi. ‘It took all the authority of my brother Serse and the affectionate remonstrations of my comrades and officers to make me train again.’ This was not the first time, or the last, that Coppi would be on the point of giving up cycling when adversity raised its head.

  * * *

  Today the Vigorelli velodrome is a cycle racing track in name only. The imposing art deco towers still flank the ceremonial entrance, not far from the Milan exhibition centre and the San Siro stadium, but it has not hosted a serious competition for over twenty years. The boards on the fearsomely steep bankings are so splintered and cracked that no tyres will roll here again until major restoration has been carried out. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of that happening.

  When I visited, it had been turned temporarily into the Fiat snowpark. Bambini in bright ski jackets on their Christmas holidays were bouncing at high speed on plastic seats over the moguls of a giant ice rollercoaster. The shrieks of delight and pumping music were a tantalising hint of better days, in spite of the chained-up entrance, the shadowy, deserted tunnels, the dusty ranks of seats. It was hard to envisage what went on in the terraces: 20,000 people moving as one when the sprinters attacked, and the most aggressive fans attempting to force the barriers to get at a rider who had just pulled a dirty move. The great track’s decline mirrors the increasing marginalisation of the sport itself.

  The future of the Vigorelli has been in jeopardy since the roof collapsed under the weight of a snowfall in winter 1985. But until track cycling faded away and ceased to be a major spectator sport in the 1970s, this was one of Europe’s legendary venues, together with the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris, the Oerlikon in Zurich and the Sportpaleis in Antwerp. For European followers of sport, not just cycling fans, it had the lustre of Barcelona’s Nou Camp or Manchester United’s Old Trafford. This was once the fastest track in the world. The high canopies – designed by the German architect Frans Schurmann under commission from Mussolini – provided shelter from the wind, and its maple-wood planking was famously smooth. From the Second World War until the end of the 1960s, the Vigorelli was the chosen venue for record attempts, and it was here that Coppi’s career took its second great leap forward with an attack on the world hour record.

  The hour is often called cycling’s Blue Riband. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: a man, on a bike, looking to go further in sixty minutes than his predecessor. Unlike the myriad complexities of road racing, there are no might-have-beens. The cyclist is either quick enough, or he isn’t. In terms of concentrated effort it is cycling’s hardest event: the rider is alone on the track, with nowhere to hide, and there is absolutely no respite.

  It had taken Coppi most of 1942 to recover from his father’s death, and the idea of entering came to him and Cavanna while he was in the process of winning that year’s Italian national pursuit title. They had ample time for reflection; this was a uniquely drawn-out affair. Coppi had crashed heavily while warming up on the Vigorelli between winning the semi-final and contesting the final, where he was up against one Cino Cinelli, who later went on to fame as a handlebar maker. He broke his collarbone, and Cinelli should then, according to the rules, have been awarded the title in a rideover. Cinelli showed sportsmanship that was truly Corinthian; or, more probably, he was aware that he had more to gain from a noble defeat than from a lucky win. He agreed to postpone the final from the end of June to the start of October, although he must hav
e known that he stood no chance of victory.

  While Coppi was recovering, he was persuaded to tackle the hour. It has been suggested that it was in part a forlorn attempt to postpone his departure for the war, as more and more troops were sent to prop up the disastrous front in North Africa, but there were other reasons as well. Winning in Italy was all very well, but the war meant there was no chance to compete on the international stage. ‘Only a great exploit would allow me to lift myself above the rest, to dominate the ranks of international roadmen,’ explained Coppi. A record attempt was all that was possible: this was the only form of competition that was internationally recognised, but which did not require cyclists from more than one nation to be present. The record would be a victory well above the status of anything he could achieve in Italy, and that might just tip the balance with the authorities when it came to sending him to fight. Moreover, the hour was a feat Bartali had never attempted.

  The record was held by the Frenchman Maurice Archambaud, with a distance of 45.840 kilometres. Coppi could ride quickly enough in a five-kilometre pursuit: he averaged around 48kph, once as high as 50.3kph, so on paper riding at just over 45kph for sixty minutes was not impossible. Even so, in hindsight, it was a crazy enterprise as Coppi was not yet in his best form, having been two months without cycling after his broken collar-bone. It was the conditions imposed by the war, however, that made the attempt truly bizarre. Petrol rationing meant that it was impossible to carry out motor-paced training, the usual way of gaining the ability to ride at a sustained, set speed necessary for the hour. The Vigorelli itself was being used by the army as a clearing station, so it could not be used for training, and special permission had to be given for it to be opened for the attempt. To practise, Coppi located a straightish, flattish bit of road, the same stretch between Novi and Tortona where he had met Bruna.